Texans Breathe Sighs Of Relief As ERCOT Power Grid Passes Winter Test

It wasn’t last year’s Winter Storm Uri, but residents all over Texas are breathing sighs of relief anyway Saturday morning as they awake to the knowledge that their power grid came through its first real winter test in a year, seemingly with flying colors. No doubt Governor Greg Abbott, who spent the last four months issuing an unqualified guarantee the grid would survive any winter weather test, felt relieved, too.

The Governor had hedged his bets just a bit during a press conference held Wednesday as the cold weather started to set in, noting that no one could guarantee spot outages from downed power lines would not happen. Those isolated outages did inevitably happen. Grid manager ERCOT reported that, mainly overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning, roughly 70,000 Texans were without power as tree branches snapped and landed on elevated lines. But infrastructure companies like Oncor were able to restore power in almost all those instances within a few hours.

But the bottom line is that despite some anticipatory reporting that the grid might not hold, it did just fine. No doubt, Texans who since last February’s terrible grid failure had shelled out $5,000 to $14,000 for backup natural gas generators or $20,000 to $60,000 or more for rooftop solar may have even been a little irritated about it. But for millions of folks who can’t afford to make those kinds of investments, it’s a relief.

No one should think, though, that the past few days of cold and ice and snow in parts of Texas really provided a test similar to Winter Storm Uri, when temperatures across a vast swath of the state remained below freezing uninterrupted for more than 170 hours. Rob Allerman, Senior Director of Power Analytics at Enverus noted in an email Thursday that “Although there is a lot of attention around this event, this storm is not anything like the 2021 cold snap (temperature is 15-20 degrees higher compared to last year).”

The state’s own data bears that up. At a press conference held Friday, Gov. Abbott noted that peak demand on the grid during the cold snap amounted to 69,000 MW, well below the 86,000 MW experienced in the depths of Winter Storm Uri. That was well below the 75,000 MW projected by ERCOT officials earlier in the week. “As I said yesterday, and I can say again today, the Texas electric grid is more reliable and more resilient than it’s ever been,” Abbott said.

Allerman said that one of the most critical changes made in the management of the grid since last February was, as I’ve noted in several previous pieces, a simple change in communication between the natural gas industry, the Texas Railroad Commission and ERCOT. “The most significant change is that natural gas providers are now considered critical infrastructure, so they won’t have their power turned off. That should reduce freeze offs at gas compressors and allow much more gas to flow to gas plants,” he said.

The natural gas industry has borne most of the blame in the media for last year’s grid failure, much of it unfair and misinformed. The reality was that most natural gas service outages during Uri came after ERCOT had cut electric service to natural gas infrastructure as part of its rolling outages. The focus on designating these production, compression and transmission sites as critical infrastructure solves most of that problem. Winterization requirements at baseload generating plants likely played a role in ensuring grid stability this time. There are no similar requirements for wind and solar.

But again, no one should believe this week’s winter weather was in any way a Uri-level test for the grid. Uri was a once-in-a-decade kind of winter storm for Texas. This week was a pretty normal course of business event. A failure this time would have indicated Texas has arrived at California-level instability.

The Texas grid may be headed in that direction, but it hasn’t arrived there yet. If anything, this week might provide some confidence that upgrades in communication and weatherization have at least delayed that arrival, and there may even be time to turn the thing around.