ERCOT Give Greenlight for the Majority of Power to be Restored

AUSTIN (WBAP/KLIF News) – As millions of Texans sit in their homes without electricity amid below freezing temperatures, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has given the green light for the majority of power to be restored.

ERCOT had asked providers to begin controlled, or rolling, outages this week to ease pressure on the grid amid unprecedented demand.

On Thursday, ERCOT issued a statement that stressed that although their allowing the rolling outages to cease energy emergency conditions to remain.

“We’re to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event,” said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. “We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on.”

Now, some Texans will still remain without power despite ERCOT’s order:

Those who live in areas that have outages due to ice storm damage on the distribution system
Those who live in areas that were taken out of service due to the energy emergency load shad that need to be restored manually
Large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help during this energy emergency

ERCOT said while there is no additional load shed right now, a little over 40,000 MW of generation remains on forced outage due to this winter weather event.

Of that, 23,500 MW is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar.

The council added that the rotating outages may not be over completely.

“It is possible that one some level of rotating outages may be needed over the next couple of days to keep the grid stable,” said the statement.

In the wake of criticism over its handling of the power situation amid the winter storm, ERCOT will hold a meeting February 24th at 10 a.m. to address critical actions taken and power outages.

It will be broadcast live. Click here to view the meeting.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Oncor customers in Texas remained without power Thursday morning.

As of 9:23 a.m. CST, there were 4,538 outages affecting 150,397 residents. Oncor provides power to much of North Texas.