The Texas power grid was “four minutes and 37 seconds from total collapse” during the recent historic winter storm – meaning the state could have been in the dark for weeks, according to a report.
The surprising revelation was made during an emergency meeting on Wednesday by the Texas Electric Reliability Council, a cooperative responsible for 90 percent of the state’s electricity, KHOU reported.
“This was a devastating event,” said ERCOT CEO Bill Magness in his opening statements at the board meeting. “Power is essential to civilization.”
The authorities said ERCOT lost 48.6 percent of power generation during the height of the outages – and if the outage had continued, the remaining generators would have started to shut down, leading to a possible system failure that would have required called “black start. “
Magness doubled down on his claim that continuous interruptions were necessary to prevent such a blackout in Texas, which is the only state to operate its own autonomous power grid.
“If there is a blackout of the system, it will be down for an indefinite period and it will be extremely difficult to bring it back,” he said, according to CBS Austin.
“We may still be talking about when the power will come back if we let the system reach that condition,” added Magness.
During the storm, 356 generators were shut down, nearly doubling what Texas experienced during its last major winter storm in 2011, KHOU reported.
ERCOT officials said on Wednesday that it has 13 units it hired in the event of a blackout, but six of them suffered interruptions last week.
During the meeting, employees discussed some of the measures that ERCOT took to prepare for the climate, including canceling outages for maintenance of the transmission and exemption from COVID-19 restrictions on bringing in additional support workers, among other measures.
They also said that an order from the Department of Energy allowed power generators to disregard some environmental standards, which was very helpful.
ERCOT officials said the natural gas plants were the ones that failed the most during the crisis, according to CBS Austin. Wind generators also had problems, but sometimes they performed better.
“There were a lot of problems with the gas supply during this event,” said Magness. “What I like to emphasize here is that the storm affected all types of generation”.
He added: “We are sorry that this event took too long to resolve. What ERCOT wants to do today, what ERCOT wants to do at tomorrow’s legislative hearings and going forward is to provide explanations, not excuses. “
On Tuesday, ERCOT announced in a statement to the Texas Public Utility Commission that four of its board members will resign on Wednesday.
A fifth member presented his resignation separately and the resignation of a sixth member was announced at Wednesday’s meeting.
Governor Greg Abbott sent a statement saying he welcomed the resignations of members, who live outside the state.
“The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and reveal the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that last week’s disastrous events never repeat,” says Abbott’s statement in part.