(TEXAS TRIBUNE) – The Texas power grid was “seconds and minutes” from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials at the entity operating the grid said Thursday.
While millions of customers across the state begin to have their power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials from the Texas Electric Reliability Council, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worse situation Case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.
The quick decision that network operators took in the early hours of Monday morning to start what should have been a continuous blackout – but it lasted for millions of Texans for days – occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that large amounts of power supplies were falling from the grid.
As natural gas plants, utility-scale wind power and coal plants shut down due to the extreme cold brought on by the winter storm, the amount of energy supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state has fallen rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses increased heating and stayed indoors to avoid the weather.
“This needed to be resolved immediately,” said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. “It took seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was leaving the system. “
The network operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of energy distributed, said Magness, because if they had waited, “then what happens in the next minute may be that three more [power generation] the units go offline and you sink. “
Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted at that time, the state could have suffered blackouts that “could have been going on for months” and left Texas in an “indefinitely long” crisis.
The worst case scenario: the demand for energy overloads the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to explode, power lines to fall.
If the network had gone completely offline, physical damage to the power infrastructure caused by overloading the network could take months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of energy and renewable energy at Enverus, a utility company. Austin-based oil and gas software and information.
“As chaotic as it was, the entire grid could be blacked out,” she said. “ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it was not worse is because of the network operators.”
If that had happened, even with power generators recovering from the cold, ERCOT would not have been able to quickly reconnect them to the grid, Johnson said.
Network operators would have to slowly and carefully bring generators and customers back online, while taking care not to cause further damage to the network. It is a delicate process, explained Johnson, because each part of the puzzle – the generators that produce energy, the transmission lines that move the energy and the customers that use it – must be managed carefully.
“You have to constantly balance yourself,” she said. “Once a grid is deactivated, it is difficult to put it back online. If you attract a lot of customers, you will have another interruption. “
ERCOT officials have repeatedly said that the winter storm that swept the state caught energy generators off guard. The storm far exceeded what ERCOT designed in the fall to prepare for winter.
“The operators who took these measures to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made during the entire event,” said Magness.
Nine network operators are working at any time and make that kind of decision, said Leslie Sopko, an ERCOT spokesman.
“Ultimately, our operators are highly trained and have the authority to make decisions that protect the reliability of the electrical system,” she said in a statement.
ERCOT made “significant progress” during Wednesday night to restore customer power to many Texans, and the remaining power outages are likely due to damage from an ice storm in the distribution system. Some areas that have been taken down will also need to be restored manually, according to ERCOT.
ERCOT warned that emergency conditions remain and that “some level of rotary interruptions” may be needed in the coming days to keep the network stable.
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