Abbott warns of icy roads — but not the grid

Gov. Greg Abbott is urging Texans to remain vigilant this week as a cold front sweeps the state, but he remains confident that the lights will stay on during the winter weather.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm watch for North, Central and Northeast Texas. The cold weather is expected to hit Wednesday, when Texans can expect below-freezing temperatures, ice accumulation and possible sleet or snow.

Abbott and other state officials warned that icy roadways will likely be the most dangerous obstacle this week. They are urging Texans to use drivetexas.org to check road conditions before heading out — or, if possible, to avoid driving all together.

“If you don’t have to be out there … don’t be out there,” said Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. “There’s no one skilled enough to drive an automobile at highway speed in icy conditions, period. The last thing we need is to lose life on the roadways.”

The Texas Department of Transportation is already pre-treating roads and calling in an additional 4,000 workers to respond to unsafe conditions, officials said.

Meanwhile, Abbott pledged that the cold weather won’t prompt a repeat of last year’s deadly freeze, when millions of Texans were left without power for days in subfreezing temperatures. More than 240 people died, mostly from hypothermia.

“What we will work and strive to achieve — and what we’re prepared to achieve — is that the power’s going to stay on across the entire state,” he said.

Abbott has promised repeatedly that the lights will stay on this winter, though he acknowledged Tuesday that “no one can guarantee that there won’t be a ‘load shed’ event.” Load shedding refers to planned blackouts, used to prevent a total grid collapse in a power shortfall.

Abbott’s team partially walked back the comment Tuesday afternoon in the wake of intense backlash after the remark went viral on Twitter. Nan Tolson, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Abbott was actually referring to “a tool in ERCOT’s toolbox to reduce the demand for electricity so that there will not be any blackouts.”

“This is a tool that has larger industrial electricity users who choose to participate in the program reduce their demand for electricity and has no impact on commercial or residential customers,” she said.

Brad Jones, the interim president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the cold front is expected to bring record demand for electricity — but the agency is planning for an excess of 15,000 megawatts of available generation during peak demand. Officials anticipate that will come Friday morning.

“We’ve been working for the last year to make sure that this grid is more reliable than it ever has been in the past, and it is,” Jones said. “We’ve taken a number of actions to make sure that our generators are ready, that our transmission system is ready, and they have responded. … We are ready for this storm. We’ll be prepared for this.”

The Legislature approved several grid reforms last year in response to the 2021 freeze, mandating new emergency alerts and weatherization for power plants, among other changes.

But Abbott also warned that Texans could experience power outages this week for reasons entirely unrelated to a grid failure.

“It could be either ice on power lines that would cause a power line to go down, or it could be ice on trees that causes a tree to fall on power lines and cause the power line to go down,” the governor said. “That doesn’t mean that there are challenges with the power grid in the state of Texas. It means that for a short period of time, a particular neighborhood may be without power.” cayla.harris@express-news.net