ERCOT says limited outages are still possible at night due to snow and cold temperatures

Austin, Texas – While many CPS Energy customers have restored power, the Texas Electric Reliability Council says there will still be limited outages Thursday night or Friday morning due to the cold weather.

Still, ERCOT said in a release Friday that it is hopeful that more power generation will become available.

“The manufacturing units that were online this morning have been running all day,” Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s Senior Director of System Operations, said in a written statement. “Now that the generation remains stable, we hope that more generations will become available.”

While there is an end to the snow, there will still be freezing temperatures, snow and ice at night until morning, possibly leading to the limited downtime. This outage will help keep the network stable when usage increases, according to ERCOT.

According to CPS Energy’s outage map, there will be 215 active outages and 5,103 customers without power as of Thursday around 7 p.m. These numbers can change during the night.

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Those who lack electricity can fall into one of these three categories, according to ERCOT:

• Areas due to ice storm damage on the distribution system

• Areas that have been decommissioned due to the energy emergency charging shed that must be manually restored (i.e. sending a crew to the site to re-power the line)

• Major industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to assist during this energy emergency

ERCOT said Thursday at 6:30 pm that nearly 36,000 MW of power generation is still under forced power outages as a result of this winter weather event. About 21,400 MW of this is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar.

RELATED: ERCOT Suspends Rollout Disruptions, But CPS Energy Customers Without Power May See No Lights for Days