ERCOT chief says Texas power grid 'ready as ever been' for coming winter

AUSTIN — Population growth will spur increased demand for electric power across the state and lower than normal wind to power turbines in West Texas might strain the system, but added generation over the past year should mean the state's grid hold up as the weather turns cold.

That was the message Tuesday from the top executive for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is charged with meeting the power demands for nearly all of the state.

"We are as ready as we have ever been to deal with the challenges of the winter season," ERCOT chief Pablo Vegas told the board of directors at its quarterly meeting.

Vegas' message was presented through the lens of the brutal and deadly winter storm of February 2021 when hundreds of thousands of Texans lost electricity for days at a time and upward of 250 people lost their lives. The soaring demand coupled with widespread losses of generation put the grid on the verge of statewide collapse.

And it comes just three weeks after ERCOT in a report warned much of Texas could be facing rolling blackouts starting in January, but most likely in the morning hours before the sun reaches high enough into the sky to fire solar generating facilities.

"In the wintertime, the peak of the system tends to happen in the early morning hours as people are starting to wake up at 7 a.m., 8 a.m.," Vegas said. "It's still cold from an overnight winter cold. And we don't yet have the resources like solar resources on the system at that point in time."

More: After ERCOT entered emergency conditions, risk of controlled outages continues

Even though Texas has not seen as much new generating capacity as ERCOT would have liked, Vegas said 800 new projects have been added to the grid in the past year, including 50,000 megawatts of new battery storage and 7,700 of gas-fired generation.

Vegas said that ERCOT has already inspected about 1,500 units in the generating and transmission sectors for weatherization and other reliability factors and about 500 more are expected to be inspected in the coming weeks.

Chris Coleman, ERCOT's chief meteorologist, said he is forecasting a milder than usual winter for much of Texas, but that does not mean parts of the state will not see a deep freeze. For example, Coleman said that overall, the winters of 2021 and 2023 were generally mild, but both saw extended periods of extreme could.

So far, Coleman said, December has been warmer than ordinary, but that could change in the coming months.

"January and February will have more opportunities than December for some impact from polar vortex," he said. "I'm not going to point out any dates, but I think that as we transition into January you will see some pattern differences that may pose some issues for Texas.

But we won't be able to catch this until a few weeks ... and I'm watching that first half of January closely right now. But we're good for Christmas and New Year's."

John C. Moritz covers Texas government and politics for the USA Today Network in Austin. Contact him at jmoritz@gannett.com and follow him on X, formerly called Twitter, @JohnnieMo.

This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Is the Texas power grid ready for winter? ERCOT chief says yes