ERCOT Issues Watch For Projected Reserve Capacity Shortage, Issues Conservation Appeal

With extreme hot weather driving record power demand across Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) on July 10 issued a Conservation Appeal, asking Texans and Texas businesses to voluntarily conserve electricity, Monday, July 11 between 2-8 p.m.

ERCOT also issued a Watch for a projected reserve capacity shortage from 2-8 p.m.

As of ERCOT's July 10, 9:35 pm conservation appeal announcement, no system-wide outages were expected.

Specifically, ERCOT issued an operations message on July 10 at 9 pm that, "ERCOT issued a Watch for a projected reserve capacity shortage with no market solution available for Monday, July 11, 2022 HE 14:00 – 20:00, which causes a risk for an EEA event."

The conservation appeal is issued when projected reserves may fall below 2300 MW for 30 minutes or more. ERCOT emphasized that the call for conservation is limited to the hours of 2-8 p.m.

As of ERCOT's July 10, 9:35 pm conservation appeal announcement, under then-current projected scenarios, performance of the generation fleet Monday was forecast as:

Total forecasted demand is 79,671 MW