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A comment on What went wrong with the Texas power grid?. Parent comment

Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by ineedasername on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @10:06AM (#26167078)
The ERCOT website say they "manage the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers -- representing about 90 percent of the state’s electric load. As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than 46,500 miles of transmission lines"

This makes it seem like they would have at least some influence on the rolling outages, no?

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by salawat on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @10:59AM (#26167842)
You'd think, but nope.

If you hit the About section and watch their videos, you learn of ERCOT's role as a market facilitator and administrative body. They don't actually own any of the infrastructure, they are just a mediating influence through which granular activities are coordinated. They have the highest level view of activity as a whole on the grid, but there is no centralized control room or intimacy with utilities systems that allows ERCOT any semblance of fine grained control beyond being a message dispatcher and info propagter. Powerful and influential? Yes. Top down driver of day to day operations? No.

If anyone is interested in more about the Midnight Connection scandal, I highly recommend

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/4...

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