Texas cold snap deepens, and demand for power surges

Bloomberg

The biggest test of Texas’s newly fortified power grid arrives Friday morning, when electricity demand is forecast to surge as waking residents crank up heaters in the sub-freezing cold.
Shortly before sunrise in Dallas, it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees Celsius). Midland, in the oil- and gas-rich Permian basin, was 10. Highs will only be in the 30s.
“That’s a solid 20 degrees below average,” said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist at the US Weather Prediction Center.
Those temperatures aren’t as extreme as last year’s deep freeze that trigged sprawling blackouts and left more than 200 people dead. But they’re enough to push demand for power to close to record levels in the state. Texas’s system is expected to pass the trial. But success isn’t guaranteed. Critics have warned for months that grid managers and utilities haven’t done enough to winterise the system, while Governor Greg Abbott and other politicians have tried to reassure Texans the state is ready.
Outages struck only a few pockets of the sprawling state by early Friday, with about 17,000 homes and bossinesses without power at 6:30 a.m. local time, according to Poweroutage.us, which tracks utility outage data.
“These are localized outages that are not related to system-wide reliability issues,” Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, said earlier at a media briefing. “The grid remains strong, reliable, and it is performing well in this winter-weather event.”
Natural gas has continued to flow through the pipelines that feed many of the state’s power plants, with limited disruptions. And wind turbines, whose poor performance during last year’s deep freeze has become the focus of Abbott’s scorn, supplied far more power than expected, keeping electric heaters
humming.