TYLER, Texas — The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has issued a conservation appeal to residents in Texas and businesses today, making it the second one to be issued this week.
ERCOT is asking residents to voluntarily conserve electricity during the hours of 2-9 p.m. today. There are no current system-wide outages expected, but the weather conditions are similar to those on Monday, July 11, which were extremely hot weather.
Statewide, Texans and businesses were able to help ERCOT successfully meet their record power demand by reducing energy usage by 500 MWs on July 11.
Conservation of energy is a reliability tool that has been used by ERCOT more than 48 times since 2008 to help regulate and manage the grid operations. Efforts to conserve are only issued when projected energy reserves might fall below 2300 MW for more than 30 minutes.
The factors that ERCOT list for the reasoning behind the conservation are:
- Record-high demand due to the heat wave
- Low wind, leading to lower wind generation
- Forced thermal outages
- Less solar energy generated because of cloud cover in West Texas
The call for conservation of energy is only between 2-9 p.m. The projected demand across the state is 78,451 MW.
For more information on how to conserve energy, Texans are encouraged to visit the Public Utility Commission's Power to Save website to get conservation tips. PUC advises that residents increase their thermostat by a degree or two; and delay running any major appliances, like the washing machine, or pool pumps during the conservation timeframe.