New Energy Economics and Reliability
Electric system reliability is fundamentally, and importantly, an economic issue. First, when the lights go out, particularly across large areas and for sustained periods of time, economic losses to the economy lacking electricity mount up quickly and can run up to billions of dollars. For utility systems, like Texas ERCOT when storm Uri froze off gas required for electric production, with outages lasting days in February 2021 for millions of customers and killing more than 240 Texans.
