The week
The parts of Texas that are not connected to the ERCOT power grid seem to have weathered the frost with few failures
Texas is nearing the end of what Governor Greg Abbott (R) called “a cold front that happens once in 120 years,” but that doesn’t entirely explain why more than a million homes were without electricity by early Thursday. below freezing point after three full days. Many places in the world hold power in persistent arctic weather, as do parts of Texas. These Texas outskirts, including El Paso, “are primarily in areas outside of the areas supported by ERCOT, the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which manages the power grid for 90 percent of the state and is separate from the oversight and regulation of the state Federal works, “KHOU 11 Houston reported Wednesday night. After the winter frost of 2011, El Paso Electric spent a lot of money on the Western Interconnect network “winterizing our equipment so that it could withstand minus 10 degrees Celsius for extended periods,” said Eddie Gutierrez, a spokesman for El Paso Electric, said KHOU. That year “we had about three thousand people out and about during that time, a thousand of whom had breakdowns that lasted less than five minutes.” On the other side of Texas, near the Louisiana border, the city of Beaumont also appears to have weathered the storm without massive outages. Entergy, which powers Beaumont on the Eastern Interconnect network, told KHOU that it also winterized its infrastructure after the 2011 storm. Weathering power generation and harvesting equipment is voluntary in Texas, although lawmakers will likely reconsider that strategy when they dissect ERCOT this year. More stories from theweek.com Trump comes out of hiding The Texas power grid has been down mainly due to natural gas. Republicans blame wind turbines. The Daily Show solves blackouts in Texas with “America’s Most Renewable Resource: The Insane Hatred of AOC”.
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