Politics
Texas power grid was just four and a half MINUTES away from ‘total collapse’ during Winter Storm Uri
THE Texas power grid was a mere four minutes and 37 seconds away from collapsing for a week or longer during the recent devastating winter storm.
It would have meant “total collapse” and a statewide blackout, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) officials revealed at an emergency board meeting on Wednesday.
ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said the Texas blackouts during the winter storm were ‘devastating’[/caption]
“This was a devastating event,” ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said in his opening statement, according to KHOU 11.
“Power is essential to civilization.”
ERCOT officials were able to prevent the statewide blackout by implementing controlled outages.
Winter Storm Uri last week took 365 generators offline, which was almost double the outages that the Lone Star State experienced in its last massive winter storm back in 2011.
If the power grid had gone out, Texans would have been without power for at least a week[/caption]
ERCOT officials said that six of the 13 units it contracted to help in the event of blackouts experienced outages of their own last week.
Several measures were taken to prepare for the winter storms.
ERCOT canceled transmission maintenance outages and waived coronavirus staffing restrictions to bring in more workers to help.
In addition, the Department of Energy let power generators temporarily off the hook for following some environmental regulations.
Winter Storm Uri brought freezing temperatures and power outages to Texas[/caption]
News of the close call came a day after ERCOT announced that four board members would resign on Wednesday after the emergency board meeting.
A fifth board member resigned shortly after, and a sixth board member’s resignation was disclosed during the meeting.
A resignation letter shared by four board members stated that they noticed concerns about board members living outside of Texas.
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“To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning from the board effective after our urgent board teleconference meeting adjourns on Wednesday, February 24, 2021,” the letter read.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement that the resignations were the right course of action as the state probes the energy crisis.
“The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated,” Abbott stated.
