Electric industry collaborates on power restoration as severe winter weather strikes large swaths of nation

Facing the continued effects of devastating winter weather, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has ordered the continued interruption of power delivery, spurring collaboration between investor-owned electric companies, electric cooperatives, and public power utilities in a massive effort to restore power as quickly as possible to more than 2 million customers.

Texas has faced a compounding number of power challenges as an unprecedented arctic cold snap across the state has impacted all forms of electricity generation, and customer demands for energy have surpassed the available supply.

“Most electricity providers in Texas are transmission and distribution companies and do not generate electricity,” Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) said. “The shortage of generation capacity is not something electric companies, electric cooperatives, and public power utilities can directly address. They must follow directives from ERCOT and other grid operators. Our frontline employees who operate the transmission and distribution systems are actively keeping that system operational and in balance, while restoring power to customers as soon as generation resources become available.”

As utilities work to restore power to customers’ homes and businesses and protect the electric grid, the continued cooperation of federal, state and local communities is vital, noted National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) CEO Jim Matheson. “This historic storm serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of a diverse fuel supply, robust transmission infrastructure, and effective coordination between grid operators and electricity providers,” he said.

Customers in other states, including Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, and West Virginia, also have been hard hit by severe winter storms. In those states, mutual assistance networks are activated, and utility crews continue to work to restore power to customers who lost electricity as a result of downed power lines and damage to other types of infrastructure.

Progress is being made. Texas’ largest transmissions and distribution utility, Oncor, announced Thursday morning that it was ceasing controlled outages due to increased generation and stabilization efforts. Response is so widespread, however, that its tracking systems don’t often reflect those updates yet.

“There are approx 150,000 remaining customers w/o power – this is the result of damage from Wednesday winter storm, previous winter weather/storm damage that couldn’t be identified until equipment was re-energized & damage to electric equipment caused by record-breaking low temps,” Oncor tweeted.

As of Wednesday night, Entergy Texas was still requesting customers to voluntarily reduce electricity use until further notice, and warned that conservation efforts will likely be requested until the end of the week. It added that in addition to the winter weather, ice damage to trees and power lines has caused additional outages, and workers face extra challenges in the extreme cold. As of 8 p.m. Wednesday, approximately 19,380 of Entergy Texas’ customers remained without power.

Thursday morning, AEP Texas reported that its workers had toiled through the night to restore power to another 150,000 customers. At 9 p.m. Wednesday, it ended its daily reports noting that 285,000 were without power, so around 135,000 should remain in the dark.

“AEP Texas crews stand ready to restore power to additional customers when ERCOT determines that a sufficient amount of generation on the electric grid makes it safe to proceed,” the utility said in a statement.

Wednesday night ERCOT reported that some 2.7 million households still did not have power. Generation is returning, but slowly, it cautioned. Still, ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin issued an optimistic report on Thursday. “We’re to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event,” Woodfin said.

While there is no additional load shed occurring at this time, a little over 40,000 megawatts (MW) of generation remains on forced outage due to the winter weather event, ERCOT said. Of that, 23,500 MW is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar.