ERCOT Ends Emergency Terms, CEO Bill Magness Defends Decision to Protect Network – CBS Dallas/Fort Worth

NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) – ERCOT has officially ended the emergency conditions and resumed normal operations.

This means that Texans are no longer urged to save energy.

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CEO Bill Magness acknowledged the difficulties Texans are facing this week, but said controlled outages have saved the network from suffering weeks or even months of outages.

“I want to acknowledge the immense amount of human suffering…As a company doing everything it can to support the needs of its customers, watching these heartbreaking conditions for several days has been terrible,” said Magness during a Friday morning media call.

In response to Governor Abbott’s claim that ERCOT “failed” in its handling of the historic winter storm, Magness admitted there are “always things they can do better,” but defended the decision. difficult to take to protect the system. “The decision our operators made on Sunday morning to protect the system is one I will defend. Our operators were calm and did their job,” Magness said.

He explained that ERCOT “really had no choice when the storm hit”, due to customer demand, which far exceeded what was expected.

“We could get by with only 60% supply and the only way to do that was with outages. And those outages served their purpose. If we hadn’t done that, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be not sitting here talking about outages. We would be talking about plans to restore the power grid in weeks…even months,” Magness said.

When asked why power plants in Texas started going offline on Sunday night, Magness replied, “ERCOT does not run power plants. If they are broken by a storm or otherwise, we cannot operate them.

Calling the energy crisis “one of the worst weather events in Texas,” Magness praised the “experts who came out in the middle of the night and fixed the power plants.”

To those who asked ERCOT to “pay” for the suffering ultimately caused by the loss of control of the power supply by the state power grid operator, Magness assured that they “would do whatever the legislators and policy makers will tell us to do”.

Ultimately, ERCOT is subject to the policy and rules established by the international regulatory authority, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Its mission is to ensure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to network reliability and security.

READ MORE: Oncor continues to restore power to North Texas homes and businesses

But the winter storm was so massive, fluid and fast-moving that the outages couldn’t unfold effectively. It left millions of people in the dark for days.

“The amount of the claim was so big that when we ran the transmission company, it was such a big block that it was harder for them to spin them. The amount of megawatts needed has been reduced,” Magness explained. “Texas can’t afford this to happen again.”

More than half of ERCOT’s winter generating capacity, largely fueled by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, or about 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior manager.

In the immediate term, there are two legislative hearings, one in the Texas Senate and the other in the House of Representatives, which must resolve the situation next Thursday. ERCOT will present at both.

And looking further into the future, if another catastrophic weather event causes a statewide power outage, Woodfin assured “there is a plan in place to restart the system in the event of a breakdown”.

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