AUSTIN, Texas — As winter storm blackouts roil Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that operates Texas’ electrical grid, has gained sudden notoriety — as well as the unusual fact that Texas has its own electrical grid.
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The U.S. has three power grids: one covers the eastern U.S., another the western states and the Texas grid covers nearly the entire state.sd
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The grid has been thrust into the national spotlight as extreme energy demand and overloaded frozen utility plants contributed to widespread power outages across Texas, experts said.
Nearly 4.5 million customers went without electricity Tuesday, and by Wednesday over 3.1 million Texans still didn’t have the lights turned on, according to poweroutage.us.
‘Massive failure’:Why are millions of people in Texas still without power?
The breakdown sparked growing outrage and demands for answers over how Texas — whose Republican leaders as recently as last year taunted California over the Democratic-led state’s rolling blackouts — failed such a massive test of a major point of state pride: energy independence. And it cut through politics, as fuming Texans took to social media to highlight how while their neighborhoods froze in the dark Monday night, downtown skylines glowed despite desperate calls to conserve energy.
The predecessor for ERCOT was formed in the 1930s, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with regulating interstate electricity sales.
“Utilities in Texas were smart and made an agreement that no one was going to extend power outside of Texas,” Donna Nelson, who served as chair of the state Public Utility Commission, which oversees ERCOT, from 2008 to 2017, said in an ERCOT promotional video about the history of the grid.
“By eschewing transmission across state lines, the Texas utilities retained freedom,” Richard D. Cudahy wrote in a 1995 article. “This policy of isolation avoided regulation by the newly created Federal Power Commission, whose jurisdiction was limited to utilities operating in interstate commerce.”
The result was “an electrical island in the United States,” Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. “That independence has been jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the industry.”
