AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – Oncor Electric Delivery CEO Allen Nye began his testimony before the State Senate on Friday, February 26, as did the executive directors of other people in the energy sector.
“I mean, I completely understand all the outrage and anger of all Texans.”
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Nye appeared during the second consecutive day of hearings at the Texas Chapter, in which the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce and the Committee on State and Energy Affairs of the House investigated what led to last week’s large-scale disruptions. which caused the loss of electricity, heat and water to millions of Texans. for days.
Nye testified when the first winter storm exploded in Texas overnight on February 15, the state’s grid operator, ERCOT, repeatedly ordered them to cut off power to several customers to prevent a catastrophic outage.
“We were two-thirds of 1% of the last security blanket that this state has.”
Initially, he said their intention is to make feathers for 15 minutes, 30 minutes.
But he said it was impossible because power plant operators continued to go offline and there was not enough supply to meet demand.
“The generation has gone down so fast and we would be told that it is about to return and that we will wait all night waiting for it and it will never show. Or it would be a little, and something else would fall. I could not estimate in those times if the generation would return, so I could take it to your house. I had no idea.”
Nye said Oncor should have done a better job communicating with customers why many of them had to stay in the dark for so long.
He also told lawmakers why the lights were on for about 40 percent of their customers.
“If you happen to live in a power supply that goes to a hospital or if you happen to live in a power supply that goes to a 911 call center, then you’re not even rotated.”
This left about 50% of customers dealing with power outages.
In a moment of candor, he said he didn’t realize his house was on such a power supply until he woke up with the lights on.
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He is not near any critical infrastructure, so he said he called his company to tell them to cut off their electricity, which also affected his neighbors.
In all, Nye told lawmakers that 1.3 million customers had lost power.
Most of them are due to the fact that not enough power plants were working.
Of these, he said about 140,000 customers were in the dark as Oncor’s power lines froze during storms.
As reported by CBS 11, natural gas processors have lost energy in the field, making it impossible to deliver natural gas to power plants that need fuel to operate.
Christi Craddick, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, Christi Craddick, who oversees the gas industry, told parliamentary committees on Friday that ERCOT did not realize what was happening. “When they say that there is a lack of communication from ERCOT, they did not understand that they need a continuous flow of gas in order to be able to introduce gas into power plants.”
Nye said before the storm that they had identified 35 gas installations that needed to continue to receive electricity.
But after the outages began, Nye said he received calls from many others. “During the event, we added 168 new critical gas installations. I turned them all on immediately and kept them on all the time. ”
He told lawmakers that his company and other transmission owners, power plant operators and the gas industry need to develop an updated list.
Energy experts told CBS 11 that improvements must be made to both the electricity and gas networks to prevent the type of large-scale disruptions that occurred last week.
On Thursday, the first day of hearings, Curt Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corporation in Irving, which operates power plants, told House Committees that unless the state has integrated gas and energy systems, the same problem will happen again. .
Morgan recommended that a single authority oversee both systems, but this is not the case now.
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While the Railroad Commission regulates the gas industry, ERCOT oversees the electricity grid and reports to the Texas Public Utilities Commission.