Midcontinent Interdependent System Operator's (MISO's) COO Clair Moeller and PJM's CEO Andy Ott spoke at CERAWeek in Houston at the panel "Wholesale Power Market Evolution" on March 14, 2019:
Clair Moeller: [That's] only part of the question. So two polar vortex's ago, my neighbors to the east got in trouble. I sent them about nine thousand megawatts across at their scariest time. This last time they sent me fourteen thousand.
Andy Ott: We paid them back.
Clair Moeller: Right. So, that's resilience. The places that I was in trouble on the 30th and 31st had to do with how fast I could get resources to respond. We did have some fuel issues. The wind fleet is not homogeneous. There are wind turbines that are rated to minus forty below. If you are in Alberta, all of them are, because that's a Canadian regulation.
As you get South from there, people's choices are different. Literally, the fiberglass blades can become ripped. So they have to go offline. We missed that in our forecast. We were expecting the wind to be where it was in terms of miles per hour. When they began to shut down because of the cold, we missed that in our forecast.
So my problem was about six thousand megawatts of resource that we expected to be reliable based on what is normally reliable."