NBC 5 news reporting from Ercot that we were 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from blackouts that could have lasted months. MONTHS!! Wow.

Ercot making themselves the heros now....

Great handle

Yep, they started trying to spread that narrative the day after the outtages began. Weird how they don't explain just how they saved us all from weeks or months without power.

Sad and pathetic.
I try to not get emotionally invested in things I don’t have control over, but this is testing my resolution.

We’re they insinuating that physical damage would occur all over taking months to fix ?

What happens during and over load ? Does some giant breaker fry some where ?

They are saying the rolling blackouts they implemented saved the grid from overload causing a major crash. Not saying I completely buy that but that is their “excuse”. I would like to know how many on the board were personally affected by the blackouts. Somehow I am picking they were spared the inconvenience unlike the rest of us. About all I can say it whatever it takes corrective action has to be implemented so this will not repeat. I will be very interested on what comes out of these hearings.

Texas' power grid was minutes from collapse during Winter Storm Uri last week, officials of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) admitted on Wednesday.

Bill Magness, ERCOT's chief executive told the Wall Street Journal that the grid operator came close to losing control of the system through the night on February 15.

Magness explained that the storm caused the grid's operating frequency to fall to dangerous levels, which prompted ERCOT to try and stabilize it by ordering the state’s electricity providers to cut 5 gigawatts of power to customers.

He said that just before 2am, the frequency of the grid fell significantly below the normal level of 60 hertz and stayed below 60 hertz for more than 4 minutes until the company ordered more blackouts, according to the Journal.

Magness said had the frequency stayed below 60 hertz for nine minutes or more, power generators and other equipment could've suffered damage and resulted in uncontrolled outages that could have caused the entire grid to fail.

'That is the thing we cannot allow to happen,' Magness told the Journal. 'If we have a blackout of the system, the system is out for an indeterminate amount of time and it’s extraordinarily difficult to bring it back.'

I happened to be awake at the time mentioned above and can attest that the compressor on my heat pump started making a load noise like it was losing power (frequency) similar to a brown out before I shut it down. A couple of minutes later the power went out for good. Of course all of the above does not address the true multiple causes of the capacity shortfall.

ERCOT manages what is available. I have no idea what they prevented from happening, but if anything like they claim, it would have been disastrous. Plenty of blame to go around, including PUC and legislators who chose not to have safeguards in place. We need to hold them accountable. And even us, the consumers who have also not properly insulated our homes, with alternative energy sources. Will it change? Maybe but probably not as the cost will be significant to retrofit generators and natural gas plants. Regulations that require those changes will be necessary and we are not in a regulatory mood now.

So we have even worse systemic problems than the lack of secure power when we need it most. Check. Got it. Texas can no longer rely on power during heat and cold weather events and we should be thankful it's not worse.

This is 3rd world stuff. The EPA has a hand in this as generating capacity has been cut over the years by forcing coal fired plants offline.

Must be Trump's fault.

Ercot manages the grid that moves power from the generating plants to the distribution stations. They have NO control of the generating companies. Those companies have failed to update their infrastructure and 6 of 13 plants went offline due to equipment failures. You can’t manage what you don’t have!

I'm not sure I understand how low frequency could cause the system to crash.

I struggled with that too. It seems that the low frequency would damage the generators beyond repair at power generating stations. This is where the months of downtime would come from if they would have to replace the machinery. Maybe the low frequency would destroy windings and such . . . just a guess from me.