ERCOT Expected To Go Before Legislature This Week

Staff Reports

On Friday, leaders of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas held a press conference and announced the end of emergency conditions.

The announcement came after many Texans spent at least four days without power.

ERCOT CEO, Bill Magness said he wanted to acknowledge the suffering through this event without power was terrible for an organization whose purpose is to help provide power to homes.

“We lost about 40 percent of the generation that we expected to have on the system,” Magness said. “That’s 40 percent of the supply to serve the demand customers needed, and customers’ demands were exceeding everything we’d ever seen or expected.”

Governor Greg Abbott has named review of ERCOT as an emergency item in the current Texas Legislative Session.

The legislature is expected to hold two hearings this week regarding ERCOT.

Magness noted that there were people out working on the energy problems in freezing weather over the last few days, day and night, in attempts to bring generators back up.

“We’ll begin the process of analyzing and looking at this situation immediately,” Magness said. “There are legislative hearings slated for [this] week. We have an ERCOT boarding meeting. Texas cannot afford to have this happen again.”

Magness said the governor’s charge to put winterization into the legislative session as an emergency item was a good idea.

According to ERCOT, they expect to gather reports from each of the generators to find out which ones went down and why.