Power keeps slipping amid cold weather
Conditions affect efforts to increase generation across state
The state’s power situation worsened Tuesday as millions of Texans waited in the cold and dark for their electricity to return.
The system lost more power Tuesday, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid. ERCOT said frigid temperatures had knocked a total 45,000 megawatts of power generation offline, more than the 34,000 megawatts that went offline Monday.
“We haven’t been able to add as much back as we would like to have,” Dan WoodHouston fin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, said in a Tuesday afternoon news conference.
About 4.2 million Texans were still without power early Tuesday afternoon, according to the outage tracking website PowerOutage.US. In Houston, about 1.3 million were without power, down from about 1.4 million Tuesday morning, according to utility CenterPoint Energy.
CenterPoint, the regulated utility that delivers electricity to Houston-area homes and provides natural gas service, urged customers Tuesday afternoon to prepare for power outages that could last for several days as cold weather continues to thwart third-party power generation.
“Given uncertain timing and the ongoing public safety risks due to the severe weather conditions in Houston and surrounding areas, CenterPoint Energy advis
es all of its electric customers to be prepared to be without power, potentially for the duration of the generation shortage event, which could last several more days,” said Kenny Mercado, CenterPoint’s executive vice president of electric utility.
It remains unclear when enough generation will be available to end the outages that have rolled across Texas since early Monday. ERCOT said it expected to bring additional wind and solar generation online Tuesday and also expected some natural-gas-fired power plants to come back into operation.
But the effect of those sources was blunted by severe winter weather that knocked more power generators offline when temperatures fell into the teens. ERCOT required additional outages to lower power consumption by about 18,500 megawatts.
CenterPoint said enough power was available early Tuesday morning that it was able to resume rotating blackouts to provide relief to customers whose power was out most of all of Monday. It said it had to end the rotation when ERCOT ordered additional cuts in power consumption.
“We are ready to go back to that process today as soon as we get a little more relief from ERCOT and the state,” Mercado said.
Mercado said the utility’s transmission system is operating normally and is just waiting for more power to deliver. He expects the outages to decrease, but cautioned the end is not here yet. “We are going to see improvements today, but that doesn’t mean every customer
will be back to normal. This event could take us through tonight. And it could easily go another day.”
Despite the optimism, supplies remained short and prices high.
One of the two reactors of the South Texas Nuclear Power Station in Matagorda County shut down, knocking out about half of its 2,700 megawatts of generating capacity. On Monday, Unit 1 went offline cold weather-related issues in the plant’s feedwater system, said Vicki Rowland, lead of internal communications at STP Nuclear Operating Co.
Unit 2 continues to operate normally, providing more than 1,300 megawatts of electricity, according to Rowland. Crews are working to promptly return Unit 1 to the grid, she said.
The Public Utility Commission, meanwhile, ordered ERCOT to modify its pricing model to reflect the severe power shortage. On Monday, even as blackouts rolled across the state, power was trading in wholesale power markets far below the $9,000 per megawatt hour cap — as low as $1,200.
Andrew Barlow, a spokesman for the PUC, said the relatively low prices could have meant that available power was not making it to the grid, despite the shortages.
“When the ERCOT dispatch system sees prices that are not at the $9,000 scarcity cap, it is programmed to ‘think’ that there isn’t scarcity in the market and that some power should be held in reserve instead of releasing it to power the grid,” he said. “The commissioners’ order fixed that.”