UNCOMMON COLD
ERCOT under fire as it waits for equipment thaw
Three days after the Texas power system collapsed, the state’s grid manager has restored little additional power and could provide no estimate on how long millions will remain without electricity and heat.
Unprepared for the persistent, unseasonable cold, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is now at the mercy of power generators — still in the throes of a deep freeze and with repairs needed to damaged equipment — unsure when they will be able to thaw their equipment out.
Pressed at a Wednesday news conference for a timeline to restore electricity flow, Bill Magness, ERCOT’s president and chief executive, said, “That’s what we’re working on. That’s the top priority. That’s what we want to see done as quickly as possible.”
As criticism of ERCOT’s preparation mounted — a similar event a decade ago led to calls for power generators to upgrade their equipment to be prepared for the next such winter storm — Magness said he was focusing first on the task at hand.
“The priority for us now, whatever the future holds, the priority for us now is to get the power back on,” he said. “‘The assessment of how we did I think is something that can be done after we get the power back on.”
ERCOT was able to restore power to an estimated 1.6 million homes Wednesday as moderating temperatures reduced demand. Some 2.2 million Texas customers were still without power Wednesday night, according to outage-tracking website PowerOutage.US.
In Houston, the utility Center-Point Energy was able to reduce the number of customers with--
out power to fewer than 1 million Wednesday night, down from 1.4 million Wednesday morning.
Bringing back power generation has been slowed by repairs to frozen pipes, broken lines another equipment needed to run the plants, experts said. Natural gas shortages have also affected power generation. Freezing temperatures in Texas shale plays have contributed to a plunge in production of as much as 7 billion cubic feet per day, according to Bloomberg and S&P Global Platts.
Power plants weren’t ready for the blow when it hit just after midnight Monday. About 46,000 megawatts of generation came offline, ERCOT said, more than half of the grid’s 82,000 megawatts of normal capacity.
The state began the week with about 14,000 megawatts of power generation already offline for routine maintenance, said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. The Arctic blast that hit overnight Monday knocked another 32,000 megawatts out of commission.
Of the total generation knocked offline, about 18,000 megawatts was generated by wind, with 28,000 megawatts by thermal sources, predominantly natural gas.
Water plays an important role in natural gas plants, Rhodes said, so if the water freezes they can’t operate.
“It would be like running your car without coolant,” he said. “It would overheat and it would break.”
Repairing infrastructure is not a quick fix, said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston.
“This equipment can’t be switched on rapidly,” Hirs said. “If plants have frozen pipes and broken lines that interrupt the gas, water or turbine flow, those are industrial repairs. This is not something where you can call upstairs and have someone come fix it overnight.”
Hirs said the state should have learned a lesson from blackouts a decade ago, when frigid temperatures also knocked out power generators.
“The 2011 debacle gave everybody in the legislature, the state, the PUC and ERCOT, the road map to fix things and they did not follow it,” said Hirs.
Julie Cohn, an energy historian affiliated with Rice University and the University of Houston, said, however, that the severity of the storm was beyond what planners would have expected.
“We’ve never had a storm like this,” she said. “This weather event is something that’s really outside historical data for ERCOT.”
Sitll, said Rhodes of UT Austin, so many generators falling offline was troubling.
“That’s definitely something we have to fix,” he said. “We can’t allow that to happen. We’ve got to weatherize better.”
ERCOT operates outside of federal regulation because its reach does not extend beyond state lines, and both Gov. Greg Abbott and former Gov. Rick Perry have been outspoken about keeping federal regulators out of the system.
On Wednesday, Perry suggested that going days without power is a sacrifice Texans should be willing to make if it means keeping federal oversight out of the state’s power grid.
“That is a ridiculous statement,” Hirs said. “No one is going to hold a gun to your head and make you join federal regulation.”
Ultimately, Hirs said, the Texas power grid issue is not political.
“This is not an issue of red or blue,” Hirs said. “This is an issue of smart or stupid.”