This simple paperwork blunder left Texans cold during the deadly freeze
Jay Root, Eric Dexheimer, Jeremy Blackman, Staff writers
March 17, 2021Updated: March 17, 2021 8:38 a.m.
San Antonio Express-News
When Texas lawmakers met last month to begin sifting through the wreckage of the state’s energy grid, many expected to hear tales of poorly insulated power plants rendered inoperable by the latest winter storm.
Instead, energy executives raised an even more confounding problem: dozens of natural gas facilities had not filled out a three-page application for outage exemptions before the storm, meaning their facilities lost power at a moment when their fuel was needed most to feed struggling power plants.
“We had basically people calling saying hey, turn a power plant back on, or turn a gas processor back on, and it’s like, it’s too late,” said Curtis Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corp., whose subsidiary, Luminant, is the state’s largest power generator. “You can’t do it when you’re in the middle of it.”
Oncor scrambled to flip power on to more than 150 gas facilities in the Permian Basin after receiving urgent calls from the Public Utility Commission that gas providers needed their power restored, said Allen Nye, chief executive of Texas’s largest electricity delivery company.
The problem, Morgan and Nye said, was that unlike hospitals, 911 call centers and fire stations, many gas production plants had never been identified as “critical” facilities, a designation that could have shielded them from outages during emergencies.
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