San Antonio residents may experience outages until Wednesday, CPS Energy says

SAN ANTONIO – CPS Energy customers experiencing power outages may not have power on Tuesday evening, when freezing rain is expected, officials said.

John Moreno, a representative for the energy company, joined GMSA @ 9 on Tuesday morning for a virtual Q&A and said customers could be affected by outages until Wednesday.

“This is a pretty serious problem and we’re doing it for the long haul,” he said, adding that the Texas Electric Reliability Council has imposed the outage as a winter storm continues to consume most of Texas.

About two thirds of the CPS Energy grids will have rotating outages during that time. The other third is devoted to critical services, such as a hospital, base or police.

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For the residents experiencing outages, Moreno said it is difficult to say whether this is due to a technical problem, such as a downed power line, or the rolling outage.

“They’re all together, they’re not separated into groups,” he said, referring to the disturbance map.

The goal was to rotate scrapes in 15-20 increments, but the demand has not resulted in them being consistent, he said.

Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of CPS Energy, said on Monday that most of the outages residents are experiencing is due to the rotations.

Without the rolling blackouts, entire grids would be taken offline, leaving them without power indefinitely, Gold-Williams said.

Due to demand – which has surpassed demand of the summer months – CPS officials are asking people to conserve energy whenever possible.

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When asked about CPS Energy’s headquarters that uses electricity to light the buildings from one day to the next, Moreno said he “should take a look”.

“We absolutely have to do our part to save energy, so it’s something I’ll definitely be monitoring,” he said.

Moreno said CPS Energy has also requested critical services to conserve energy.

San Antonio’s dangerous cold air mass will keep temperatures below freezing for most of Tuesday. Partial melting will occur, only to see everything freeze again on Wednesday morning.

Tuesday after sunset, freezing drizzle and freezing rain are expected.

Some San Antonio residents without power told KSAT that they have resorted to bundling or heading to their vehicles for a brief relief from their cold homes.

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As of 11:00 AM, approximately 320,000 customers in Bexar County will be affected by power outages.