Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tells lawmakers to mandate winterization of power generators
Texas power plants should have been ready to handle the freezing temperatures seen across the state, Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday, prompting him to announce a two new emergency items for lawmakers to consider.
Abbott is calling on Texas legislators to pass measures mandating the winterization of power generators, as well as provide funding to ensure the winter preparations and modernization occurs.
“I want everyone to know that all of us in the state of Texas believe it is completely unacceptable that you had to endure one minute of the challenges you faced,” Abbott said. “All of us agree on the necessity of action. Not just the action taken to restore your power, but the action to ensure that you never have to endure anything like this ever again.”
Abbott has slammed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas in recent days over its handling of the winter weather event that led to millions of power outages. He has also named reforms to ERCOT, which oversees Texas’ power grid, an emergency item.
Abbott claimed that ERCOT purported to be ready for the cold weather in the days ahead of its arrival at a Thursday news conference.
At the time of the conference, Abbott said there were no outages in the state resulting from the lack of power generation or the lack of the agility to generate power, but he cautioned that more cold temperatures are expected over Thursday night.
As of about 5 p.m., there were fewer than 349,000 outages in the state, according to poweroutage.us. There were fewer than 32,000 customers in Tarrant County without power.
After freezes and blackouts in 2011, the Legislature passed a bill related to winterization for power generators. But the legislation lacks enforcement teeth and only requires generators file a weather preparation report with ERCOT that’s then sent to the Public Utility Commission.
ERCOT officials on Tuesday said they conduct “winterization spot checks” to ensure generators are following their plans and “help disseminate the best practices.” Each year ERCOT checks on about a sixth of the state’s generators.
But there are not specific requirements for the mechanics of the weatherization process itself.
“There are not specific requirements to the extent of ‘you’ve got to have windbreaks of this type,” ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin said Thursday. “You’ve got to have these kinds of boxes around your instruments. You’ve got to have this amount of heat trays on your equipment that needs that.”
Committees in the Texas House and Senate are holding hearings in the coming week related to the outages.
ERCOT officials have defended the recent day’s outages as being necessary to prevent a statewide blackout.
Staff Writer Mark Dent contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 4:49 PM.
