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AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – Oncor Electric Delivery CEO Allen Nye began his testimony in the State Senate on Friday February 26, as did CEOs of other players in the energy sector.
“I mean I fully understand all the outrage and anger of all Texans.”
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Nye appeared during the second consecutive day of hearings at the Texas Capitol in which the Senate Business and Commerce Committee and the House State Affairs and Energy Committees investigated what led to widespread blackouts last week that left millions of Texans wasting electricity, heat and water for days.
Nye testified that when the first winter storm hit Texas on the night of February 15, the state’s electricity grid operator, ERCOT, repeatedly ordered them to shut off power to more of their customers to avoid catastrophic power failure.
“We were two / one-thousandth of 1% from the triggering of the last security blanket in this state.”
Initially, he said their intention was to do bearing failures, for 15 minutes, 30 minutes.
But he said it was impossible because power plant operators continued to go offline and supply was not enough to meet demand.
“The generation was falling so fast and we were told it was about to come back and we would stay awake all night waiting for it and that would never show. Or a little would, and something else would fall. I couldn’t estimate during those times if the generation would come back so that I could ship it to you. I had no idea.”
Nye said Oncor should have done a better job communicating with customers why so many of them have had to stay in the dark for so long.
He also explained to lawmakers why the lights stay on for around 40% of their customers.
“If you happen to live on a charger that also goes to a hospital or if you live on a charger that goes to a 911 call center, then you’re not turned on either.”
This left around 50% of customers to deal with power outages.
In a frank moment, he said he didn’t realize his house was on such a manger, until he woke up with the lights still on.
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He is not near any critical infrastructure, so he called his business to tell them to shut off his power, which also impacted his neighbors.
In total, Nye told lawmakers that around 1.3 million customers have lost power.
Most of them were due to the fact that there were not enough power plants in operation.
Of those, he said about 140,000 customers were in the dark because Oncor’s power lines froze during storms.
As CBS 11 reported, natural gas transformers have lost electricity in the field, making it impossible to deliver natural gas to power plants that need fuel to operate.
Before House committees on Friday, Texas Rail Commission chairperson Christi Craddick, who oversees the gas industry, said ERCOT had not realized what was going on. “When I say there is a lack of communication on the part of ERCOT, they didn’t understand that they needed a continuous gas flow to be able to put gas in the power plants.
Nye said that before the storm, they had identified 35 gas installations that were to continue to receive electricity.
But after the outages started, Nye said he received calls from many more of them. “During the event, we added 168 new critical gas installations. We turned them all on immediately and we kept them on all the time.
He told lawmakers his company and other transportation owners, power plant operators and the gas industry needed to develop an updated list.
Energy experts told CBS 11 that improvements need to be made to the electricity and gas grids holistically to avoid the type of widespread blackouts that occurred over the past week.
On Thursday, the first day of hearings, Curt Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corporation of Irving, which operates power plants, told House committees that unless the state has integrated and seamless gas systems and electricity, the same problem would occur again.
Morgan recommended that a single authority oversee both systems, but this is not currently the case.
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While the Board of Railways regulates the gas industry, ERCOT oversees the power grid and reports to the Texas Utilities Board.
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