WSJ -- In Texas, Winter Storm Forces Rolling Power Outages as Millions Are Without Electricity .............
Feb. 15, 2021
In Texas, Winter Storm Forces Rolling Power Outages as Millions Are Without Electricity
More than 150 million residents countrywide are under various weather warnings and advisories
By Katherine Blunt and Charles Passy
Millions of Texans were left without electricity Monday as a rare winter storm boosted demand and crimped supplies, demonstrating that California isn’t the only state with a power grid vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s electricity grid, began calling for rotating outages overnight on Sunday to avoid widespread blackouts that can occur when demand exceeds supply. But the severe power shortages forced companies to curtail power beyond short rolling blackouts, with many customers losing electricity for much of the day.
Ercot estimated that about 2 million homes were without power on Monday and cautioned that the outages would likely continue through Tuesday. By Monday evening, it said power had been restored to about 500,000.
The imbalance occurred as residents cranked their thermostats amid record-breaking lows in some areas of the state, causing electricity demand to surge amid a precipitous drop in generating capacity. The grid operator said it lost about 34,000 megawatts of supply as freezing temperatures forced natural-gas- and coal-fired power plants offline in quick succession. The weather also reduced natural-gas supplies to power plants and caused wind turbines in West Texas to freeze.
The supply crunch pushed oil and natural-gas prices to their highest levels in months, with West Texas Intermediate crude tracking to settle at about $60 a barrel for the first time since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The gains extended a recent rally reflecting optimism that a swift vaccine rollout would aid economic recovery and restore demand for fuels.
Wholesale power prices also surged, at times exceeding the market price cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour, according to Ercot data. Prices had hovered below $50 per megawatt hour before the winter storm.
On Monday morning, Ercot had directed the state’s electricity providers to cut demand on the system by about 16,500 megawatts, leaving customers in the dark for hours.
“We have to maintain the balance of supply and demand on the system to maintain the reliability of the system as a whole,” said Dan Woodfin, Ercot’s senior director of system operations. “If we don’t have more supply, the only thing we can do is start to reduce demand.”
President Biden declared a state of emergency in Texas, after receiving a request from Gov. Greg Abbott. The action authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate all disaster relief efforts. Mr. Abbott, a Republican, thanked Mr. Biden on Sunday for the quick action and said the declaration “will help our communities” respond to the severe weather.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, records were set for low temperatures on Sunday and Monday, when they were 9 degrees and 4 degrees, respectively, according to the local office of the National Weather Service. The service said it marked the first time the low temperature fell below 10 degrees in the area since 1996.
The harsh conditions extended beyond Texas, with more than 150 million Americans under various weather warnings and advisories because of the “unprecedented and expansive area of hazardous winter weather,” the National Weather Service said. The storm caused at least one death, when a 50-year-old man in Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish died after slipping on ice and hitting his head, according to the state’s Department of Health.
Heavy snow and freezing rain were advancing northeastward from the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys to the Northeast. Dangerously frigid wind chills were expected to remain in the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley through midweek, the service said.
The winter weather scrambled what has been the biggest travel weekend of the year so far. While passenger volumes are still less than half of pre-pandemic levels, more than one million people passed through U.S. airports on Thursday and again on Friday, heading into the Presidents Day holiday.
More than 3,400 flights within, into and out of the U.S. had been canceled Monday, according to FlightAware.com, a flight-tracking website. Dallas and Houston have been particularly hard hit, with hundreds of cancellations each day.
Texas utility officials told customers to brace for lengthy blackouts because they needed to cut huge amounts of power, preventing them from rotating outages among customers to keep service interruptions brief. Electricity providers avoid cutting power to circuits that serve critical customers such as hospitals and emergency service providers.
Jackie Sargent, general manager at Austin Energy, which serves the area surrounding the Texas capital, said the utility was only maintaining circuits serving neighborhoods with hospitals, water-treatment facilities and other critical infrastructure. It cut off others.
“There is no more energy we can shut off at this time so that we can bring these customers back on,” she said.
CenterPoint Energy Inc., which serves the Houston area, said Monday that customers who have lost power should expect to be without it for the remainder of the day.
It is rare for grid operators to resort to rolling blackouts to relieve system constraints. Ercot last called for such measures in February 2011, during a winter storm that caused several gas- and coal-fired power plants to trip offline. Those outages lasted for only about eight hours.
Ercot has nearly resorted to blackouts several times in recent years during extreme weather events, most recently in 2019 during a severe August heat wave that caused air-conditioning usage to skyrocket.
The California Independent System Operator, which operates California’s power grid, called for rolling blackouts last August for the first time in two decades as a severe heat wave swept the West, causing demand to surge into the evening hours after regional solar production declined. The extreme weather also reduced the state’s ability to import power and took out a natural gas plant.
California experienced outages in part because the state has moved quickly in recent years to reduce its reliance on natural gas in favor of solar and wind farms, which don’t produce power all the time and can’t fire up on demand. The outages in Texas show that gas- and coal-fueled power plants aren’t necessarily a safeguard against shortages.
Gas accounted for the majority of power generation in Texas in 2020, according to Ercot, followed by wind, coal and nuclear power.
Below-freezing temperatures were expected in parts of Texas through Tuesday, with windchill factors as low as 20 degrees below zero, the weather service said. Another storm is expected starting Tuesday night that could bring significant ice or snow accumulations over central and North Texas.
Texas residents said they aren’t accustomed to dealing with such brutal weather conditions and their concern is heightened by the fact many are without power.
Andrew George Cripps, a 52-year-old resident of Fort Worth, said early Monday afternoon the temperatures were already dipping into the mid-50s in his home and he was worried about the pipes possibly freezing. Plumbing systems throughout the South aren’t typically insulated as they are in other regions.
Mr. Cripps said he was disappointed that electricity companies couldn’t manage the situation better.
“The state blows its trumpet about being an energy capital of the world, and one little snowstorm comes along and, bam, everybody’s power has gone off,” he said.
Ben Guyton, 43, who runs a goat farm in Dripping Springs, a city outside of Austin, said his concern was more for his animals and business. No power means he can’t use machines to milk his 60 goats and must do so by hand. Without power for his well, he is forced to melt snow with a blowtorch to ensure his animals have water. “It’s a lot” to handle, he said.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price said she understood why many Texans were frustrated about the loss of power, but she also said they needed to recognize the reality of what caused the situation.
“We’ve never had the entire state hit by this kind of Arctic blast,” she said in an interview Monday afternoon. “You can’t prepare for this kind of [electricity] demand.”
Ms. Price said that her city was trying to help residents by opening up emergency warming centers. “We’ll open additional ones as need be,” she said.
Advocates for the homeless also are monitoring the situation, said Eric Samuels, chief executive of the Austin-based nonprofit Texas Homeless Network. He said the opening of warming centers is helping but noted that many homeless individuals avoid shelters or similar facilities. He is concerned many may not have the proper clothing and gear to withstand the conditions.
Texans are “not equipped to deal with this weather,” he said.
-- Russell Gold contributed to this article.
Write to Katherine Blunt at Katherine.Blunt@wsj.com and Charles Passy at cpassy@wsj.com
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