The Texas power grid was “four minutes and 37 seconds away from total collapse” during the recent historic winter storm – meaning the state could have been left in the dark for weeks, a report said.
The stunning disclosure was made during an emergency meeting Wednesday of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a cooperative responsible for 90 percent of the state’s electricity, KHOU reported.
“This was a devastating event,” said Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, in his opening statement at the board meeting. “Power is essential to civilization.”
Officials said ERCOT lost 48.6 percent of power generation during the peak of the power outage – and had the dip continued, the remaining generators would have gone offline, leading to a potential system crash for which a so-called ‘black start ‘would have been necessary. . “
Magness doubled down on his claim that the rolling outage was necessary to prevent such a power outage in Texas, the only state to have its own stand-alone power grid.
“If we blackout the system, the system is down indefinitely, and it’s extremely difficult to get it back,” he said, according to CBS Austin.
“We can still talk about when the power will return if we let the system get into that state,” added Magness.
During the storm, 356 generators were knocked down, almost doubling what Texas experienced during the last major winter storm in 2011, KHOU reported.
ERCOT officials said on Wednesday it has 13 units with which it has contracted in the event of a power outage, but six of those had outages last week.
During the meeting, officials discussed some of the measures ERCOT was taking to prepare for the weather, including canceling transmission maintenance interruptions and waiving COVID-19 restrictions to call in additional support personnel, among other measures.
They also said a Department of Energy order allowed power generators to ignore certain environmental standards, which was very helpful.
ERCOT officials said natural gas plants failed the most during the crisis, according to CBS Austin. Wind generators also had problems, but sometimes underperformed.
“There were a lot of gas supply problems at this event,” said Magness. “What I would like to emphasize here is the storm that has hit every generation type.”
He added, “We regret that this event took time to resolve. What ERCOT wants to do today, what ERCOT wants to do at the legislative hearings tomorrow and in the future, is to explain, not apologize. “
On Tuesday, ERCOT announced in a notice to the Texas Public Utility Commission that four of its board members will resign effective Wednesday.
A fifth member resigned separately and the resignation of a sixth was announced at Wednesday’s meeting.
Gov. Greg Abbott sent a statement saying he welcomed the resignation of members, all of whom live outside the state.
“The state of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and get the full picture of what went wrong, and we will make sure that last week’s disastrous events are never repeated,” Abbott’s statement said in part.