After days of living in the dark in crude conditions, millions of Texans had their power restored on Thursday, bringing some relief amid the arctic blast that brought the state’s water and power infrastructure to its knees.
Early in the morning nearly a half-million residents were without electricity but by midday, just under 350,000 remained without power, according PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages across the country.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of the state power grid, said Thursday morning it had “made significant progress overnight restoring customer power, although some outages still remain throughout the state.”
However, ERCOT noted that despite bringing the lights back on, energy emergency conditions remain as the grid operator and transmission owners work to restore the remaining customers that are without power.
“We’re to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event,” said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin.
“We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on,” Woodfin said.
Areas where distribution systems were damaged by ice storms may still be experiencing loss of power, according to ERCOT. Additionally, large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help alleviate pressure on the overloaded power grid may also remain without power.
Carlos Mandez waits in line to fill his propane tanks on Wednesday in Houston. Customers had to wait over an hour in the freezing rain to fill their tanks after historic snowfall and widespread power outages in Texas.
David J. Phillip/AP
In Houston, more than 99% of CenterPoint Energy customers have regained power. But the company is still urging residents to be cautious.
“As we continue repairing equipment damaged by severe weather, we ask that you continue conserving electricity – lower your thermostat & avoid using appliances,” CenterPoint Energy tweeted.
Millions In Texas Under Boil-Water Notices Because Of Winter Storm
Some 7 million residents of Houston, Arlington, Fort Worth and Tyler have been ordered to boil their drinking water after the outages knocked treatment plants offline. Statewide, water pressure has fallen because of frozen lines, Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said.
