Texas Power Grid Was ‘Seconds or Minutes’ from Catastrophic Failure, Say Officials

NBC News reports that Texas officials said the state’s primary power grid was “seconds or minutes” from catastrophic failure on Sunday night. The agency imposed rolling outages to prevent the collapse of the entire grid.

NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez tweeted that officials with the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) just stated the Texas power grid was “seconds or minutes — not hours — away from catastrophic failure. The tweet states rolling blackouts were implement to stop the situation from becoming far worse that it would have otherwise been.

ERCOT officials just said the Texas power grid was seconds or minutes — not hours — away from catastrophic failure if rolling outages had not been imposed starting Sunday night

— Gabe Gutierrez (@gabegutierrez) February 18, 2021

On Thursday, ERCOT officials said they made “significant progress” in restoring power throughout the state.

“We’re to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event,” said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin in a written statement. “We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on.”

PowerOutage.us reports that just under 500,000 Texas customers remain without electricity. This is down from more than four million customers who were in the dark earlier this week.

ERCOT officials previously stated that had the power grid collapsed, it would take weeks or months to restore power statewide.

“At approximately 1:25 a.m. this morning [Feb 15] , ERCOT entered its third and highest level of emergency operations because electric demand is exceeding the available supply,” officials said at the time. “Controlled outages are occurring to protect the electric grid from uncontrolled, cascading outages.”

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s Sunday-morning talk show, What’s Your Point? Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Parler @BobPrice, and Facebook.