More fallout from the Artic Blast on the Texas Electric Grid

[Killer]

Texas PUC Chairwoman Resigns
The Wall Street Journal (3/1, Blunt) reports Texas Public Utility Commission Chairwoman DeAnn Walker resigned Monday amid bipartisan calls for her resignation in response to the Texas electricity crisis. The Corpus Christi (TX) Caller-Times (3/1, Moritz) reports that in her resignation letter, Walker “said responsibility for the grid failure that left more than 4 million Texans without electricity, many for several consecutive days, falls on many shoulders, including” the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. In her letter, Walker wrote, “I testified last Thursday in the Senate and House and accepted my role in the situation. ... I believe others should come forward in dignity and courage and acknowledge how their actions or inactions contributed to the situation.” She “specifically mentioned natural gas companies, the Texas Railroad Commission, ERCOT, electricity providers and the Texas Legislature as bearing some of the responsibility for the power failure.”

Largest Electricity Co-Op In Texas Files For Bankruptcy
The Wall Street Journal (3/1, Biswas, Gladstone) reports Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Inc., which is the largest electric cooperative in Texas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday in order to cope with the costs it incurred during the recent cold snap. The Washington Times (3/1, Chapman, Koenig) reports Brazos “said Monday that it was a ‘financially robust, stable company’ before the Arctic freeze that hit Texas between Feb. 13 and Feb. 19.” The company “said it received excessively high invoices from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas...for collateral and the cost of electric service.” Brazos “decided that it won’t pass on the ERCOT costs to its members or the consumers, so it filed for Chapter 11 protection, which indicates that the company plans to reorganize its debts rather than liquidate.” In a statement, Brazos Executive Vice President Clifton Karnei said, “Let me emphasize that this action by Brazos Electric was necessary to protect its member cooperatives and their more than 1.5 million retail members from unaffordable electric bills as we continue to provide electric service throughout the court-supervised process.”

Reuters (3/1, McWilliams) reports ERCOT “acknowledged Brazos filing and expects to disclose additional payment defaults by grid users, a spokeswoman said.” The Financial Times (3/1, Jacobs, Meyer) and Natural Gas Intelligence (3/1, Baker) provide additional coverage.


Austin Energy Says It Cannot Revel Which Facilities Were Protected From Power Outages
The Austin (TX) American Statesman (3/1, Autullo) reports Austin Energy is declining to release the details of which facilities are considered critical and were protected from power outages during last month’s blackouts. On numerous occasions “in the past two weeks, the American-Statesman made requests to Austin Energy for a map of facilities it considers critical load.” Austin Energy spokeswoman Calily Bien said Wednesday that the company is “not able to provide that information since it’s protected critical infrastructure information.” In a “follow-up message, Bien confirmed the reason for withholding the information was related to security, presumably because the utility believes releasing it would open the city up to a potential cybersecurity attack or some other risk.”

I hope we do not forget this and give our politicians a pass. We have got to make sure they get this fixed!!! Not having reliable power will ruin Texas!!

[Burnadell]

Danny, this whole fuster cluck is so confusing. Where did Oncor fit into this puzzle? Were they colose to a shutdown?

[tradtiger]

Regarding Austin Energy rejecting requests to know exactly what was considered critical infrastructure: I'm, frankly, glad they are withholding that for "cybersecurity" reasons. Not too hard to figure out, though, that being on the same grid as a major hospital was a pretty good spot, for instance. (That may have been my case -- fortunate enough to be about 10 blocks from such a facility and never lost power.)

[S-3 Ranch]

Regarding Austin Energy rejecting requests to know exactly what was considered critical infrastructure: I'm, frankly, glad they are withholding that for "cybersecurity" reasons. Not too hard to figure out, though, that being on the same grid as a major hospital was a pretty good spot, for instance. (That may have been my case -- fortunate enough to be about 10 blocks from such a facility and never lost power.)

My wife’s house is close to a hospital, and she never lost power
Now getting propane delivery was a different matter

[CentralTXHunter]

Danny, this whole fuster cluck is so confusing. Where did Oncor fit into this puzzle? Were they colose to a shutdown?

