The week
Parts of Texas that are not part of the ERCOT grid seem to have withstood the freeze with few interruptions
Texas is nearing the end of what Governor Greg Abbott (R) called “a cold front that occurs once every 120 years”, but that doesn’t entirely explain why more than a million households still lacked electricity on the farm Monday, after three full days of sub-zero temperatures. Many places in the world maintain their energy in the prolonged arctic climate, as do parts of Texas. These Texas borders, including El Paso, “are mainly in areas outside those supported by ERCOT, the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which manages the power grid for 90 percent of the state and operates separately from federal supervision and regulation,” KHOU 11 Houston reported Wednesday night. After the 2011 winter freeze, El Paso Electric, on the Western Interconnect network, spent heavily to “prepare our equipment and facilities for the winter so that they could withstand a minus 10 degree climate for a sustained period,” Eddie Gutierrez , spokesman for El Paso Electric, said KHOU. So this year, “we had about three thousand people who were out during this period, a thousand of them had interruptions that lasted less than five minutes.” Across Texas, near the Louisiana border, the city of Beaumont also appears to have weathered the storm without major interruptions. Entergy, which supplies power to Beaumont on the Eastern Interconnect network, told KHOU that it had also prepared its infrastructure for the winter after the 2011 storm. The conditioning of power generation and extraction equipment is voluntary in Texas, although the state legislature probably revisit that strategy when you dissect ERCOT this year. More stories from theweek.comTrump come out of Texas’ hiding place back to Fox News’s comments on Green New Deal, says gas, coal failed in the Texas freeze. Malia Obama is supposed to help write Donald Glover’s new TV series