The power grid in Texas was ‘four minutes and 37 seconds away from a total collapse’ during the recent historic winter storm, which means the state could have been left in the dark for weeks, according to a report.
The amazing revelation was made during an emergency meeting Wednesday of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, a cooperative that accounts for 90 percent of the state’s electricity, KHOU reported.
“It was a devastating event,” ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said in his opening remarks at the board meeting. “Power is essential to civilization.”
Officials said ERCOT lost 48.6 percent of the power generation during the peak of the outages – and if the immersion continued, the remaining generators would have started to stumble offline, leading to a possible system crash. ‘ would require a so-called ‘black start’. ”
Magness doubles down on his claim that the outages were necessary to avoid such an eclipse in Texas, which is the only state that has its own stand-alone electricity network.
“If we obscure the system, the system is available indefinitely and it’s extremely difficult to bring it back,” he told CBS Austin.
“We can still talk about when the power will go on again if we let the system get into that state,” Magness added.
During the storm, 356 generators were knocked off offline, nearly doubling what Texas experienced during its last major winter storm in 2011, reports KHOU.
ERCOT officials said Wednesday they have 13 units they contracted with in the event of an eclipse, but six of those broke down last week.
During the meeting, officials discussed some of the measures taken by ERCOT to prepare for the weather, including the cancellation of interruptions to transmission maintenance and waiver of COVID-19 restrictions to bring in additional support workers, under other.
They also said that a directive from the Department of Energy allows generators to disregard certain environmental standards, which is very helpful.
According to CBS Austin, ERCOT officials said natural gas plants failed the most during the crisis. Wind turbines also had problems, but sometimes overperformed.
“There were a lot of issues around gas supply during this event,” Magness said. “What I want to emphasize here is the storm that is affecting every generation.”
He added: “We regret that it took time to resolve. What ERCOT wants to do today, what ERCOT wants to do tomorrow and in the future during the legislative hearings, are explanations, not excuses. ”
ERCOT announced Tuesday in a notice to the Texas Public Utility Commission that four of its board members will effectively resign Wednesday.
A fifth member submitted his resignation separately and a sixth’s resignation was announced at Wednesday’s meeting.
Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a statement saying he welcomes the resignations of members, all of whom live outside the state.
“The state of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and discover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated,” Abbott’s statement read in part.