(Bloomberg) — The winter storm battering Texas is expected to intensify overnight, bringing more snow, ice and frigid temperatures nearly one year after an Arctic blast overwhelmed the state’s power grid and triggered deadly blackouts.
State officials say the electrical system will hold this time, but the big test will come Friday morning when power demand is expected to peak. So far there’s no sign of the type of system-wide failure that triggered rolling blackouts last year after power plants went down across the state.
“The power grid is performing very well at this time,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said during a Thursday news conference. “The Texas power grid is the most reliable and resilient it’s ever been.”
This is a crucial moment for Texas, where last year’s cold snap led to blackouts that left more than 200 people dead. This current storm is testing whether Abbott and lawmakers have done enough to bolster the electrical system, including new rules requiring generating plants to winterize. Critics, however, say the reforms didn’t do enough to ensure the natural gas-fueled system doesn’t freeze up again in the cold, choking off fuel to power plants.
See: Texas Had All Year to Prep for Cold, and It’s Not Ready
Still, about 47,000 homes and businesses were without power at 2:30 p.m. local time, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages reported on utility websites.
“These are localized outages that are not related to system-wide reliability issues,” Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, said Thursday in a media briefing. “The grid remains strong, reliable, and it is performing well in this winter-weather event.”
While it’s cold in Texas now, the worst will come overnight, according to William Iwasko, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Lubbock office. The Panhandle region could fall to -3 degrees Fahrenheit (-19 Celsius) and Dallas may get down to 13 degrees. However, the storm is moving through fairly quickly, and temperatures could be close to normal on Saturday. That’s a key difference from last year’s storm, which lingered for days.
“It’s obviously quite cold, but the duration of that cold won’t be very long,” Iwasko said.
Texas has been bracing for the worst in this latest storm, which is part of a massive cold front that stretches to Maine. Many schools, universities and churches across the state have closed. Grocery stores have been left depleted as residents stocked up on food this week. Even sea turtles off the Texas coast are under threat from the cold.
Winter storm warnings and advisories span almost the entire state. Temperatures in Amarillo were at 8 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, while Dallas was 23 degrees and Midland, the business heart of the oil- and natural gas-rich Permian Basin, was 9 degrees.
“It’s not looking like a repeat of what happened last year, but the cold temperatures will certainly have some impact on the power situation,” said Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Prediction Center.
Airlines canceled almost 4,800 flights on Thursday as ice and snow advanced on a swath of the U.S. from Texas to the Northeast for a second day. About two-thirds of the flights were canceled at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, while more than 80% were scrubbed at Dallas Love Field and 79% in Austin, according to FlightAware.com.
Some natural gas wells have frozen in places like Texas and neighboring Oklahoma, shutting about 5% of overall domestic output during the peak demand season for the furnace and power-plant fuel, according to Jade Patterson, an analyst at BloombergNEF. The interruptions will take as long as five days to restore once temperatures moderate, he said.
The Texas Oil & Gas Association said natural gas production will continue sliding as the storm freezes wells and other equipment in the biggest gas-producing state. Early indicators “suggest production declines will increase throughout the day,” the industry group said in a Thursday statement.
Meanwhile, wind is providing an unexpected benefit to the state’s electrical grid. Wind farms were producing about 17.5 gigawatts at 9:55 a.m. local time, well above prior forecasts, to account for about 30% of the grid’s electricity supply, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. A gigawatt is enough to power about 200,000 Texas homes.
“We expected significant icing in the western part of the state,” Ercot Interim Chief Executive Officer Brad Jones said in the briefing. “That has not occurred as severely as expected.”
Ercot expects electricity demand to approach a record high on Friday morning as frigid weather spurs heating needs, with power consumption peaking at around 74.7 gigawatts.
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