Officials from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) say they have made significant progress overnight in restoring customer power, although some outages still remain throughout the state.
ERCOT CEO Bill Magness told reporters on a media call Thursday that progress has been made in bringing more power generators back on line. "So we're really feeling like we're in a glide-path, we hope, where those customer restorations happen. If we do hit a bump and have some generation have to come back off, we may have to ask for outages. But if we do, we believe they'll be at the level where they could be rotating outages, not the larger numbers that we faced this week." The fear is that the expected sleet, snow and freezing temperatures still plaguing Texas could continue to force power generators back out of service, making it possible that some level of rotating outages may be needed over the next couple of days to keep the grid stable.
"We're to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event," said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. "We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on."
Customers that remain without power likely fall into one of these three categories:
- Areas out due to ice storm damage on the distribution system
- Areas that were taken out of service due to the energy emergency load shed that need to be restored manually (i.e., sending a crew to the location to reenergize the line)
- Large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help during this energy emergency
- Transmission owners are assessing how many customers are affected at this time.
ERCOT officials say while there is no additional load shed occurring at this time, a little over 40,000 MW of generation remains on forced outage due to this winter weather event. Of that, 23,500 MW is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar.
