People without power currently could be forced to remain without power through Tuesday, according to an emergency update from Oncor.
“The Texas power system is currently facing an unprecedented shortfall of electric generation,” Oncor said in a statement. “The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has requested Oncor and utilities across the state to implement controlled power outages to reduce high demand and protect the integrity of the electric grid.
“We are asking all Oncor customers to be prepared to be without power for an extended period of time.”
All Texas electric utilities could face similar extended outages, ERCOT said in a news briefing Monday morning.
“These outages will continue until there’s sufficient generation being able to be brought back online to meet the demands on the system,” said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations. “At this time we anticipate that we’ll need to continue these control outages at some level for the rest of today and at least first part of [Tuesday], perhaps all day tomorrow.”
What’s happened to the Texas power grid?
Gov. Abbott maintains the power grid is not broken, but said that parts of the grid had to be shut down, including natural gas and coal generators.
The Texas power grid has not been compromised.
The ability of some companies that generate the power has been frozen.
This includes the natural gas & coal generators.
They are working to get generation back on line.
ERCOT & PUC are prioritizing residential consumers. https://t.co/wDiDXN17Fu
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) February 15, 2021
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ERCOT gave a more detailed assessment of its facilities Monday morning.
“Going into the event we had a significant number of natural gas fuel generators that were unavailable,” Woodfin explained. “And we had some wind turbines that were out due to the ice buildup.”
Woodfin said the outages began as rotating outages but ERCOT had to switch to controlled outages — which can be much, much longer — due to the magnitude of the demand.
ERCOT says emergency plan was adequate
ERCOT, in responding to a question from News 4 San Antonio, said it felt its emergency plan has been fine — there’s just been record demand.
“Would you say that your emergency plan was inadequate?” asked Jaie Avila of News 4.
“Not at all,” Woodfin said. “The plan actually has worked. There’s just insufficient supply of generation on the grid, very high demand on the grid. The plan is intended to preserve the reliability of the grid as a whole.”
“You have to go back to the 1940s or something, to see these kind of conditions,” Woodfin added. “This event was well beyond kind of the design parameters or or even as extreme as you would normally planned for.”
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SOURCE: KXAN, Wes Wilson
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