February 19, 2021 • EPE Related News
While millions of Texas homes face rolling blackouts, experience keeps El Paso's lights on
While millions of Texas homes face rolling blackouts, experience keeps El Paso's lights on
As the rest of Texas battles rolling blackouts, this week’s winter storms haven’t impacted El Paso’s electricity.
That’s because the Borderland is on a different system, and one that’s prepared for a freeze like this one.
“How they didn’t plan for something like this is pretty disappointing,” Dallas-Fort Worth resident Monika Schneider said.
Record-low temperatures have dealt a knockout blow to the state of Texas’s energy grid, as more than 3.2 million homes in the state were without power as of Tuesday night according to PowerOutage.US, a website that tracks outages nationwide.
While most major cities in Texas struggled to keep the lights and heat on, El Paso wasn’t one of them.
“We had less than 3,000 of our customers that were impacted by an outage that was five minutes or less,” El Paso Electric VP of Customer Care Eddie Gutierrez said.
El Paso isn’t supplied by the same power grid as most of the state, but it also saw record-low temperatures this week.
A spokesperson for El Paso Electric said their system was still running smoothly thanks to a plan a decade in the making.
“The big lesson of the freeze of 2011 was to make sure we’re just as prepared for extreme weather in the cold,” Gutierrez said.
After subzero temperatures rocked the Borderland ten years ago, the company decided to winterize their power plants, prepping them to withstand storms like this week’s.
“For power plants and equipment that had not had that experience before, it certainly created difficulties and challenges there,” Gutierrez said.
One of those communities has been the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where Monika Schneider’s family went without power for nearly 36 hours as temperatures fell below zero.
“It’s been very emotional, just because I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Schneider said.
Schneider and her family were able to spend Monday night in a hotel, and as of Tuesday afternoon their electricity was slowly coming back online.
But they’re still looking for answers about how they lost power in the first place.
“This is a failure, I feel like, on the part of our providers,” Schneider said. “Just how they’re overtaxed and they’re having to randomly select, kind of ‘Hunger Games’ style, who’s the sacrifice.”
On Tuesday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said close to two-thirds of the power lost in the grid came from thermal sources such as nuclear and natural gas, with one-third of the lost energy coming from wind turbines.
Manufacturers in Santa Teresa produce those turbines for use across the state.
CBS4 reached out to manufacturer TPI to ask if any of its turbines had been impacted by the winter weather.
The company didn’t respond in time for this story.
ERCOT oversees electricity production across the state’s grid.
Its last update on Tuesday morning was that it’s working to bring power back, but the cold temperatures have still been shutting down its generators.