ERCOT—The Eyes of Texas (and the World) Are Upon You: What Can be Done to Avoid a February 2021 Repeat

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The President's Day 2021 Texas power market catastrophe managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is already legendary. The massive power outage in the face of Winter Storm Uri has been written about and critiqued both nationally and internationally. Those critiquing the event have treated the crisis as either a failure of the unregulated generator market model, a failure of a poorly designed unregulated market, a symbol of overdone Texan independence (in its isolation from other power markets), and, not surprisingly, a failure of renewable wind and solar power, according to the political opponents of those sources. Pundits have had a field day chasing their pet theories, and politicians have held numerous hearings and made strong declarations as to how this will never happen again , and even possibly undo the pricing of power during the crisis. Politicians have also been pointing fingers of blame, often misplaced. As one of the millions who spent that night huddled around a fireplace with my family trying to stay warm, I certainly hope the politicians are right that this will never happen again—but I am pretty sure they do not even understand the basic problem that Texas faced.