| Austin American-Statesman
Austin water cut: the director updates the city on the restoration of the service
Austin water director Greg Meszaros gives an update on water outages on February 18, 2021. A city-wide water boil notice was issued on February 17
Austin American-Statesman
More than 90% of Austin Energy’s customers had energy on Thursday afternoon, a heated development in the city’s continuing struggle against the winter storm – a struggle that now changes to bring water and food to people without access to needs.
A total of 40,969 Austin Energy customers were still without power at 2:00 pm on Thursday, compared to 220,000 earlier in the week – the peak when less than 60% of the city had power.
“Our teams, our teams, are not going to stop until all customers have energy,” said Jacqueline Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy, on Thursday.
Sargent said he could not say when the power will be back for everyone. “I would like to bring everyone back online as easy as pressing a button or pressing a button, but it is not,” she said.
Progress on restoring electricity began overnight, when the state’s grid – operated by the Texas Electric Reliability Council – allowed transmission owners like Austin Energy to bring back any cargo they had previously discarded. Austin shut down all available circuits earlier in the week, except for those that provided critical infrastructure like hospitals and emergency response stations.
The energy-dispensing directive was sent across the state by ERCOT, due to 185 or more plants – using gas to wind power – faltering or failing completely amid freezing temperatures earlier this week.
“We are on the verge of restoring the load, allowing the transmission owners to bring back any cargo they can relate to this load reduction event,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT.
However, there was one caveat: “Some level” of rotating outages may be needed in the next few days to keep the network stable, said Woodfin.
There were 417,000 outages across the state on Thursday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages across the country.
As of 7 am on Thursday, about 81,000 Austin Energy customers were without power. Seven hours later, that number was halved.
It is unclear when all customers will have power and how many of them have been affected not only by the ERCOT’s forced blackout, but also because of the damage caused by ice storms on the power lines.
The areas with the highest number of active outages – with more than 4,000 each – were CEP 78747 in Southeast Austin and CEP 78746 in West Lake Hills.
Austin Energy said it has prioritized restoring power to customers in areas that have been without it the longest. A Twitter user from the Jollyville area in northwest Austin said he had been without power for nearly 80 hours before being restored Thursday morning.
Austin Energy is the city’s leading electricity company, serving more than 512,000 customers, not including their dependents and pets.
Crews who responded to interruptions did so under sometimes hostile conditions, being harassed and hit with snowballs by disgruntled customers.
“We are not like that,” Mayor Steve Adler said on Wednesday.