US winter storms and Texas power outages: Live updates
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Bill Magness, the CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said in a Webex briefing that he knows everybody wants to know when the power outages will end.
He said ERCOT is “working around the clock” to get more power back on, but restoring service depends on two factors.
“There was an enormous amount of electric generation – and it’s the supply side that provides the power into the equation – that was taken out of service by the storm,” Magness said, adding the storm also had a “freezing impact on the natural gas supply” which affected the ability of gas generators to produce at full output.
“So, getting those resources back on the grid is the central solution to getting people their power back, because we need to maintain a power balance. And if that power balance has supply and demand too far out of balance it risks cascading catastrophic blackout, not an outage that we could restore as soon as we get these power plants working again, but a blackout, that would affect the entire ERCOT region, and would have an indeterminate end date, and would not offer the opportunity to serve critical loads to keep some, you know, central power on,” Magness said.
“So what we are avoiding, and the reason that we are in this situation is that we risked that catastrophic blackout at one in the morning on Monday, and we had to reduce the demand to get the supply and demand back and balanced. And we’ve been working to get that balance back, so we can operate the system reliably and safely going forward,” Magness added, saying that means the outages so far have lasted longer “than anyone would want.”
The second factor, Magness said, is the weather.
Issues like freezing wind turbine blades and other generating resources that froze and needed to be thawed will be helped by the weather warming up. Additionally, transporting skilled personnel and fuel will be easier to do when there isn’t as much ice and snow on the road.
“So the work that needs to be done to get those resources back in place is going to be easier to do as the weather warms,” Magness said.
Magness said that demand will go down as the weather warms up as well.
“The reason that the demand has stayed as high as it has all week is that we’ve had this frigid weather so the people who were using electricity are using a lot more of it than they typically would,” Magness said.