Texans May Experience Electric Emergencies This Summer

SUGAR LAND-- Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Texans may be seeing power emergency alerts this summer, and possibly even experience rotating brownouts or blackouts, as strong electric demand growth is expected to result in an electric reserve margin of about 8.6%, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) (Austin, Texas) said May 8. An 8.6% reserve margin is lower than industry standards; power operators typically like to see reserve margins of 10% to 15%, to cover unexpectedly large increases in demand coming from extreme weather as well as unplanned power plant or transmission line outages.

Within this article: Details of ERCOT's predictions about this summer and those of coming years