ERCOT was able to share some good news Thursday as the Texas power crisis held its top position in the national news cycle: enough generation had returned to service to stop the rotating outages that began Monday but never actually rotated.

But with the positive came the chilling revelation that it could have been much worse.

During ERCOT’s daily briefing Thursday, CEO Bill Magness said that as generation began dropping offline like dominoes Sunday night, the Texas Interconnection came perilously close to a total system collapse.

“We were seconds and minutes away, given the amount of generation coming off the system,” he said. “We were seeing generators coming off [the grid] in rapid succession. Our frequency went to a level where, had the operators not reacted quickly enough, it could have been catastrophic.”

As it is, Texans are enduring record freezing temperatures and a wintry mix of precipitation. The long-term outages have led to flooded residences, limited or contaminated water supplies, and shortages of groceries and gasoline.

ERCOT said it made “significant progress” in restoring power, allowing it to meet Thursday’s morning peak of 55.4 GW without taking additional actions. The grid operator hasn’t seen load that high since it was forced to call for outages during the early hours of Monday.

“By the end of the night, we were able to tell the transmission providers to bring back any of the load that was part of the original event,” Magness said. “We’ve been working since then to reduce the number of those outages. It got to the point where we could do so effectively and tell the transmission providers, ‘Please, go forward and restore those that you can.’”

According to PowerOutage.US, Texas still had more than 315,000 customers without power at 6:30 p.m. CT on Thursday, compared with 2.8 million ERCOT customers just 24 hours earlier. (ERCOT serves about 90% of the state’s load.)

ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin said staff will continue “working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on.”

Woodfin said the remaining outages were likely because of ice damage on the distribution system, large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline, or because load-shed areas need to be restored manually. Transportation is still difficult in much of the state.

Magness said ERCOT is still seeing “much higher than normal winter demand.” Thursday’s morning peak of 55.4 GW was less than 3 GW from ERCOT’s projection of a 57.7-GW winter peak. The grid operator set an all-time winter peak demand mark Sunday night of nearly 69.2 GW, breaking the old record by nearly 4 GW. (See ERCOT, MISO, SPP Slough Load in Wintry Blast.)

“We think we’re in a glide path to restoration,” Magness said. “If we do hit a bump and generation has to come back off, we may have to ask for outages. If we do, we believe it’ll be at a level where they are rotating outages, and not at the numbers earlier this week. Customers should be seeing the lights and the heat coming back on a regular basis.”

ERCOT will remain in emergency conditions at least into Friday and warned that, with more extreme cold weather and snow and ice falling, limited outages remain a possibility into the morning.

Meanwhile, SPP and MISO both dialed back their energy emergency alert (EEA) levels. MISO South exited its emergency status Wednesday night, and SPP called off its EEA status Thursday morning. The RTOs will remain in conservative operations into the weekend.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Energy and Commerce Committee will look into the crisis. The hearings will join those already announced by the ERCOT Board of Directors, the Texas Legislature, and FERC and NERC. (See related story, Glick Eyes New Standards Following Midwest Outages.)

ERCOT said that as of 6:30 p.m. Thursday, nearly 36 GW of generation remain on forced outage. Of that, about 21.4 GW are thermal generation, and the rest comprises renewable resources.

Among the generators to fail was one of two nuclear units at the South Texas Project Generating Station in Bay City. Plant personnel shut down the 1,350-MW unit around 5:30 a.m. Monday because of freezing water. The reactor has since returned to service and was “ascending to 100% power” Thursday morning.

ERCOT said a little more than 40 GW of generation remained on forced outage Thursday. That included 23.5 GW of thermal generation and 16.5 GW of renewables.

With SPP exiting its EEA, ERCOT has been able to import 813 MW of energy over the two DC ties it shares with its neighbor.

SPP, MISO Back to Conservative Ops

SPP thanked its members, neighboring systems and the millions of residents in its 14-state balancing authority for their response to the “historic event” and allowing the RTO to exit emergency status.

“This has been a case study in everyone doing their part on behalf of the greater good,” CEO Barbara Sugg said in a release. “We take our responsibility to keep the lights on very seriously and appreciate the trust placed in us to do so. Thanks to voluntary conservation by people across our 14-state region, the quick actions taken by local utilities, and the dedication and expertise of our operators, we’re thankful we could keep the regionwide impact of this storm to a minimum.”

While the RTO ended its EEA at 9:30 a.m. CT Thursday, it will remain in conservative operations until 10 p.m. Saturday because of continuing high loads and the severe weather’s other implications. SPP expects load and generation to fluctuate over the next 48 hours and warned conditions could change rapidly.

The event marked the first time SPP has declared EEA levels 2 or 3 for its entire region. It was also the first time it had to direct its member utilities to shed load to prevent widespread blackouts: for about 50 minutes on Monday morning, and for a little more than three hours on Tuesday morning.

“Considering the historic nature of this storm and how broadly it affected the entire SPP region, we’re grateful we could limit the use of controlled service interruptions to lessen the chance of longer, more impactful and more costly outages,” COO Lanny Nickell said.

MISO said another round of wintry weather caused additional power outages in its South region Wednesday night. As a precaution, it said it was extending its maximum generation emergency alert for MISO South until 4 p.m. ET Saturday.

Directors’, Officers’ Online Info to be Restored

ERCOT said it will restore the names and personal information of its board members and officer team to its website. The information was taken down earlier this week after they started receiving threats over the widespread outages.

“On reflection … we figured that information ought to be up there,” Magness said. “It was public information that has been on the website in the past, so we thought it made sense to put it back up there.”

Magness said the publicly available information was being used “to send sometimes harassing communications.”

“Threats were being made to the board members. We were very concerned about both the employees’ and board members’ safety because of things we’ve been receiving over the last few days,” he said.

Asked again about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s call for leadership resignations and a board that includes five non-Texas residents, Magness pointed out that ERCOT’s governance structure was created by the state legislature. The Public Utility Commission provides regulatory oversight of the organization.

“If there’s dissatisfaction with how the board works, I’m sure that will be part of the review,” he said. “The composition of the board is defined by statute. If the legislature thinks that needs to change, that is something we will follow.”

NERC: First Things First

During their media briefings this week, ERCOT staff have made frequent references to a winter weatherization standard in draft form at NERC. The cold-weather standard project is currently out for industry comment, with responses due back March 12. (See “Cold Weather SAR Approved,” NERC Standards Committee Briefs: Sept. 24, 2020.)

During a Standards Committee discussion earlier this week, stakeholders said this week’s winter storms underscore the importance of cold weather preparedness and suggested NERC do its best to make utilities prepare if they won’t do it voluntarily.

A NERC spokesperson said the storms and their effects have increased the ERO’s urgency to pass the standards.

“We need to complete our inquiry to determine how to proceed with any additional standard modifications,” Kimberly Mielcarek told RTO Insider, alluding to the commission’s recently announced joint inquiry with FERC into the outage response. (See “FERC, NERC Announce Joint Inquiry,” Slow Storm Restoration Sparks Anger in Midwest.)

The project comprises three proposed standards that:

• ensure each BA, transmission operator and generator owner has developed plan(s) to mitigate and prepare for operating emergencies and that the plans are coordinated within a reliability coordinator area;
• prevent instability, uncontrolled separation or cascading outages by ensuring the RC has the data it needs to monitor and assess the RC area; and
• ensure the TO and BA have the data they need to fulfill their operational and planning responsibilities.

Holden Mann contributed to this report.