ERCOT’s summer review is misleading and incomplete

Today, the ERCOT Board will hold its first meeting since the end of the summer — a summer in which consumers were asked to conserve energy 11 times.

It's also the first meeting since September 6, when ERCOT was perilously close to rolling outages. 

ERCOT staff prepared a summer operational and market review, ostensibly to give the board — and, presumably, Texans — a clearer picture of what happened but it obscures more than it reveals. 

Much of what is wrong with ERCOT is clear in the review’s two dozen slides. 

It starts with a lack of transparency. The ERCOT slides that cover the September 6 incident still don’t clearly demonstrate how the agency’s own mistakes likely compounded problems that day. The slides also completely dismiss the serious problem of thermal plant outages. And the presentation doesn’t mention at all the transformative role that the state’s growing solar resources played in keeping Texans’ air conditioners humming during the summer’s relentless dangerous heat waves…