Oncor is only responsible for the transmission and distribution of utilities. They have no factor in generation. They did experience an extreme number of outages though. Linemen were working ‘round the clock from the initial storm on Thursday for about 2 weeks. As far as a shutdown, the state was perilously close to that. As ERCOT called for emergency measures and load shedding occurred, plants were also tripping offline for numerous reasons. Frequency needs to be maintained at 60 hertz. It is rather intolerant of deviation. We got down to 59.3 hertz for 4 1/2 minutes. ERCOT called for additional load shedding and that coupled with some generation being restored brought us back up. Had this gone on for 9 minutes, it would have caused a cascading effect of plants tripping offline and the whole grid goes down. Then a “black start” would have been initiated and that could have taken weeks to months depending on who you hear from. It was dang near a catastrophic event.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is consumer responsibility in all this. Retail companies were emailing and texting consumers to please conserve load and reduce consumption. Most didn’t heed this at all which lead to our record demand spike. Then, when ERCOT was forced to shed load in what would have been normally “rolling” blackouts, they didn’t have the generation to handle the load and bring these folks back. We were essentially running critical infrastructure only. If your home was tied to one of those facilities, then you maintained power. Once we had enough generation to end forced outages and restore people’s power, linemen were having a difficult time restoring. Most homes had all their breakers on and that much instant load demand wasn’t able to be handled by cold lines. This forced linemen to isolate areas and slowly bring power up by street by street instead of turning on an entire subdivision at once. This prolonged the outages for many people into Saturday. If people would learn to shut off all breakers except maybe a single breaker for the living room and keep 1 light on so they’d know when power was restored, the linemen would have had an easier job restoring power. There are plenty of places to poke fingers and there’s a lot that needs to be corrected, but nobody wants to talk about individual responsibility. I don’t think this could have been avoided with the weather and current infrastructure in place, but I do think it would have been less impactful if people would have been less selfish with their consumption.


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[Burnadell]

Oncor is only responsible for the transmission and distribution of utilities. They have no factor in generation. They did experience an extreme number of outages though. Linemen were working ‘round the clock from the initial storm on Thursday for about 2 weeks. As far as a shutdown, the state was perilously close to that. As ERCOT called for emergency measures and load shedding occurred, plants were also tripping offline for numerous reasons. Frequency needs to be maintained at 60 hertz. It is rather intolerant of deviation. We got down to 59.3 hertz for 4 1/2 minutes. ERCOT called for additional load shedding and that coupled with some generation being restored brought us back up. Had this gone on for 9 minutes, it would have caused a cascading effect of plants tripping offline and the whole grid goes down. Then a “black start” would have been initiated and that could have taken weeks to months depending on who you hear from. It was dang near a catastrophic event.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is consumer responsibility in all this. Retail companies were emailing and texting consumers to please conserve load and reduce consumption. Most didn’t heed this at all which lead to our record demand spike. Then, when ERCOT was forced to shed load in what would have been normally “rolling” blackouts, they didn’t have the generation to handle the load and bring these folks back. We were essentially running critical infrastructure only. If your home was tied to one of those facilities, then you maintained power. Once we had enough generation to end forced outages and restore people’s power, linemen were having a difficult time restoring. Most homes had all their breakers on and that much instant load demand wasn’t able to be handled by cold lines. This forced linemen to isolate areas and slowly bring power up by street by street instead of turning on an entire subdivision at once. This prolonged the outages for many people into Saturday. If people would learn to shut off all breakers except maybe a single breaker for the living room and keep 1 light on so they’d know when power was restored, the linemen would have had an easier job restoring power. There are plenty of places to poke fingers and there’s a lot that needs to be corrected, but nobody wants to talk about individual responsibility. I don’t think this could have been avoided with the weather and current infrastructure in place, but I do think it would have been less impactful if people would have been less selfish with their consumption.


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Thanks for that informative reply! I learned some more helpful learnings!

Hopefully, the utilities will instruct us, the next time, to turn off those breakers, and hopefully, we will comply.

I take it you work for Oncor? I didn't realize they did not generate. Learned something else.

Now, go getthat broken down Ranger fixed!

[CentralTXHunter]

Thanks for that informative reply! I learned some more helpful learnings!

Hopefully, the utilities will instruct us, the next time, to turn off those breakers, and hopefully, we will comply.

I take it you work for Oncor? I didn't realize they did not generate. Learned something else.

Now, go getthat broken down Ranger fixed!

I don’t. I do commercial energy consulting. I just happen to live in Oncor territory and have several friends that work for Oncor.

I think they’ll try to educate the people, but I don’t know if you get much traction with that. There’s been some things discussed in the consulting world with incentivizing consumers, but there’s some massive changes that would have to take place for that to happen. One big thing is to utilize these smart meters that consumers paid for to their maximum capacity. Then the rep could push a message to consumers that says something like, “Energy prices have reached the cap of $9/kWh. If you conserve immediately, we’ll pay you $4/kWh for your reduction during this time.” With fully active smart meters, you could see, in real time, the reduction in load during the period, and calculate that paid incentive for the consumer. Unfortunately that’s probably the only method that would work. Money makes people react. Most people won’t inconvenience themselves for the sake of others. It’s a sad state of affairs really.

As far as the ranger goes... that’s no longer my problem, lol. Trevor has to get that bad boy fixed.


