FERC-NERC Report Documents ERCOT Winter Outages Halved Since Uri, Shifting Price Risk to Demand
Generator improvements cut Texas cold-weather failures by 45%, leaving demand growth and gas infrastructure gaps to drive ERCOT real-time price risk.
Unplanned power plant outages in ERCOT peaked at roughly 19,420 MW during January (2026) cold weather events, less than half the 35,300 MW that failed during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, according to a FERC-NERC joint report released Thursday (2026-09-10).3
The numbers carry a specific implication for ERCOT real-time pricing. If generators are less likely to trip offline under cold stress, the marginal driver of price spikes shifts toward demand — how much load materializes, not how many megawatts disappear. Demand growth in Texas, driven in part by data centers and large industrial customers, means that pressure is accumulating.3,2
The January (2026) performance held across a much wider geographic area. Eastern Interconnection peak outages fell to about 49,700 MW from 90,500 MW during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, a reduction of nearly 45%, the report showed. Both figures arrived against demanding conditions: U.S. electric use peaked at 666 GW, and natural gas demand ran close to record levels throughout the event.3
There were no planned outages in ERCOT or the Eastern Interconnection throughout the period. The FERC-NERC report attributed the improvement to changes power plant owners and grid operators have made in cold-weather preparation. That progress is real, though the same report identified vulnerabilities that have not been resolved.3
Interregional transfers did meaningful work. MISO imports peaked at about 9 GW in January (2026), drawing primarily from PJM and supplemented by flows from Canada and neighboring systems, the report noted. The FERC-NERC authors observed that such transfers continue to provide relief "every winter," a finding that underlines how dependent regional reliability has become on interstate capacity that may not always be available simultaneously.3
The report was not a clean bill of health. FERC identified persistent weaknesses in electric-gas coordination, load forecasting accuracy, and gas storage infrastructure. These gaps matter most during prolonged cold snaps, when pipeline throughput constraints limit fuel delivery to gas-fired generators regardless of how well the generators themselves have been hardened since Uri. Weatherization at the plant level does not fix the upstream pipeline.3
NYMEX Henry Hub front-month gas was at $2.82/MMBtu on Friday (2026-09-11). Soft spot gas prices reduce the economic incentive to build out gas storage, precisely the infrastructure FERC flagged as insufficient. U.S. working gas storage inventories stood about 5% above the five-year average entering winter 2025-26, per EIA data cited in NERC's Winter Reliability Assessment, a cushion that sounds comfortable until demand runs close to record levels for more than a few days.1
NERC's winter reliability assessment had already flagged the absence of consistent weatherization standards for natural gas infrastructure, a gap that creates asymmetric risk: generators have improved, but the fuel supply chain serving them has not been hardened to the same degree. FERC's Thursday (2026-09-10) report reinforces that finding.1
For ERCOT, the demand trajectory is the variable most likely to test those gaps. Load growth from data centers and large industrial customers continues to expand peak exposure on the Texas grid. The generator fleet's improved cold-weather performance documented Thursday (2026-09-10) buys headroom, but how much depends on how hard demand pushes and whether gas pipelines hold when temperatures drop and stay down.2,3