The Texas power grid may have come closer to total failure as a winter storm blew through the state Monday than previously thought, news which came as a shock to some Rio Grande Valley officials.
Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) revealed just how close the state came to catastrophic collapse during a media call Thursday morning as hundreds of thousands remained without power.
Throughout the week, ERCOT officials have defended decisions to cut power to millions of homes, leaving some without power for four days straight, saying that doing so prevented a worse disaster from happening.
But when asked to quantify just how close the state came to ERCOT’s worst-case scenario, officials intimated the grid had been on the brink of collapse.
“Certainly not days, and I don’t think hours,” replied Bill Magness, the president and CEO of ERCOT.
Magness explained that multiple power generation units began to go offline in “rapid succession” Sunday night, heading into Monday morning as the winter storm barreled through the state. It was a situation which required “an immediate response,” he said.
“I think if we hadn’t taken action, it wouldn’t have been that we would’ve waited a few days and saw what happened, it was seconds and minutes, given the amount of (power) generation that was coming off the system at the same time that the demand was still going up significantly,” Magness said.
By Thursday morning, however, the crisis was mostly under control. ERCOT instructed power transmission companies, such as AEP Texas and Magic Valley Electric Cooperative, to restore power to more customers, including those who had been without since the first blackouts.
But reached for comment Thursday, many local leaders were caught by surprise at how close the state grid had come to collapse.
“That’s real scary,” Weslaco City Manager Mike Perez said.
“We think COVID is bad, that would have been worse than COVID,” he added a moment later.
In a region prone to hurricanes, many local governments — including Weslaco’s — have prepared for disaster to strike. The city has several generators to operate critical systems in the event of power outages. Indeed, the city’s water plant switched to generator power Monday.
But no local government is prepared to spend months without main power.
“They’ve got 150 gallon tanks, and they go through about 150 gallons (of fuel) every 24 hours,” Perez said of the city’s generators.
Beyond being unable to power city infrastructure, Rio Grande Valley cities would soon find themselves without water in the event of a grid collapse.
Though many water utilities have issued boil water notices this week, water is still flowing from the river. That couldn’t happen in a grid collapse, Perez said.
“The irrigation district that delivers water to all cities — unless you have a direct connection (to the river) — we’re out of water,” he said.
The close call was news to Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez, as well.
Speaking after a meeting Thursday, the county judge said he had only been aware of ERCOT’s orders allowing transmission companies to turn more circuits back on, but hadn’t heard about how close the state grid had been to collapsing.
“I’m quite saddened and surprised that this wasn’t anticipated,” Cortez said.
As a government leader, Cortez knows how important it is to plan for disaster — even unlikely ones.
“Even though cold weather doesn’t necessarily come all the time, but we’ve had snow before, we’ve had freezes before, so that should be part of the mitigation plan,” he said.
Had that worst case scenario happened, it would have resulted in cascading failures of the entire grid — something ERCOT’s Magness said would take months to repair.
However, Magness’ colleague, Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, said the grid had one final failsafe in place to prevent such a system-wide failure from occurring.
That failsafe system, known as an “under frequency load shed,” would have triggered automatic shutdowns, in what’s called “load shedding” that would have reduced power consumption by a total of 25% in the event that demand outpaced supply to the point of risking system-wide collapse.
“But that’s much more a blunt instrument. It’s harder to get the load back faster,” Woodfin said of the failsafe system.
“It’s not as controlled as what occurred,” he said, referring to electricity distributors maintaining control by shutting down power to portions of their customer base.
In a media call Wednesday, Magness said a complete grid failure would take months to rebuild. Such an outage would even affect critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, which transmission companies strove to keep powered throughout the crisis.
“The blackout that can occur if you don’t keep the supply and demand balanced could last months. It’s not just outages. You lose all electricity on a system. And it could take months, it could take longer to rebuild that,” Magness said Wednesday.
“And Texas would be in an indeterminately long situation without power, even more extensively than we are with these outages,” he said.
One person who wasn’t as surprised at the state’s close call was McAllen Mayor Jim Darling, who serves on the Texas Coalition for Aggregate Power, or TCAP.
TCAP is a nonprofit organization that represents some 275 cities to negotiate for electricity prices.
In 2000, Darling also testified before the state legislature about the deregulation of Texas’ energy system. Darling was against deregulation, he said.
Prior to deregulation, energy companies were beholden to certain reliability standards.
“Of course, that all went away when deregulation went to a market process and they all had to divest themselves from generation,” Darling said of the companies that have since become transmission operators — those who deliver power to customers, rather than those who generate it.
Even after ERCOT ordered transmission companies to shed load to reduce stress on the system, those companies were left unable to rotate outages to other customers because the supply and demand balance remained fragile.
Additional power generators continued to go offline as transmission companies plunged hundreds of thousands into darkness early Monday morning.
Contrary to rumors, however, the biggest generation failures were not among renewable resources, like wind turbines, but in thermal generators — those powered by coal and natural gas.
Natural gas generators accounted for the largest loss of generation, ERCOT said. That was due in large part to gas wellheads freezing over, preventing gas from being delivered to power generation plants.
Currently, there are no regulations in place that mandate power companies winterize their infrastructure. The only thing that exists is a set of “best practices,” officials said.
Ahead of the storm, the ERCOT board met and said the system was ready for the cold. On Thursday, officials continued to defend the system and their decisions through the crisis.
“Regardless of what could have been done in the past to make sure we had more gas supply and units were weatherized and those kinds of things, once you get to the point that all these units are gone, that’s the amount of load we can serve,” Woodfin said.
“There’s nothing ERCOT can do at that point,” except try to maintain the supply and demand balance, he added.
The county judge was unimpressed.
“Being in the business of providing services, you can’t be perfect. You can’t think of everything that could go wrong and prepare for everything that could be wrong,” Cortez said.
“But in their particular case, what else are they doing every day of their lives if not looking into this?”
