HARLINGEN — The agency that controls the majority of the Texas power grid began rolling blackouts early Monday morning in the midst of unprecedented demand for electricity in the state.
The outages are expected to last between 15 and 45 minutes and officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, say the outages may continue through Tuesday as power demand remains at record levels.
Extreme weather conditions caused many generating units – across different fuel types – to trip offline and become unavailable.
Over 30,000 megawatts of generation has been forced off the system.
“Every grid operator and every electric company is fighting to restore power right now,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness.
Here in the Valley, outages were reported by both AEP Texas and Magic Valley Electric Cooperative.
“ERCOT set a new winter peak demand record this evening, reaching 69,150 MW between 6 and 7 p.m..” the agency reported on its Twitter feed Sunday night. “This is more than 3,200 MW higher than the previous winter peak set back in January 2018. Thanks to everyone who has been conserving today. We appreciate it!”
ERCOT began the rolling blackouts at 1:25 a.m. Monday, and warned many traffic lights would be out of service, which was the case for much of Harlingen on Monday morning.
Magness said generating plant outages were higher than normal “due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units.
“We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower their energy use during this time,” Magness said.
They are:
