AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) Oncor Electric Delivery CEO Allen Nye began his testimony before the Senate on Friday, February 26, as did the CEOs of others in the energy sector.
“I want to say that I fully understand all the outrage and anger from all Texans.”
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Nye appeared during the second consecutive day of hearings at the Texas Capitol in which the Senate Business and Commerce Committee and the House State Affairs and Energy Committees investigated what led to last week’s widespread power outage that left millions of Texans with electricity, heat, and water. lost. for days.
Nye testified when the first winter storm blew through Texas at night on Feb. 15, the state’s power grid operator, ERCOT, repeatedly ordered them to cut off power to more of their customers to avoid a catastrophic power outage.
“We were two / one-thousandths of 1% from tripping over the last security blanket this state has.”
Initially, he said their intention was to do rollout outages, 15 minutes on and 30 minutes off.
But he said that was impossible because power plant operators continued to go offline and there was not enough supply to meet demand.
“Generation was deteriorating so quickly and we would be told it’s about to come back and we would wait all night for it and it would never show. Or a little bit would, and something else would fall. During those periods I could not estimate whether the generation would come back so that I could get it at your place. I had no idea.”
Nye said Oncor should have better communicated with customers why many of them had to remain in the dark for so long.
He also told lawmakers why the lights kept on for about 40% of their customers.
“If you happen to live on a feeder that also goes to a hospital, or if you happen to live on a feeder that goes to a 911 call center, then you’re not turned either.”
That caused about 50% of customers to experience power outages.
In a moment of candor, he said he didn’t realize his house was on such a crib until he woke up with the lights still on.
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He’s nowhere near any critical infrastructure, so he called his company to tell them to cut off his power, which also affected his neighbors.
In total, Nye told lawmakers that about 1.3 million customers lost power.
Most of those were because there were not enough power plants in operation.
Of those, he said that about 140,000 customers are in the dark because Oncor’s power lines were frozen during the storms.
As CBS 11 has reported, natural gas processors lost power in the field, making it impossible to supply natural gas to power plants that need fuel to operate.
Before the House committees Friday, the chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, Christi Craddick, who oversees the gas industry, said ERCOT did not realize what was going on. “When I say that there is a lack of communication from ERCOT, they did not understand that they needed a continuous gas flow to be able to put gas into power plants.”
Nye said they had identified 35 gas installations before the storm that needed to continue to receive electricity.
But after the power outage started, Nye said he received calls from many more people. “During the event, we added 168 new gas-critical facilities. We turned them all on right away and we kept them on all the time. “
He told lawmakers that his company and other transmission owners, power plant operators and the gas industry should develop an updated list.
Energy experts have told CBS 11 that holistic improvements are needed in both the electricity and gas grids to avoid last week’s kind of widespread power outage.
On Thursday, the first day of the hearings, Curt Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corporation of Irving, which operates power plants, told the House Committees that the same problem will arise again unless the state has integrated and seamless gas and electricity systems.
Morgan recommended one authority to oversee both systems, but that’s not the case now.
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While the Railroad Commission regulates the gas industry, ERCOT oversees the power grid and reports to the Texas Public Utility Commission.