Googling has failed me, but I have been in two conversations this week where it was mentioned that ERCOT curtailed power to refineries on the Gulf Coast due to the heat and increased load.

A gas processing customer in West Texas says their production was limited due their fractionator partner having limited capacity due to power curtailment.
The lady running an industry training program in Houston this week says she has students in her class talking about it also.


If this is true, it has not made any of the news I seen. Anyone else heard about this? If so, can you point me to any news stories?

With current energy prices, if this is happening, you would think it would be BIG news....or is ERCOT doing this quietly, while telling the public there is plenty of power reserves?

Look at current electricity rates on powertochoose.org, my contract is up in a month and the best rate I can find is double my current rate.

Nothing surprises me anymore.
They’re probably trying to limit fuel production to drive prices even higher.

When I was working, some of the larger industrial customers would get a lower rate for their electricity if they agreed to some contractual oddities that we wouldn’t have in the public sector. One of those oddities would be that they could be shut off with a certain amount of notice was provided. I thought this was odd, but the rate per kw was noticeably better depending on the amount of time agreed upon.

Yea, they are called interruptible rates. They typically specify a certain amount of notice (a few hours) and have a limit to how many times and for how long they can be told to be offline. The old style interruptible rate was the same KWH rate as normal contracts, but waived 50% or more of the commercial contract "Demand Charge", which is a billing rate set by the maximum 15 minute usage rate, which you then paid for the next 12 months.


IF these facilities are under interruptible rate contracts, then its just a business decision they made. If ERCOT just declared "you have to be shut down" under a Force majeure clause in the contract, then the public needs to know.

Sounds like typical Internet rumor BS to me.

Nak, I remember those types of contracts to the business community when I worked for Lone Star Gas a long time ago. I managed an IT team to manage that process.

Essentially, human needs had priority over “business” use. Or, at least non essential businesses. And, as a part of the lowered contracts prices, businesses realized that they ran a risk.

I think we can blame the power issues on Teslas and other EVs. We have do not have the excess capacity on the grid for more EVs.

I actually saw 2 Tesla's today while making an Acadamy run. Both were driving super slow...maybe they thought they were saving energy!

Who's got the best deal on electric rates?

This should help some:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/t...mp;cvid=1e77d76847cd4f6aa278036bee6edc4c

We had a mysterious power cut (5 second) then back on for 10 second and off again and back on after 5 second. This happened Sat afternoon 1 time and on Sunday afternoon 3 times. If it goes off the third time you will waiting a while for them to fix transmission problem / load or clear line. I think they were just warning us to cutback on power consumption.