The South Central region has seen its fair share of above normal temperature days in May 2025 with the latest period extending heat from May 14^th through the 16^th. Since it is still considered outage season for the thermal and nuclear fleet, conversations around net load profiles start to migrate to what we call net thermal plus outages as these two elements give you a pretty good understanding of where the marginal megawatt resides within the natural gas portion of the supply stack.  A good example of this can be found in our ERCOT Real-Time Dashboard (included in the Enterprise South Central Sub-Package), where the table below bins the thermal plus outage volume for the past few months by four periods within the 24-hour block (vertical columns). Each horizontal pane is associated to the North and West West Day-Ahead (DAM) or Real-Time (RTM) heat rates (HR).  The key to every hourly bin is when the grid is seeing high enough power demand matched with lower wind and in the case of the evening and light load frames, reduced solar to move the net thermal plus outages far enough to the right that it hits the major inflection point where the auction clears move to the steep portion of the supply curve.

Figure 1 | ERCOT Thermal Plus Outage Breakdown by Bin