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[Big Lee]

My wife’s house is close to a hospital, and she never lost power
Now getting propane delivery was a different matter

How about your house?

[Neck]

Oncor is only responsible for the transmission and distribution of utilities. They have no factor in generation. They did experience an extreme number of outages though. Linemen were working ‘round the clock from the initial storm on Thursday for about 2 weeks. As far as a shutdown, the state was perilously close to that. As ERCOT called for emergency measures and load shedding occurred, plants were also tripping offline for numerous reasons. Frequency needs to be maintained at 60 hertz. It is rather intolerant of deviation. We got down to 59.3 hertz for 4 1/2 minutes. ERCOT called for additional load shedding and that coupled with some generation being restored brought us back up. Had this gone on for 9 minutes, it would have caused a cascading effect of plants tripping offline and the whole grid goes down. Then a “black start” would have been initiated and that could have taken weeks to months depending on who you hear from. It was dang near a catastrophic event.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is consumer responsibility in all this. Retail companies were emailing and texting consumers to please conserve load and reduce consumption. Most didn’t heed this at all which lead to our record demand spike. Then, when ERCOT was forced to shed load in what would have been normally “rolling” blackouts, they didn’t have the generation to handle the load and bring these folks back. We were essentially running critical infrastructure only. If your home was tied to one of those facilities, then you maintained power. Once we had enough generation to end forced outages and restore people’s power, linemen were having a difficult time restoring. Most homes had all their breakers on and that much instant load demand wasn’t able to be handled by cold lines. This forced linemen to isolate areas and slowly bring power up by street by street instead of turning on an entire subdivision at once. This prolonged the outages for many people into Saturday. If people would learn to shut off all breakers except maybe a single breaker for the living room and keep 1 light on so they’d know when power was restored, the linemen would have had an easier job restoring power. There are plenty of places to poke fingers and there’s a lot that needs to be corrected, but nobody wants to talk about individual responsibility. I don’t think this could have been avoided with the weather and current infrastructure in place, but I do think it would have been less impactful if people would have been less selfish with their consumption.


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Thank you taking the time to post this. Very informative.

[Mike D]

Oncor is only responsible for the transmission and distribution of utilities. They have no factor in generation. They did experience an extreme number of outages though. Linemen were working ‘round the clock from the initial storm on Thursday for about 2 weeks. As far as a shutdown, the state was perilously close to that. As ERCOT called for emergency measures and load shedding occurred, plants were also tripping offline for numerous reasons. Frequency needs to be maintained at 60 hertz. It is rather intolerant of deviation. We got down to 59.3 hertz for 4 1/2 minutes. ERCOT called for additional load shedding and that coupled with some generation being restored brought us back up. Had this gone on for 9 minutes, it would have caused a cascading effect of plants tripping offline and the whole grid goes down. Then a “black start” would have been initiated and that could have taken weeks to months depending on who you hear from. It was dang near a catastrophic event.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is consumer responsibility in all this. Retail companies were emailing and texting consumers to please conserve load and reduce consumption. Most didn’t heed this at all which lead to our record demand spike. Then, when ERCOT was forced to shed load in what would have been normally “rolling” blackouts, they didn’t have the generation to handle the load and bring these folks back. We were essentially running critical infrastructure only. If your home was tied to one of those facilities, then you maintained power. Once we had enough generation to end forced outages and restore people’s power, linemen were having a difficult time restoring. Most homes had all their breakers on and that much instant load demand wasn’t able to be handled by cold lines. This forced linemen to isolate areas and slowly bring power up by street by street instead of turning on an entire subdivision at once. This prolonged the outages for many people into Saturday. If people would learn to shut off all breakers except maybe a single breaker for the living room and keep 1 light on so they’d know when power was restored, the linemen would have had an easier job restoring power. There are plenty of places to poke fingers and there’s a lot that needs to be corrected, but nobody wants to talk about individual responsibility. I don’t think this could have been avoided with the weather and current infrastructure in place, but I do think it would have been less impactful if people would have been less selfish with their consumption.


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Well written and informative explanation.

Well done and thank you.


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[Hollywood]

All the more reason to never trust the system again, I will have an alternative system ready to go.
I had a generator ready to go but not set up to run my well pump. This was bad, but a very expensive learning experience.
We have put people in positions throughout our nation that have no clue of what they are doing. Highly educated individuals with no common sense or work ethics.
Time to eake up.

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[Killer]

Danny, this whole fuster cluck is so confusing. Where did Oncor fit into this puzzle? Were they colose to a shutdown?

Lots of problems getting everything back on after the power being out for so long in some places. The power had been out so long once it comes back on it sometimes takes hours for the heaters to cycle in all the neighborhoods and the load to level out.

Centraltxhunter explained it better than I could. He was spot on.