The biomass plant contract (from ~2012)was colossally stupid from the initial deal with Southern. The purchase of it was just the smallest shit sandwich they could negotiate. To be fair to AE, Southern and NACE lost their shirt on that damn plant as well. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad then as it does now.
Mothballing the Decker units made perfect sense due to cost of operation/maintenance and the capital projects needed to keep it reliable. Otherwise they were just playing roulette even if they were made available off/non-spin. Also, if they had been able to keep those two units online for Feb 2021, where were they going to get the gas?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anybody criticizing public or private entities cutting non financially viable assets.
AE should have had better transformer maintenance/circuit mapping and isolations that would have made it able to roll blackouts when needed. But I’m not aware of many wellhead circuits they failed to identify.
Once again, AE has plenty of faults, but with Uri - they were a room temp IQ in College Station.
ERCOT knew shit was turbo fucked on Friday and they were still telling people to not use their stand mixer/washing machine on Sunday.
Perhaps you are combining the boil notice onto the end of the power outage, but based on this post - I don’t think you understand what happened during the storm with regards to generation/load shedding/ERCOT response. AE couldn’t bring more customers back online faster (late Tuesday) because the grid couldn’t sustain the demand without risk of dropping again. People were starting to get stuff back on Wednesday. It wasn’t until power began to be restored that transmission issues could be fixed (Wed/Thurs).
I am not defending the Public Utilities of old or AE in general. They suck ass at maintaining transmission lines and are over susceptible to NIMBY pressure in line clearance. I don’t think AE is the bad guy on this one.
As shitty as they can be sometimes, AE made out like bandits because they didn’t have a derate/unit trip the whole week. They were one of two generators that ended up in the black for the whole event.
It absolutely was the grid failure that was the root cause for most of the problems here - including exposing the idiots at Austin Water. There were some transmission issues, but they weren’t that long in duration given the severity of the storm.
Nobody defends Austin Water as they are fucktards.