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The latest forecasts on Friday morning suggest North Texas is in for the longest stretch of below-freezing temperatures we’ve felt since the deadly, catastrophic winter storm of 2021. In the five years since Uri froze Big D with a rarely seen fury, most of us have learned more about the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the state’s power supply than we had known in the decades leading up to 2021 combined.
Almost everyone knows about the standard ways to prepare your house for a deep freeze: let your sink faucets drip, leave your sink cabinet doors open, cover your outside water faucets, etc… But there’s that pesky grid, a thinking in which we as individuals can not control, lurking beyond our grasp. Although recent headlines suggest the grid is prepared for the surge in usage surely to be spurred by the incoming storm, we can be forgiven if we’d rather not just sit and hope the lights stay on until Tuesday, when most forecasts suggest temperatures will finally go back above freezing.
There’s a website for that.
ERCOT, which manages the state’s main power grid, has an online dashboard that continually tracks the grid’s conditions and usage.
The grid conditions meter in the middle of the page will likely make it clear how things are looking with one glance. Green is good. Easy, right? Yellow means some conservation is needed, which is less easy. Orange, red and black, all well-known as colors representing some sort of danger, indicate the grid has reached one of three emergency levels.
Emergency level 1, orange on the tracker, means there’s a risk of controlled outages. Emergency level 2, when the tracker shows red, indicates that electricity from large industrial customers who’ve agreed to have their power turned off during an emergency could be interrupted. The third emergency level is represented by black on the tracker, which is appropriately ominous. Once the grid hits that realm, prolonged, controlled and rotating outages can be deployed to balance the grid’s supply and demand.
On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the state is ready for the energy demand while issuing a disaster declaration for more than 130 counties, including Collin, Dallas, Denton, Johnson and Tarrant Counties. We think he would agree it’s a good idea to keep a close watch on ERCOT’s grid condition tracker.
“The severity of it is not quite as great, and the size of it is not quite as great as winter storm Uri,” Abbott said. “That said, people would be making a mistake if they don’t take it seriously.”
