On Oct 14 there will be a solar eclipse in Texas around noon, when PV solar is at its peak. With 22GW of solar at stake, will it break the grid?
I will resolve YES if there is a blackout affecting at least 10k households.
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I've probably now bet more than I should on this market, so here's the demand vs capacity forecast for ERCOT for the next 6 days, with the impact of the eclipse forecasted:
essentially there's a higher chance of an outage at 7pm the day before, than the actual day of the eclipse. with the largest forecasted dip in production from the eclipse being only 7 GW, or <9% dip in total capacity, while the forecasted demand is only 55% of forecasted capacity. I'd say enough things simultaneously going wrong to cause blackouts has a <1% chance of occurring at this point.
I wouldn't rule out operator error during the eclipse from ERCOT causing a blackout, but during the most recent "DEFCON 2" (I forget ERCOT terminology) power shortage event (which was complicated, but mostly due to operator error). The quickly growing grid tied battery storage facilities sent out about 3GW of power (iirc) and basically singularly saved the grid from losing so much frequency everything went down.
all that being said, I think the obviously forecastable eclipse will allow ERCOT to know well in advance what reserves need to be available at the time, so the only reason this might happen is particularly bad weather, or multiple LNG plants having unexpected outages at the exact same time as the eclipse.
@calm i've done some open source work in grid monitoring and solar forecasting, but i mostly just have engineering brain (and/or a hyper-fixation) about the energy transition, as well as a lot of osmotic knowledge of ERCOT specifically.
Related:
https://manifold.markets/Flekkie/will-the-solar-eclipse-of-october-1?r=Rmxla2tpZQ
