» ERCOT in spotlight as outages persist.
A small nonprofit organization that until now was largely ignored or unheard of by many Texans is taking heat while millions of state residents go without.
ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has been thrust into the spotlight because of power outages that left more that 4 million customers shivering during a winter storm that began Sunday. As power was slowly restored to homes and businesses Tuesday, ERCOT will continue to be asked how allowed the power system to fail when it was most needed.
“Ensuring a reliable grid,” as ERCOT says in a published mission, includes managing the flow of electricity to more than 26 million customers, about 90 percent of Texas’ power load. That power flows from about 700 generation units, including wind turbines, natural gas- and coal-fired power plants, solar installations and even smaller generators used by industrial facilities. It’s distributed out over 46,500 miles of power lines. .
ERCOT also acts as a financial middle-man for wholesale buyers and sellers in the system, collecting payments from the power buyers and paying those that generate it.
The effort wasn’t always as massive as it is today.
At the start of World War II, several utilities in the state agreed to connect their power operations and send excess power to the Gulf Coast, where industrial customers were building war materiel.
The cooperation demonstrated the improved reliability of a connected system, so the utilities continued to work together. They also kept operations within state lines and thus out of reach of federal regulations.
In 1970, Texas created ERCOT to ensure that the state’s power utilities followed standards established two years earlier by the North American Electric Reliability Council, a voluntary industry organization that now enforces mandatory reliability standards.
ERCOT is one of three power grids in the U.S. and Canada, with the Eastern and Western grids roughly separated by the Rocky Mountains. ERCOT, however, covers about 75 percent of the state and manages about 90 percent of the state’s power load. Far Western Texas, parts of the Panhandle and a narrow swath along the border with Louisiana are on other grids.
While the organization isn’t a state entity, it receives policy direction and guidance from the Public Utility Commission and the Legislature. A board of directors includes representatives of electricity consumers, generators, retail power providers, utility companies and municipal utilities.