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ERCOT offers few solutions at Texas Senate hearing

ERCOT CEO Bill Magness told Texas senators something needed to be changed in Texas's energy infrastructure, but he didn't know what.

TEXAS, USA — ERCOT CEO Bill Magness opened his comments to the Texas Senate Thursday. He stated that he understood the amount of human suffering in the state last week. He said due to the work ERCOT did, the system is still working today, and the alternative would have been much worse. 

"Today on the 25th, we are experiencing electricity in Texas about like we did on February 10th or February 12," Magness said. "If we didn't make decision at certain points we'd be at a much worse place. Today, we'd still be talking about how we were going to get the power on." 

Last week, according to ERCOT data, the organization was unable to fully restore power to the grid for multiple days after multiple power plants and generators rapidly tripped offline. An ERCOT presentation shows that, at one point last week, 48.6 percent of all transferable power across the state had been offline at the same time. Magness said the situation left ERCOT operators with no choice but to order continuous blackouts. 

"This storm at it's worst, took out 48.6 percent of the generation available to ERCOT to manage the system. We always keep reserves, but when you lose half your generation, and see record demand, you are going to have a problem," Magness said. 

Magness said if the operators did not take the options they did, parts of the state would be in a blackout lasting weeks or months. 

"We held it to together at great pain to a lot of people," Magness said. 

More than four million Texans were without power last week. Some were without power for over a week. 

Texas Senators questioned Magness for hours Thursday on how the situation could be avoided. Magness did not have many answers for them. At one point said he didn't know what the answer was. 

"We were stuck. We could not put that much demand back on the system. The generation to serve it wasn't there. The outages couldn't rotate so we still needed that sacrifice," Magness said. "We need to fix that. We need to find a way, and I don't know what it is."

Senator John Whitmire asked Magness if it was ERCOT's job to keep this situation from happening in the first place.

"You are the CEO. Is it not your responsibility to prevent us from ever experience what we did?" Whitmire said. 

"I believe the operators on our team did everything they could in a dramatic, very difficult situation," Magness said. "I wouldn't step in front of them and question their judgement and experience."

Magness said ERCOT would continue to review the incident and listen to tapes from all the phone calls made during the event. Magness said 16,000 calls were made during the incident. 

Magness also provided the legislature new information on the reasons power plants and generators gave for going offline:

  • 42 percent were classified as cold weather and freezing
  • 6 percent were classified as fuel limitations
  • 8 percent were classified as non-weather related equipment damage
  • 6 percent were classified as planned outages
  • 18 percent were classified as "potentially weather related"
  • 20 percent were classified as "other"

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