HOUSTON — As Texas prepares for another winter storm, Governor Greg Abbott says he cannot guarantee there will not be power outages despite previously reassuring the power would stay on.
Back in November, the governor said he “can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
Later, Peter Lake, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, echoed the governor’s remarks.
“The lights are going to stay on this winter,” he said.
On Tuesday, the governor had a different message.
“No one can guarantee there won’t be (power outages),” Abbott said at a press conference on the arctic blast heading to Texas.
After the press conference, the governor’s opponents in the 2022 gubernatorial race criticized those comments, with one campaign calling it “flip-flopping”.
When asked about the reversal and Governor Abbott’s response on Wednesday, his office emailed KHOU 11 the following statement from spokesperson Nan Tolson:
The Governor was asked this question: “Does that mean if there are any load shed events that it wouldn’t be a success?” The Governor responded, “No one can guarantee there won’t be a 'load shed event.'"
In answering the question, the Governor was referring to a tool in ERCOT’s toolbox to reduce the demand for electricity so that there will not be any blackouts. This is a tool that has larger industrial electricity users who choose to participate in the program reduce their demand for electricity and has no impact on commercial or residential customers. This is the tool Chairman Peter Lake of the PUC discussed at the press conference when he said, “We made our industrial demand response program more accessible and available sooner for us as another measure of redundancy and reliability in our system."
Bob Stein, KHOU 11’s political analyst, said he believes Governor Abbott is “walking on tip toes” due to the difficulty in predicting the weather and the performance of power and gas facilities.
Stein said he does not believe the upcoming weekend will be critical to the governor’s re-election chances.
“Will he lose an election over this issue in a primary? I think not,” said Stein.
If both Abbott and Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke win their primaries, Stein expects O’Rourke to focus on the issue ahead of November.
On Friday, O’Rourke will launch a statewide “Keeping the Lights on Tour” in El Paso that ends in Houston on February 15, one year to the day after controlled blackouts began.
The arctic blast could be the first real test of the power grid following last year’s winter storm in February that left millions without power. More than 240 people died during the winter storm.
“Either ice on power lines ... could cause a power line to go down, or it could be ice on trees that causes a tree to fall on power lines,” Abbott said.
At a winter weather briefing Tuesday at a state operations center in Austin, Brad Jones, interim CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and a half dozens state officials pledged the Texas grid will hold up this week.
“We are ready for this storm, we’ll be prepared for this,” Jones said.
That preparation includes adding extra reserves earlier, before the storm hits, as well as making sure power generators are not offline due to routine maintenance.
“They are already bringing more generation online sooner than what happened last year,” the governor said.
Since last year, power generators and transmission providers have been required by law to winterize equipment to meet federal standards and be subject to inspections and $1 million fines.
“Those power plants and transmission infrastructure have been inspected by ERCOT and found to be in near-universal compliance,” said Chairman Peter Lake of the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
No such legal mandates are in place for natural gas facilities just yet, but the Railroad Commission of Texas said many have begun to weatherize on their own.
“Inspectors have visited more than 4,000 facilities so far, about 98% of those facilities have been winterized,” said Commissioner Jim Wright.
ERCOT projects the peak power demand during the upcoming storm--about 71,000 megawatts—to occur on Friday morning.
State officials said the grid will have a capacity of 86,000 megawatts, a comfortable cushion for the cold spell ahead.
“Well they’re certainly saying what they should be saying,” said KHOU 11 energy expert Ed Hirs.
“Are we totally ready? And the answer is not for a storm like we had last February,” Hirs said.
Fortunately, this week’s winter storm forecast doesn’t look to pack nearly the same punch.
“If we can’t make it through this, then they’ve certainly overstated what they’ve done to fix the grid,” Hirs said.