But the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said it does not expect customer outages like those caused in February.
The tight conditions for the grid are being caused by a stalled cold front over Texas, combined with a high number of energy-producing plants being offline for maintenance.
“This emergency declaration allows us to access tools that will bring supply and demand back into line,” Woody Rickerson, an ERCOT vice president, said in a statement.
Maintenance outages are very common during the spring and fall. Those outages are higher than usual right now, a spokesperson told the Tribune early Tuesday, due to additional repairs necessary from the February winter storm.
A spokesperson for ERCOT was not immediately available to comment Tuesday afternoon.
Data from ERCOT showed that the current demand for energy on the grid was near 49,000 megawatts at 5 p.m., when the available supply to the grid was about 50,000 megawatts. That’s much less than the peak demand it neared during February, about 72,000 megawatts, when energy use surpassed record levels as Texans tried to stay warm during a severe winter storm.
But ERCOT said a significant chunk of its generation is currently down due to maintenance. Approximately 33,000 megawatts of generation was offline earlier this week, according to an ERCOT spokesperson.
The supply and demand for power must remain balanced on electricity grids at all times. Asking Texans to conserve power is among the first steps the grid operator takes in order to bring it back in balance.
While maintenance repairs are common this time of year, experts said the amount of outages was still significant.
“It borders the edge of reasonable,” Beth Garza, director of ERCOT’s independent watchdog from 2014 to 2019, told the Tribune.
[By Erin Douglas and Mitchell Ferman, Texas Tribune]
Reliability Coordinators monitored the state power grid during a tour of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas command center in Taylor in 2012. Outages are higher than usual right now due to additional repairs necessary from the February winter storm. [Texas Tribune photo]