More than half of the power plants driven offline during the deep freeze in Texas in February were due to the weather, underscoring that many of the state’s facilities were not prepared to withstand extreme cold.
At the peak of the power crisis, which put millions of Texans in the dark for nearly a week, 51,173 megawatts of electricity were offline, with 54% of those outages due directly to the cold, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, said in a preliminary report released Tuesday.
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ERCOT also found that equipment failures unrelated to the weather and fuel limitations contributed to outages. Fuel limitations were likely driven by declining oil and gas production due to frozen wells and competing gas demand for heating.
ERCOT also noted 15% of the outages existed before the freeze conditions began, including previously planned shutdowns or some seasonally mothballed facilities.
The preliminary data from ERCOT reiterates that many of Texas’s power plants failed because they weren’t mechanically prepared to handle freezing temperatures like power equipment in the Northeast and the Midwest is.
Federal regulators had encouraged Texas facilities to weatherize after a cold-weather event in 2011 that also led to rolling blackouts, though on a smaller scale, but Texas regulators declined to mandate the changes then. In the aftermath of the February crisis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called on the legislature to mandate winterization of the state’s facilities.
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ERCOT said it will provide a more comprehensive report on facility outages and their causes by the end of August. The grid operator also noted it cannot disclose the causes of specific facility outages because it is confidential information.
