ERCOT Says Power Able To Be Restored For Majority Of Affected Texas Residents
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DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Nearly 500,000 residents are still without power after the Electric Reliability of Texas said Thursday morning that it made "significant progress" in restoration efforts.
The current number of affected residents is down from the 3 million seen on Wednesday after winter storms caused critical issues to the Texas' power grid.
According to ERCOT, power outages remain in areas likely under three categories: ice storm damage to distribution system, areas where emergency load shed needs to be restored manually, large industrial facilities that voluntary went offline.
During an morning update, Dan Woodfin, ERCOT senior director of system operations, said although a power restoration efforts are getting better, smaller rotating outages may be needed due to the cold temperatures.
"Not out the woods yet. We're still in very cold conditions. So we're still seeing much higher than normal winter demand... Today we were able to get over our morning peak without taking additional actions... We still expect a high cold weather peak tomorrow," Woodfin said. "We really feel like we're on a right path... If we do hit a bump and have some generation have to come back off, we may have to ask for outages. But if we do, we believe they'll be at the level where they could be rotating outages, not the larger numbers we faced this week."
ERCOT said just over 40,000 MW remains on "forced outage." Of that number, 23,000 is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar.
According to Oncor's outage map, about 80,000 residents remain without in the North Texas area.
