Ten years ago, 241 Texas power plants couldn't take the cold. Dozens of them failed again this year.
Source: Washington Post
Ten years ago, 241 Texas power plants couldn’t take the cold. Dozens of them failed again this year.
The Washington Post compared last month’s power failures to the last big freeze. In both cases, some of the same companies failed to prepare.
By Neena Satija and Aaron Gregg
March 6, 2021 at 9:55 a.m. EST
The corporate and municipal owners of more than 30 power-generation plants in Texas appear to have failed to adequately heed a decade of warnings to better prepare for deadly winter weather, contributing to their malfunctions or shutdowns during last month’s historic winter freeze that led to statewide power outages and a humanitarian crisis.
Facilities owned by Fortune 500 energy giants NRG, Calpine Corporation and Vistra Corporation, all headquartered in Texas, and the Chicago-based Exelon, experienced shutdowns during last month’s winter storm as well as during the state’s last historic cold snap a decade ago, according to a review by The Washington Post. In testimony to state lawmakers, documents for shareholders and statements to The Post, the companies have said that last month’s problems occurred at least in part due to a failure to properly winterize equipment — in other words, to implement certain upgrades designed to protect power infrastructure from the cold. The same issue contributed to their shutdowns back in 2011.
“The entire energy sector failed Texas. We know we can do better and we must do better to make sure that this never happens again,” said Mauricio Gutierrez, chief executive of NRG, while testifying before Texas lawmakers last week. “We did suffer our share of unit problems ... for that reason, we own it. We did not perform as well as I would have hoped.”
Publicly owned power generators Austin Energy and CPS Energy, which provide electricity to San Antonio, also experienced problems during both storms, according to data provided by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a nonprofit that operates Texas’ power grid and energy trading market.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/06/texas-power-plants/
