The finger-pointing may be well underway in the Lone Star State — Frozen wind turbines! Natural gas curtailments! Ill prepared! — but ERCOT has no time for that. Its leadership made it clear Wednesday that it is fully committed to restoring power to the millions of Texans spending their fourth night shivering in the dark, no matter what the consequences are.
During an interview Tuesday night with a Houston television station, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called for ERCOT’s leadership to resign.
“This was a total failure by ERCOT,” he told KTRK. “There seemed to be a lack of preparation and making sure we did have access to backup power in the event that the power generators were incapable of generating power. But all that aside … they should be providing greater transparency.
“They are a public entity. They deserve to tell you, as well as government leaders, exactly what is going and what is not going on, and they are not stepping up and providing that level of transparency.”
“The priority for us now, whatever the future holds, is to get the power back on,” CEO Bill Magness said during a media briefing Wednesday. “Obviously, this has been a tremendously difficult situation for Texas, to have outages this long in this weather. The assessment of how we did is something that’s going to be done after we get the power back on.”
Magness called the decision made during Monday’s early hours by ERCOT operators to cut load after generators began to trip offline “wise.” (See ERCOT, MISO, SPP Slough Load in Wintry Blast.)
“If we had waited and not reduced demand, we could have drifted into a blackout,” he said. “I know people feel like what they’re seeing is blackout, but if we don’t keep the supply and demand balanced … Texas would have been in an indeterminately longer situation. Many decisions we’ve made will be reviewed in greater detail, but I’ve got to stand behind the grid operators who made an extremely difficult decision.”
ERCOT was able to restore about 3.5 GW of load Tuesday night, representing about 700,000 households. However, as SPP was forced to shed load as well Tuesday morning, ERCOT was unable to import about 600 MW of power over one of two DC ties with its neighbor and lost some of the restored customers.
By Wednesday’s media call, ERCOT was asking transmission providers to shed 14 GW of load, representing about 2.8 million customers. Staff said 46 GW of generation had been forced offline (28 GW of thermal, 18 GW of renewables) because of frozen wind turbines, limited gas supplies, low gas pressure and frozen instrumentation. All told, 185 of the grid operator’s 680 generators have tripped offline at one time or another.
“The ability to restore more power is contingent on more generation coming back online,” said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations.
By late afternoon, both operating capacity and demand had begun to climb. By 7 p.m. CT, demand was at more than 49 GW, the highest load has been since Monday morning after the initial load sheds.
ERCOT said it had been able to restore about 8 GW of generation, or 1.6 million households, during the day, bringing back about 1 GW/hour by the afternoon.
“We’re at a point in the restoration where we’re going to keep energizing circuits as fast as we safely can until we run out of available generation,” Woodfin said in a release. “We hope to make significant progress overnight.”
Though another line of winter weather was rolling through the state last night, ERCOT expected conditions to continue to improve. The weather is expected to reach more seasonable — for Texas — February temperatures on Friday.
“This morning, it was 10 to 20 degrees warmer than yesterday morning. As that temperature moderates, each household is using less electricity overall for those who do have power,” Woodfin said. “That helps us get more individuals online.”
Still, neither Woodfin nor Magness was willing to commit to an end date for the outages.
“We’re unable to get real specific because of the variables around the generation resources and the weather,” Magness said. “We hope with the warming trend, we can get [the outages] down to a level where we can at least see the rotation of outages. If the generation can get back in 24 hours and the weather continues to moderate, that’s how we’ll get to the end of it.”
Another issue now looms. The outages have disrupted service to 420 public water systems in the state, leading to conservation calls and boil-water notices affecting more than 8 million people.
Talberg Calls Urgent Board Meeting
ERCOT Chair Sally Talberg has called for an urgent teleconference with the Board of Directors next week to receive an initial report from staff on the “sustained power outages” and ERCOT’s preparations and decisions.
In a letter addressed to her fellow directors and ERCOT, Talberg requested the meeting be scheduled for 10 a.m. Feb. 24 and that an agenda be posted no later than this Friday. The meeting will be webcast live, as are all regular board meetings.
