As thousands of San Antonians awoke Tuesday in cold, dark homes for the second day in a row, utility officials said the state-mandated power outages are likely to continue into Wednesday.
The icy weather over the weekend created record-breaking demand for power, throwing the statewide energy system into turmoil.
More than 256,000 CPS Energy customers were without power as of 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, with the most widespread outages on the North and Northwest sides. On the near East Side, roughly 60 percent of households didn’t have electricity, according to CPS Energy’s outage map.
Besieged by freezing temperatures, many San Antonio residents have said they’ve gone without power for hours at a stretch — well over the 45-minute blackout period that CPS Energy told customers to expect. Some CPS customers reported on social media going without electricity for more than a day.
As the winter storm pushed into Texas, power plants and wind turbines froze over and stopped producing electricity. That caused a dearth of available power, which sent energy prices skyrocketing and forced the state’s grid operator — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — to initiate rolling blackouts beginning early Monday morning.
Officials have said controlled outages are a way to ensure Texas’s energy supply meet statewide demand.
“What we have seen is that imbalance of supply and demand developing to a point Sunday night where we needed to protect the integrity of the grid,” ERCOT chief executive Bill Magness said. “We needed to make sure we didn’t have an uncontrolled blackout that could last for an indeterminate amount of time.”
This week’s freeze has created the greatest demand for electricity CPS has ever seen, utility officials said. City-owned CPS usually sees demand decline in the winter and peak during the hottest days of summer.
“We’re seeing more demand overall than we have seen in any summer in CPS Energy’s history,” said CPS Energy chief executive Paula Gold-Williams in a briefing with reporters Tuesday. “We have more people needing power and needing it at deeper levels than ever before.”
“We’re seeing such demand on the system, we’re seeing more than we have the capacity to supply,” she said.
At 1:30 a.m. Monday, ERCOT began calling on Texas utilities to temporarily cut some households’ power to keep the stressed grid stable.
CPS officials said outages have been prolonged because of the overwhelming demand on the system. Downed power lines or other equipment damaged by the blustery weather are worsening the blackouts in some neighborhoods, they said.
Customers who haven’t experienced outages may live within the same service areas as sites deemed “critical infrastructure” — such as hospitals, police and fire stations and government offices.
Households fired up heaters to warm homes amid the frigid San Antonio temperatures over the weekend, driving up demand for power before the coldest weather arrived. Homes heated with natural gas competed with power plants that burn gas to produce electricity, dramatically driving up prices for the fuel.
Some natural gas wellheads froze, further cutting into the supply of gas for heating and power generation.
Wind farms and power plants across the state also seized up in the cold.
“The natural gas system failed, the electricity system failed — they’re linked together,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “We didn’t foresee there would be such a weather event as this.
“If we had built a grid that would have been able to handle this, we would’ve seen people left and right telling us we’re wasting money, overbuilding things,” he said.
In CPS’s fleet, one of the South Texas Nuclear Project plants went offline during the deep freeze, and the utility had one natural gas-fired plant already offline for scheduled maintenance went the winter storm hit.
The nuclear plant in South Texas’s Matagorda County is back up and running, Gold-Williams said.
Gold-Williams said CPS hasn’t calculated the effect the price spike will have on ratepayers in San Antonio. She said the utility may sell bonds or perform other financial maneuvers to soften the blow to ratepayers.
“We will leverage every tool we have to spread the impact out, but we’ll have to do quite a few things,” she said.
Rhodes said electricity customers who pay a fixed rate — such as CPS customers — likely won’t take a major hit because of the energy price spikes in recent days.
On Tuesday, Mayor Ron Nirenberg announced City Council’s scheduled meeting on Thursday would be postponed so CPS and city staffers can update council members on the power crisis. Nirenberg also asked the owners of downtown buildings to go dark Tuesday night to conserve power.
“Still no power at my house along with hundreds of thousands of my neighbors,” Nirenberg said Tuesday in a post on Twitter. “ERCOT’s systems threw millions to the cold when we needed them most. They must he held accountable.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the statewide grid was short by 45,000 megawatts of electric generation.
Wind farms knocked out of operation accounted for one-third of the shortfall, with offline natural gas, coal and nuclear plants accounting for the rest, according to Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT.
ERCOT expected statewide electricity demand to soar above 53,000 megawatts on Tuesday evening, potentially exceeding the energy supply.
“It will be dicey between now and late (Wednesday),” Gold-Williams said.
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One in three CPS customers are still without power - San Antonio Express-News
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