ERCOT: Power able to be restored to majority of customers, outages still remain

AUSTIN, Texas - The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) says it has made significant progress overnight restoring customer power although some outages still remain throughout the state.

Officials say energy emergency conditions remain as the grid operator and transmission owners work to restore the remaining customers that are without power.

"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 news release. "We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on."

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Officials indicate improvement in power restoration but outages continue

Many Central Texans are waking up for another day without power but energy officials indicate we may have turned a corner in the restoration process. FOX 7 Austin's John Krinjak has details.

Officials say that customers that remain without power likely fall into one of these three categories:

Areas out due to ice storm damage on the distribution system
Areas that were taken out of service due to the energy emergency load shed that need to be restored manually (i.e., sending a crew to the location to reenergize the line)
Large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help during this energy emergency

ERCOT says transmission owners are assessing how many customers are affected at this time.

While there is no additional load shed occurring at this time, ERCOT says a little over 40,000 MW of generation remains on forced outage due to this winter weather event. Of that, 23,500 MW is thermal generation and the rest is wind and solar. ERCOT says it is possible that some level of rotating outages may be needed over the next couple of days to keep the grid stable.

Austin Energy works to restore power to more customers

Many Austin energy customers remained without power. Something Austin Energy's general manager says they're working to change.

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The news comes as the City of Austin says it's working tirelessly to restore power and water to customers.

Austin Energy says so far is still not rotating outages but could start doing so soon. In that case, those rotations could result in around 10 minutes of power loss for customers. If you do get power back Thursday, energy officials say it’s important that you do your part to conserve as well, by avoiding turning on lights and heating your home gradually.

The weather has continued to slow down crews trying to restore power to customers who were knocked out due to damage from the storm itself. Power companies have also been working to deal with new outages caused by icy buildup on trees, poles, and power lines thanks to Wednesday’s freezing rain.

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