The entire state of Texas was under a winter storm warning Monday, with snow falling across the state single digit temperatures as far south as Austin and San Antonio. As Texans turned on their heaters Sunday night, the freezer shut down several power plants, prompting the Texas Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT) – which runs the state’s uniquely independent power grid – to order electricity outputs Monday at 1:25 p.m. than to risk a collapse of the entire network.
More than 2 million customers lost electricity on Monday morning and 4.2 million customers in Texas were without power on Monday night as temperatures reached record lows, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that tracks power outages nationwide. Utilities in Texas are warning households that they may only get power on Tuesday afternoon or evening, just before the prediction of a second storm. What went wrong?
First, Texas is not set for extreme cold. “The electricity network was designed to be very popular during the summer, when Texans turned on their air conditioning at home,” The Texas Tribune explain. “Some of the energy sources that power the net during the summer are offline during the winter.” Wholesale prices on the largely deregulated Texas market rose over the weekend, prompting generators to maximize their production, The Wall Street Journal reports. Then non-weathered wind turbines began to freeze and natural gas and coal plants stumbled offline.
“This recurrence, it’s really unprecedented,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of ERCOT. He points to the 1940s as the last time Texas experienced this combination of Arctic temperatures and cold winds. “Most of the plants that went offline during the evening and morning today were powered by coal, gas or nuclear power,” he added. About 40 percent of Texas’ electricity comes from natural gas plants, followed by wind turbines (23 percent), coal (18 percent) and nuclear power (11 percent), the Magazine reports, referring to ERCOT’s 2020 data.
With 30 gigawatts of power being beaten offline – enough to power nearly 6 million homes – the rolling power outages have stalled. The power outages were supposed to last less than an hour at each household, but “local utilities kept the neighborhoods with hospitals, fire stations and water treatment plants afloat,” the Magazine reports. “There was so little extra power that electricity networks could not turn the power outages under neighborhoods that did not have critical infrastructure, leaving some homes without power for more than 12 hours.”
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