TEXAS POWER PLANTS BACK ONLINE BUT MILLIONS STILL LACK ELECTRICITY

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on Thursday (Friday, February 19, 2021, in Manila) that all power generating plants in the state were back online but hundreds of thousands of homes remain without energy because of downed lines and other issues after a ferocious winter storm and cold snap, Idrees Latif, Brad Brooks, Barbara Goldberg, Nathan Layne and Jonathan Allen reported for Reuters.

While welcoming the progress, other leaders in Texas warned that the state’s energy grid would remain extremely “fragile” for a few days and that the cold weather that created the problems would stick around through the weekend. Some 325,000 households still do not have power, down from 2.7 million on Wednesday, and more than 13 million Texans are seeing interruptions in their water services.

Energy operators and state leaders including Abbott are facing withering criticism for the prolonged outages due to freezing temperatures that began four days ago. Abbott said he has asked state legislators to push through laws mandating that all energy generation plants in Texas “winterize” their facilities like those in colder states do in the hope that future cold snaps don’t result in electrical grid failures.

“What happened this week to our fellow Texans is absolutely unacceptable and can never be replicated again,” Abbott told an afternoon news conference. The governor lashed out at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a cooperative responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity, which he said had told officials before the storm that the grid was prepared for the cold weather.

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