Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from ‘multi-month’ blackouts, ERCOT CEO says

Texas was “seconds and minutes” away from “multi-month” blackouts, the beleaguered ERCOT CEO said Thursday as he defended the grid power outages.

A week of subzero temperatures took about a third of the state’s generation capacity offline, resulting in the largest forced blackout in U.S. history and exposing the weaknesses of the government’s unique approach. Texas in the area of ​​power grid management.

The Texas Electric Reliability Council, or ERCOT, operates the power grid that covers most of the state and was behind the decision to have continual power outages that have left up to 4 millions of people experience blackouts at subzero temperatures.

Its CEO, Bill Magness, told the Texas Tribune on Thursday that if operators had not acted “ immediately ” to implement them on Monday morning, the state would have been facing an electricity crisis. ‘an indefinite period ”.

He said: ‘It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of production that came out of the system.

Energy officials had seen huge amounts of supply drop from the grid as temperatures were cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and prevent wind turbines from turning.

The plunging temperatures also prompted Texans to increase their heaters, including many inefficient electrical appliances. Demand has reached levels normally seen only on the hottest summer days, when millions of air conditioners are operating at full capacity.

Magness added: ‘What happens in the next minute could be that three more [power generation] the units disconnect, then you’re sunk.

The Texans began to see power restored on Thursday.

But the storm claimed at least 15 lives statewide; In the Houston area, a family has died of carbon monoxide as their car idles in their garage.

A 75-year-old woman and her three grandchildren were killed in a fire that authorities said could have been caused by a fireplace they were using.

And Republican Gov. Greg Abbott accused ERCOT of misleading the public with messages that the grid was storm ready.

The enraged Texans are also asking for answers after he was warned that power producers were warned their equipment would not withstand such a cold snap.

After the state’s last major freeze, during the 2011 Super Bowl in Arlington, Texas, a federal analysis found that power producers’ procedures for winterizing their equipment “ were inadequate or not being properly monitored ” in many cases.

Defending the grid, Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of energy and renewable energy at Enverus, told The Tribune: ‘Chaotic as it may be, the whole grid could have been down. ERCOT gets a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn’t worse is due to these network operators.

“The operators who took these steps to avoid catastrophic power failure and much worse damage to our system was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this event.

But Ed Hirs, an energy researcher at the University of Houston, dismissed ERCOT’s claim that this week’s freeze was unpredictable. “This is insane,” he said. “Every eight to ten years we have very bad winters. It is not a surprise.’

Texas has a network largely disconnected from others to avoid federal regulation.

This means that it is not tied to other states and therefore cannot borrow energy from them, a system the state has put in place to avoid federal regulation.

The unique system, which avoids regulation in favor of market incentives, now faces backlash for allowing power producers to avoid preparations for a winter storm that will only occur once in a while. decade.

Gradual power outages are usually triggered when reserves drop below a certain level.

Grid operators say continual blackouts are a last resort when demand for energy exceeds supply and threatens to create a larger collapse of the entire power system.

Usually, utilities black out certain blocks or areas before cutting power to another area and then to another. Often, areas with hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants and other key facilities are spared.

By reversing blackouts, no neighborhood is expected to go an unfairly long period without power, but that wasn’t always the case this week in Texas.

Some areas never lost power, while others were blacked out for 12 hours or more when temperatures dropped to single digits.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Texas woke up to a fourth day without electricity on Thursday.

A water crisis was also unfolding after authorities in Texas ordered 7 million people to boil tap water before drinking it.

The latest outage sparked growing outrage and demands for answers about how Texas – whose Republican leaders as recently as last year were poking fun at California over the Democratic state’s continuing power outages – has failed such a massive test of a major point of state pride: energy independence.