Texas grid survives milder cold blast

The Texas power grid and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas passed a closely scrutinized cold-weather test as the grid withstood this week’s winter storm, but one that critics say didn’t measure up to the damaging freeze of 2021.

One reason could be better planning: ERCOT, the state’s power grid manager, lined up more power and earlier than it did before the storm that killed hundreds during days of bitter cold in February 2021. Another possible reason lights stayed: the weather. Unlike last year, with multiple days of temperatures in the teens, this week’s storm was milder — with lows in the 20s, reducing electricity demand to levels short of early forecasts.

At a news conference Friday morning, Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas’ electricity demand had peaked hours earlier at 69,000 megawatts, according to ERCOT projections, well below the 86,000 megawatts the governor said was available during the storm, and shy of the 75,000 megawatts of demand projected by state officials earlier this week. One megawatt is enough to power about 200 homes on a hot summer day.

“As I said yesterday, and I can say again today, the Texas electric grid is more reliable and more resilient than it’s ever been,” Abbott said.

Still, Texas’ gas system didn’t get through the cold snap unscathed.

Kinder Morgan said Thursday morning that its El Paso Pipeline was operating at reduced pressure because wells in the Permian Basin had frozen.

And some power companies burned fuel oil at their natural gas-fired plants — a fairly unusual occurrence in gas-rich Texas. One of the state’s largest power companies, Dallas-based Vistra Corp., turned to fuel oil at four of its natural gas plants after being unable to come to terms with pipeline giant Energy Transfer for natural gas delivery.

‘Absolutely not a stress test’

Some experts did not view this winter storm or the lack of outages as a testament to the grid’s stability.

“This was absolutely not a stress test of the Texas grid,” said Alison Silverstein, an Austin-based energy consultant who worked for the Public Utility Commission of Texas from 1995 to 2001 and with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2001 to 2004. “It’s great the grid ‘survived’ this storm, but gosh it should have, and had it not I’d be pretty darn worried.”

Silverstein pointed to the temperatures, which were warmer than during the 2021 storm. The low in Houston on Friday morning, for example, reached 26 degrees, while the lowest temperature during last year’s was 13 degrees. Temperatures were at 32 or below this week for 18 straight hours, while last year Houston-area residents endured 44 straight hours of temperatures at freezing or lower.

Facing scrutiny in the wake of last year’s deadly freeze, however, ERCOT took no chances. It brought online far more power earlier than it did in February 2021. At times on Thursday, there were more than 84,000 megawatts of available power online — about equal to the power that could have been generated last year before the cold knocked it offline. Often the supply of electricity in recent days exceeded demand by more than 22,000 megawatts.

The number of power generation facilities that experienced issues this year won’t be known until ERCOT releases more data about the grid’s performance next week.

Some customers did lose power during the recent storm. About 71,000 homes were without electricity on Thursday, but those outages were likely caused by trees or branches falling on power lines or ice bringing down lines.

Political fodder

In El Paso, meanwhile, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Be-to O’Rourke embarked on what he said would be a 12-day “Keeping the Lights On” tour of the state, designed to draw attention to Abbott’s handling of the the February 2021 power grid failure. At the first stop of his tour, O’Rourke — who has made the power grid a central focus of his campaign — told reporters he did not view this week’s storm as a legitimate measure of the grid’s reliability.

“We are so grateful that yesterday was relatively mild when compared to last February, and we didn’t have the kind of outages that so many people feared,” O’Rourke said. “But there’s a reason that you are seeing record sales of power generators … across the state of Texas. There’s a reason that so many people had a traumatic reaction to seeing the weather reports that the temperature was going to plunge across the state of Texas, because it reminded them of what they went through.”

In any case, the grid’s performance this week likely helped Abbott avoid major political blow-back. A poll released Thursday by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston found that 49 percent of Texans would hold Abbott responsible — trailing only ERCOT, at 70 percent — if Texas were to experience power outages in line with those of February 2021.

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report. shelby.webb@chron.com