Texas officials on Feb. 16 offered little in the way of rapid progress as they scrambled to bring more power plants back onto the electric grid without damaging it in the process.
Officials with the Electric Reliability Council Of Texas Inc., which operates most of Texas' grid, on Feb. 16 said that between 2 million and 3 million people were still without power as 15 GW of demand went unmet amid a historic cold snap that paralyzed generation equipment and caused widespread blackouts. (Almost 3.3 million customers were still without power as of late Tuesday night, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks blackouts nationwide.)
On the supply side, roughly 45 GW of generation was offline.
"That number hasn't progressed as much as we would have liked it to," Dan Woodfin, senior director of systems operations for ERCOT, told reporters during the press call.
ERCOT in November projected winter peak demand across its system of 57.6 GW, and said that 82.5 GW of generation capacity would be available to meet it.
Prices on Feb. 16 reached the $9,000/MWh cap after the Texas Public Utilities Commission directed ERCOT to put in place pricing measures that incentivize generators to connect to the grid.
Officials said they are trying to prevent a "cascading blackout." They are doing so through controlled outages to keep the grid in balance as generation is added to the system. If the frequency on the grid, a function of the balanced of the system, varies too widely, generation equipment could be damaged for months, Woodfin said.
"Now you're further out of balance, and the other generation may trip offline," he said. "And at that point, you kind of have to ... start the grid back up from zero."
As of Tuesday evening, Feb. 16, all 254 counties in Texas were under a winter storm warning, with more snow forecast.
Preventing the worst
Bill Magness, ERCOT's president and CEO, said, "These controlled outages have been extremely difficult."
"Of course, it's lasted longer than anybody wanted to last, but I just want to make the distinction because what we're protecting against is worse," he said, referring to cascading blackouts. "And what we're trying to do to resolve it is extremely difficult for people in Texas and we're working as hard and as fast as we can to get them back where they were last week, with a functioning grid that operates effectively to serve the needs of Texans in every season."
More controlled outages are possible as officials try to keep the grid in balance, and officials did not provide a timeline for when Texas would return to normal.
Officials said about 16 GW of the 45 GW that were offline were renewable resources. They went offline mainly because of icing on wind turbines in West Texas. Slightly under 30 GW of thermal resources — including coal, nuclear and gas — were offline as weather damaged equipment and choked the natural gas supply chain.
Officials saw some success and setbacks during the day. While 4,000 MW of generation came online, the grid lost additional generation. Much of the generation remained offline, said Woodfin, "primarily due to issues on the natural gas system" including "getting the gas from the frozen wellhead[s] through the pipe to the generators."
Woodfin also noted that of the 16 GW of renewable generation counted in its calculations, the grid is not actually losing that amount of renewable capacity. That is because, during typical peak conditions, variable wind and solar generation "is only counted upon in some of our capacity calculations for serving about 30% of that installed capacity." ERCOT counts thermal generation "megawatt per megawatt" he said.
Even as ERCOT officials worked to restore power, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed a legislative investigation of the grid operator, calling the power shortfalls "unacceptable."
Officials said it was the fourth time in ERCOT's history that it has had to shed load. The most load previously shed by ERCOT came in a 2011 winter cold snap that also froze natural gas plant equipment, when 4,000 MW went offline. Officials said they learned lessons about weatherization from 2011 — but generators still face no penalties for failing to protect equipment from extreme weather, other than financial losses from being offline.
