Texas was 'seconds and minutes' away from 'monthslong' power outages
0Texas was 'seconds and minutes' away from 'monthslong' power outages the embattled CEO of ERCOT said Thursday as he defended the grid's rolling blackouts. A week of below-freezing temperatures knocked about a third of the state's generating capacity offline, resulting in the greatest forced blackout in U.S. history and exposing weaknesses of Texas' unique approach to power grid management. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, operates the power grid that covers most of the state and was behind the decision to have rolling blackouts which left up to 4 million people enduring outages in subfreezing temperatures. Its CEO Bill Magness told The Texas Tribune Thursday that if operators had not acted 'immediately' in implementing them Monday morning the state would have faced an 'indeterminately long' electricity crisis. He said: 'It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.' ‹ Slide me › Energy officials had seen huge amounts of supply dropping off the grid as temperatures cropped cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and to stop wind turbines from spinning. Plunging temperatures also caused Texans to turn up their heaters, including many inefficient electric ones. Demand spiked to levels normally seen only on the hottest summer days, when millions of air conditioners run at full tilt. Magness added: 'What happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you're sunk.' Share this article Share Texans were on Thursday beginning to see power restored. But the storm has left at least 15 people dead across the state; In the Houston area, one family died from carbon monoxide as their car idled in their garage.A 75-year-old woman and her three grandchildren were killed in a fire that authorities said might have been caused by a fireplace they were using. And Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has accused ERCOT of misleading the public with messages that the grid was ready for the storm.Furious Texans are also demanding answers after it emerged energy producers were warned their equipment would not withstand such a cold snap. After the state's last major freeze, during the 2011 Super Bowl held in Arlington, Texas, a federal analysis found that energy producers' procedures for winterizing their equipment 'were either inadequate or were not adequately followed' in many cases. Defending the grid, Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, told The Tribune: 'As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could've been in blackout. ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn't worse is because of those grid operators.'The operators who took those actions to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this whole event.'But Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Hou