ERCOT CEO says ‘Texas can’t afford for this to happen again’ as controlled outages end
ERCOT officials announced on Friday morning an end to the emergency protocols put into place following record winter weather this week, meaning there will no longer be rotating outages and Texans aren’t being advised to conserve their energy.
More than 21,000 Oncor customers in Tarrant and Dallas counties were still without power on Friday, according to the company’s outage map. Though as of Friday morning ERCOT — the state agency in charge of the electrical grid — stopped directing individual utilities like Oncor to implement rolling blackouts, crews were still working on Friday to fix damage from two winter storms and historic low temperatures, officials said. The damage to the grid has led Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to call on lawmakers to mandate the winterization of power generators.
During a virtual press conference on Friday morning, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness addressed the scrutiny directed at the agency and the failures of the grid over the past week, acknowledging “the immense human suffering that we saw throughout this event.”
“When people lose power, there are heartbreaking consequences,” Magness said. “As a company that has a job of trying to do everything we can to make sure that power is provided every day — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — watching those heartbreaking conditions over several days was terrible.”
He also emphasized, regardless of the circumstances that led them to this situation, the quick actions of ERCOT and electric utilities across the state helped save the grid from crashing, which could have left residents without power for weeks or months. The grid was seconds or minutes away from reaching this point.
The grid had lost about 40 percent of its generation, Magness said.
“Those outages — we hope that are ending now — served a purpose, as difficult as they were,” he said. “And that purpose is: We don’t act, we do nothing, we could have a much worse event. And I know it’s hard to imagine a much worse event right now.”
Magness first addressed the media during a call Thursday morning, when he was hesitant to analyze this week or the changes that need to be made in the future to avoid a similar incident unfolding.
On Friday, as he announced an end to the emergency procedures that left millions of Texans without power, Magness spoke a little more candidly about the overhauls that might need to happen in the coming months or years. He said he approved of Abbott’s call to winterize equipment and was open to hearing proposals from other legislators.
“Texas can’t afford for this to happen again,” Magness said.
Reflecting on the beginning of the power issues late Sunday, Magness said he believes the weather report ERCOT received was accurate, with a meteorologist warning Texas hasn’t seen a winter weather event this strong in a long time. They were prepared for the possible need for rotating outages, he said, but weren’t anticipating the amount of generation that was going to come offline.
They were ready to be “all hands on deck” with the winter weather, Magness said. “But the storm came in,” he said, “and lots of different issues occurred.”
ERCOT officials said this week the agency had been using the winter of 2011, one of the worst winters in Texas is recent memory, as a basis for worst-case scenario limits for the electric grid. It was determined this represented a 90th percentile extreme event, officials said.
Magness answered a question from the Star-Telegram on Friday about whether ERCOT had considered how climate change could lead to worsening winters in Texas, more severe than in the past.
Without stating if officials had considered climate change in the past, or are going to acknowledge a warming climate moving forward, Magness said that “2021 certainly puts a marker down for the kind of severe weather that we really have not seen.”
“We’re going to have to examine everything about that,” he said. “And then what implications what we’ve seen has for the future.”
