Federal report highlights Texas grid failures, recommendations to prevent Winter Storm Uri repeat

Last winter, three storms swept across Texas, bringing the state’s electrical grid to a standstill. Between Feb. 10 and 20, the blackouts and energy failures led to the deaths of more than 200 people, with some estimates as high as 700. 

Over the course of the two-week crisis, the Texas grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), ordered “a total of 20,000 megawatts of rolling blackouts in an effort to prevent grid collapse; this represents the largest manually controlled load shedding event in U.S. history. More than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power—some for as long as four days,” notes a 300-page federal report titled “The February 2021 Cold Weather Outages in Texas and the South Central United States” issued this month by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The analysis was published in conjunction with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), an Atlanta-based nonprofit. 

“The final report on Winter Storm Uri is a sobering analysis that highlights the significant work that needs to be done,” said Rich Glick, chair of the federal regulatory agency in a statement. “The devastating effects of extreme cold on our bulk power system’s ability to operate in 2011 and now, 2021, must not be allowed to happen again. We have a duty to protect the bulk power system and public safety and we will do just that.”   

Glick referenced a cold-weather front in 2011 that featured “unusually cold and windy weather during the first week of February,” according to a report on the event issued by the regulatory commission. “Lows during the period were in the teens for five consecutive mornings and there were many sustained hours of below freezing temperatures throughout Texas and in New Mexico.” 

Given the recent precedence of wintry weather in the southeast over the last decade, Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., said the region’s “electricity ecosystem needs to come together to plan for and prepare to operate under more extreme, longer duration, and wide area weather events.” 

Specifically, Robb said the report lays bare the need for “substantially better coordination between the natural gas system and the electric system to ensure a reliable supply that nearly 400 million people across North America depend upon to support their way of life.” 

When this year’s series of storms inflicted the region, the analysis found that a “confluence of two causes” led to the crisis. First, electrical generating units operated primarily by the ERCOT catastrophically failed in great numbers because they weren’t properly winterized. Second, and to a lesser extent, natural gas processing couldn’t keep up with the demand. 

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