Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

ERCOT:

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power on the Texas Interconnection that supplies power to more than 25 million Texas customers – representing 90 percent of the state's electric load.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...

Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on right now.

I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wondering.

It is odd for Texas to have peak electricity usage in the winter; especially anywhere other than north Texas, we usually get threatened with rolling blackouts when it's 110 degrees and everyone has their A/C cranked up, not in the middle of the winter.

Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday.

The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the blackouts with them.

It is kind of weird and worrisome that such a large entity doesn't use https

Look at the weird error message...

https://www.ercot.com/

The rest of the site appears to be http only

What's funny is that they do have a valid certificate for their error message page.

Some time ago, I worked for a defunct energy company that provided demand-side relief in exactly this scenario - when total system load outstrips total system capacity, we'd begin taking actions on behalf of end users, not the utility. Lights would turn off, generators would spin up, fridge temperatures would be raised.

ERCOT (Texas) is an interesting case in that it can't import power from other states as easily - it has its "own grid" at 60Hz, but not necessarily in phase with either of the other two major grids in the country (there's eastern US, western US, and "most of Texas"). So to import power, it first has to convert grid-scale amounts of energy from AC to DC, then back to AC, which incurs a pretty significant loss.