The officials responsible for maintaining Texas’ electrical grid are still unsure when power will be fully restored to millions of people still in the dark after a cold front blanketed all 254 counties in subzero temperatures Monday morning.
That was the message from leaders with the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, during a conference call with media Wednesday morning.
A sharp increase in electricity demand, combined with winter precipitation that knocked out electric generators across the state, forced ERCOT to order power distributors — such as AEP Texas and Magic Valley Electric Cooperative — to begin reducing their load on the system.
In what industry insiders call “shedding” load, power distributors began to institute power outages among their customers — a maneuver that was meant to be temporary and cycled among customers — but the move ultimately left scores of people without power for more than 50 hours.
ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness said had the council not ordered distributors to shed load, the spike in demand for power could have caused the entire grid’s failure and taken months to repair.
“The reason that we are in this situation is that we risked catastrophic blackout at one in the morning on Monday, and we had to reduce the demand to get the supply and demand back in balance,” Magness said.
But, as the cold weather persisted, demand continued to remain dangerously high, even as millions of customers remained plunged in darkness. That demand resulted in even more people losing power, rather than outages being rotated.
Magness said ERCOT is working “around the clock, working with those generators in particular, to get power back on the system” but neither he, nor Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, could put a date on when power will be fully restored.
“The best case at this point is that, either today or tomorrow, we’re able to at least get back down to the point where all consumers are experiencing outages that are no longer than, say, 30 minutes to an hour at a time,” Woodfin said.
Much depends on how quickly power generators — across all sources, including coal, natural gas, wind and nuclear power — can return to full operability, Magness said.
As power distributors began shutting off the lights Monday, the supply chain itself began to crumble under the cold, exacerbating the precipitous imbalance ERCOT was struggling to maintain.
Wind turbines froze. Coal fired plants went down. And beyond that, natural gas facilities suffered the greatest power generation reductions when gas wellheads froze, causing the flow of that resource to run dry.
“There’s some issues on the natural gas system as a whole in that you’ve got freeze-offs in the wellheads. They’re cold and so you’re not getting gas out of the ground into the pipeline system … to have enough gas to then compress to be used for electric generation,” Woodfin said.
At the height of the blackouts, up to 40% of Texas’ electricity generation capacity had failed, leaving more than 4.1 million customers huddling in the cold and dark.
In the Rio Grande Valley, those failures resulted in hundreds of thousands of people without power, even though much of the electric transmission infrastructure here has remained undamaged from the freezing precipitation that fell Monday.
According to a spokesperson for AEP Texas, some 150,000 of their customers were without power at the height of the crisis.
By Wednesday afternoon, that number had only fallen slightly — to 131,000, said AEP’s Eladio Jaimez.
Another 6,000 customers with Magic Valley Electric Cooperative customers remained without power as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to Abraham Quiroga, the division manager for business and employee development.
But both AEP and MVEC have their hands tied when it comes to restoring power to their customers. ERCOT has continued to demand the two electric distributors shed load.
“We’re still having to do rotating outages,” Quiroga said. “At this point, we’ve actually rotated throughout our entire system at least once.”
And even when ERCOT gives the companies the go-ahead to turn circuits back on, it’ll take time to restore power to everyone — as much as several days, Jaimez estimated.
They’ll need time to inspect transmission lines, power poles and other infrastructure for any damage that could have been caused by the storm. For now, crews remain unable to inspect those lines that are part of the load shedding, Jaimez said.
“Our crews are to stand off the line, so haven’t really been able to patrol and assess what the damage is offline,” Jaimez said, before adding that he doesn’t suspect local power lines to have suffered as much damage as those farther north in the state.
But it’s that damage that has brought ERCOT under fire from residents and lawmakers alike.
Politicians from Gov. Greg Abbott to U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, have criticized ERCOT’s handling of the crisis and are seeking investigations into the council.
Abbott even called for ERCOT leaders to resign.
Magness responded by saying the time for investigations will come, but right now, ERCOT is focused on restoring power.
He also defended the council’s decision to initiate load sheds early Monday morning.
“If we had waited and not done outages … we could have drifted towards a blackout,” Magness said.
“It’s not just outages, you lose all electricity on a system. And it could take months, it could take longer to rebuild that,” he said.
But when asked why the council hasn’t mandated that electric generators and distributors winterize their infrastructure, Woodfin said it’s not ERCOT’s responsibility to do so.
“The role of ERCOT is not necessarily to mandate those kinds of things,” Woodfin said.
“There was some discussion about that fact back when, and there’s been some discussions since then,” Woodfin said, referring to a 2011 winter storm which resulted in similar power outages.
In the wake of that event, energy leaders across the state developed a set of “best practices” for winterizing infrastructure. But no efforts have been made to mandate such overhauls.
“There is that standard that is under consideration right now, it’s just not mandatory yet,” Woodfin said.
When cold weather struck again in 2018, the grid performed well. It appeared that those who had voluntarily adopted those best practices had done enough, Woodfin said.
However, this week’s weather proved those voluntary measures have not gone far enough. Even before ERCOT ordered load shedding Sunday night, demand had far outpaced the peak usage seen in 2011, Woodfin said — by “several thousand megawatts.”
In the meantime, as some residents bundled up to spend their fourth consecutive night in the dark, even local power distributors couldn’t answer when those residents would again have power.
“That’s the million dollar question that everyone across the state can’t get answered,” Quiroga said.
