ERCOT Allows Energy Companies to Add Power to the Grid

AUSTIN, TX, – The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has made significant progress overnight restoring customer power, although some outages still remain throughout the state.

Energy emergency conditions remain as the grid operator and transmission owners work to restore the remaining customers that are without power.

"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," said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. "We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on."

Customers that remain without power likely fall into one of these three categories:

• Areas out due to ice storm damage on the distribution system
• Areas that were taken out of service due to the energy emergency load shed that need to be restored manually (i.e., sending a crew to the location to reenergize the line)
• Large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help during this energy emergency

Transmission owners are assessing how many customers are affected at this time.

While there is no additional load shed occurring at this time, a little over 40,000 MW of generation remains on forced outage due to this winter weather event. Of that, 23,500 MW is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar. It is possible that some level of rotating outages may be needed over the next couple of days to keep the grid stable.