Texas was dangerously close to a long-term outage during last week's severe winter storm, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said Wednesday.
According to documents released during an ERCOT emergency meeting on Wednesday, the Texas grid was under significantly more stress than previously thought.
In the most dangerous part of the night on Feb. 14 when the storm came to the state, grid operators were four minutes and 37 seconds away from a large-scale grid "trip," which would have led to automatic shutdowns of certain circuits.
If that had happened, millions of Texas customers would have had a long-term outage as technicians would have to do a "black start" of generation facilities. That could have taken weeks, leaving Texans in the dark.
The documents showed that half of the state's power generation capability was knocked offline due to the extreme cold at the peak.
Significant power generation was offline for more than 48 hours before power facilities could begin powering back up, according to ERCOT data. The majority of the power that went offline was natural gas facilities, the council said.
As of Wednesday, six board members of the ERCOT are resigning. ERCOT is the agency tasked with managing most of the Texas power grid which is largely isolated from the rest of the country's power grid.
Last week, a severe winter storm brought massive blackouts to the southern U.S. state. So far, dozens of deaths have been reported due to the extreme weather.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement on the resignation of the Electric Reliability Council Of Texas (ERCOT) board members, including the chairman and vice-chairman: “When Texans were in desperate need of electricity, ERCOT failed to do its job and Texans were left shivering in their homes without power. ERCOT leadership made assurances that Texas’ power infrastructure was prepared for the winter storm, but those assurances proved to be devastatingly false.
"The lack of preparedness and transparency at ERCOT is unacceptable, and I welcome these resignations. The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated.” ■