The board of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) held its first meeting since the events that resulted in power outages that left more than 4 million Texans in the dark last week. The emergency board meeting also came one day after 5 of the 15 members announced their resignations, effective at the end of today’s meeting.
ERCOT CEO Bill Magness delivered his review of the events that forced the non-profit organization that oversees the State’s power grid to order rolling and controlled power outages in order to prevent its total collapse. Magness said they were 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from a total blackout of the entire system. “We may still be here today talking about when is the power going to come back on if we had let the system get in to that condition.,” said Magness. He added that a “Blackstart” restart of the State’s energy grid could have taken weeks to bring power back online for the entire grid.
Magness delivered a timeline of events beginning with a weather advisory issued by ERCOT to the State’s energy providers on Monday February 8th, days in advance of the severe winter storms. “We were telling the entities that we communicate with, the generators and the transmission owners, that we expected extreme cold weather,” Magness told board members. “We posted that on our public website. When we issue those operating condition notices we be sure to share them with the Public Utility Commission of what we’re seeing and what we’re telling the marketplace.”
Board member Jacqueline A. Sargent, General Manager of Austin Energy questioned why Mr. Magness didn’t spend more time addressing the issue of pending weather at their February 9th board meeting. “The concerns in regards to the upcoming weather event should have been communicated more specifically,” said Sargent. “I feel, as a board member very frustrated that that did not occur.” Magness apologized saying that he could have done a better job emphasizing what was coming in more depth with the board.
Magness admitted that they could have handled other communications better as well. One moment came after they had shifted into Energy Emergency Alert level 3 at 1:20 AM on Monday morning as the storm was raging throughout the State. “We instituted rotating outages over 10K megawatts…so a very large amount to institute in the scheme of things.” Magness said it eventually became evident that the energy providers were not able to handle such a large loadshed of megawatts in a rotating outage fashion. This meant that the projected outages of 10 to 45 minutes could actually take days in many cases. “I think we have to look back and reflect and do better in the way we were communicating as we went out of the middle of the night Sunday and into the day Monday, and began to realize with our interactions with the transmission owners that they were not going to able to rotate these in a lot of places.”
Magness also added that the State has not established any mandatory standards for weatherizing the energy generators to ensure they wouldn’t fail during extreme summer and winter conditions. “Generation owners and operators are not required to implement a minimum weatherization standard, or perform exhaustive reviews every winter of vulnerability.”
Magness’s review of events was a dry-run for State Senate and House hearings that