“While ERCOT’s operators have managed to avoid a total collapse of the grid, the significant and sustained loss of electricity generation and unprecedented demand have led to millions of Texas households and businesses without power for days during extreme cold temperatures,” she said. “Given ERCOT’s charge by the Texas Legislature for resource adequacy and reliability, this crisis warrants the board’s full and prompt attention, beginning with an understanding of the key events and known causes to date.”
Talberg copied Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Public Utility Commission’s DeAnn Walker, Arthur D’Andrea and Shelly Botkin, and various members of the state’s legislative leadership.
The Texas House of Representatives has also been directed to hold a joint hearing by its State Affairs and Energy Resources committees on ERCOT’s response to the extreme winter weather and the ensuing outages. House Speaker Dade Phelan has asked that the meeting be set for Feb. 25.
Talberg said she expected ERCOT management to provide a chronology of key events and critical actions, data and explanations to a series of questions, many of which Magness and Woodfin have answered during media briefings. She also urged the board to “work with state leadership and other entities to identify and take the necessary actions to assure Texas residents and businesses never again experience power outages on this magnitude.”
“It is critical to learn from this experience and bring about the necessary organizational, market, planning and oversight changes to protect Texans,” Talberg said.
A seven-year member of Michigan’s Public Service Commission, Talberg was only elected as the board’s chair on Feb. 9. (See Former Mich. Regulator Talberg to Chair ERCOT Board.) She has been pilloried by some Texans this week for being a Michigan resident. However, while obtaining her master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, she worked with both the PUC and Lower Colorado River Authority.
Talberg’s predecessor, Craven Crowell, lived in Tennessee during his nine years as chair.
ERCOT has removed Talberg’s information and that of the other directors and its officer team from its website after they started receiving threats over the widespread outages.
MISO Grid ‘Stable,’ Emergency Remains
MISO said its entire footprint’s system is now “stable,” although emergency measures remain in place through the week.
The RTO temporarily shed load Tuesday and Wednesday in parts of Southeast Texas, South and Central Louisiana and South-Central Illinois. Its last load-shed orders ended at 1 a.m. ET Wednesday.
The grid operator said it expects high load demand to last through the end of the week. It has a maximum generation event in place for MISO South through tonight; the entire footprint is under conservative-operation orders and a cold weather alert through Saturday evening.
“MISO’s North and Central Regions continue to export energy to the South Region and are projected to remain reliable,” spokesperson Brandon Morris said in a statement to RTO Insider. “Over the next few days, MISO and its members will continue monitoring the record-breaking winter weather to ensure reliability. Conditions for the rest of the week remain challenging in the South given the continued extreme weather and ongoing operational uncertainties.”
MISO said it was dealing with “interdependent issues,” including transmission constraints in neighboring RTOs and generation outages that complicated restoration efforts.
“In a situation where so many issues are showing up simultaneously, you have to prioritize the challenges to preserve overall grid reliability,” MISO Executive Director of System Operations Renuka Chatterjee wrote in a release. “We will continue to work with our members and neighboring reliability coordinators to navigate a very complex and dynamic situation.”
Chatterjee said MISO is devoting “every available operational resource to maintain the bulk electric system.”
Entergy told its MISO South customers in Texas on Wednesday evening to limit electricity usage. “Insufficient reductions may require temporary interruptions of electric service,” the utility warned.
SPP Back to EEA Level 1
SPP lowered its energy emergency alert to Level 1 Wednesday afternoon but later, around 6:20 p.m. CT, elevated it back to Level 2.P
COO Lanny Nickell said during a media call that at EEA Level 2, SPP will again ask its member utilities to ask their consumers to voluntarily reduce load.
SPP had been at EEA Level 2 since Tuesday evening, when Nickell said the RTO was able to reduce its load by 6.5% and continue meeting demand. “We saw an immediate impact,” he said.
The grid operator has called the first two EEA Level 3s of its history this week. It said it expects to continue fluctuating between levels before possibly exiting the alert on Friday.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” CEO Barbara Sugg said during the call. “The deep freeze is still here. We still have a higher load than we normally do at this time of the year.”
Amanda Durish Cook contributed to this report.
