The biomass plant contract (from ~2012)was colossally stupid from the initial deal with Southern. The purchase of it was just the smallest shit sandwich they could negotiate. To be fair to AE, Southern and NACE lost their shirt on that damn plant as well. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad then as it does now.
Mothballing the Decker units made perfect sense due to cost of operation/maintenance and the capital projects needed to keep it reliable. Otherwise they were just playing roulette even if they were made available off/non-spin. Also, if they had been able to keep those two units online for Feb 2021, where were they going to get the gas?
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anybody criticizing public or private entities cutting non financially viable assets.
AE should have had better transformer maintenance/circuit mapping and isolations that would have made it able to roll blackouts when needed. But I’m not aware of many wellhead circuits they failed to identify.
Once again, AE has plenty of faults, but with Uri - they were a room temp IQ in College Station.
ERCOT knew shit was turbo fucked on Friday and they were still telling people to not use their stand mixer/washing machine on Sunday.