More than two million residents were without electricity in Texas as of Monday morning due to the extreme weather conditions that are taking place throughout the state, with energy demand reaching a record high.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued an ENERGY EMERGENCY ALERT (EEA) LEVEL 3 with rotating outages in progress to maintain frequency on Sunday evening. ERCOT said the rotating outages are likely to continue into Tuesday all day.
“They typically last between 10-40 minutes before moving to another circuit, but sometimes can last a little longer,” the Brownsville Public Utilities Board said. “It’s important to remember that rotating outages are a last resort effort to maintain the reliability of the electrical system.”
During a webinar for the media outlets by ERCOT, officials said the energy demand created due to the weather is like nothing they have seen in their lifetime and that the rotating outages are lasting longer than expected due to the energy demand being higher than it has ever been.
In Brownsville, there were several reports of residents without electricity for up to 10 hours on Monday.
“It wound up being such a big number that the transmission providers are having difficulty doing the kind of normal rotation to one area and then switching to another area,” Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, said.
“They just don’t have enough options that don’t have critical facilities like hospitals or emergency responders to move from between. So, they’ve kind of used all of the circuits that they can to meet the high amount of outages that are required to balance the energy demand and preserve the reliability of the system as a whole.”
Woodfin said he hopes that the number of people without electricity goes down instead of going up further with the generators that were forced out due to the cold weather being able to come back online. He said it depends on the amount of generation that is currently unavailable becoming available as Monday progresses.
“We don’t think these outages, in general, are going to be multi-day outages. There might be a few that are, but we think in general they should be able to come back in a matter of hours,” he said.
“How quickly we can reduce the number of outages down, it completely depends on the amount of generation that is currently unavailable that becomes available as the day and night tonight progresses.”
Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez said this has been the coldest prolonged event since 1989 and asked the community to do its best to conserve energy.
“There have been several power outages in town. Specifically, ERCOT has advised of rolling outages throughout the state and service providers are being asked to shed/conserve power,” he said.
“Please do your best to conserve as well. Most outages will return within an hour. We should expect this the rest of the day and into tomorrow.”
