Dallas-Fort Worth electric power outages may continue through Friday, as more snow falls

The leader of a North Texas electrical cooperative warned that power blackouts that have plagued Dallas-Fort Worth for days could continue through Friday — even as the region braces for more snowfall.

“If you’re in the rolling blackouts, it’s not going to stop. It’s probably going to be this way for a few more days, unless something changes at the grid level,” Darryl Schriver, president and chief executive officer of Tri-County Electric Cooperative, said in a video posted on the group’s Facebook page.

Tri-County delivers electricity in 16 Texas counties, and has customers in cities such as Azle, Granbury and Keller. It provides electrical power delivery to some areas in North Texas not served by the largest deliverer, Oncor.

In his video posted about noon Tuesday, Schriver also said that, while the state likely would be dealing with blackouts for several more days, he was cautiously optimistic that the worst of it would soon pass. On Tuesday morning, nearly 4.5 million Texans remained without power, including some residents who had been without electricity for more than 24 hours.

The rolling blackouts are supposed to be spread across a wide area of the population, and initially officials said they expected the outages to last only 30 to 45 minutes at a time. But because of a variety of factors related to the state’s aging electric grid, the outages have not been spread evenly — with some Dallas-Fort Worth residents being without power since Monday, and others not losing power at all.

Schriver said he had spoken Tuesday morning with officials from the agency that manages the state’s grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, who were ordering electricity deliverers such as Tri-County and Oncor to reduce their energy consumption through rolling blackouts.

With temperatures still in the teens Tuesday and several inches of snow or ice expected by Wednesday morning, North Texans reacted with confusion and anger as the state’s electrical grid operator failed to restore power to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Many Dallas-Fort Worth residents said they had gone more than 24 hours without lights and heat — a matter that was made much worse for more than 200,000 people in north Fort Worth who were to boil water before consuming it for at least the next two days, after one of the city’s water treatment plants lost electrical power.

When ERCOT posted an item on Twitter warning residents of rolling blackouts Tuesday, one Austin resident replied: “Yeah, and you said ‘rolling outages’ yesterday too. We’re all in this together, but let’s be in it together. Those of us without power for +20 hours need some heat.”

Gov. Greg Abbott called for emergency action in the ongoing legislative session to reform ERCOT, in response to the agency’s failures during the past 48 hours.

Abbott said ERCOT had been “anything but reliable” over the past couple of days.

Bill Magness, ERCOT chief executive officer, told the Star-Telegram’s television partner WFAA that the number of megawatts offline had grown to 45,000 megawatts on Tuesday, up from 34,000 megawatts offline on Monday. A megawatt of electricity can power about 500-650 homes a year.

Magness said the outages occurred because 70 to 80 of Texas’ power plants — the state has 680 of them in all — are offline.

He said ERCOT cannot get power from the eastern United States power grid because other cities and states in that area also are dealing with outages. He said ERCOT isn’t connected to the western U.S. electrical grid.

Another option is to get additional electricity from Mexico, but Magness said Mexico can only provide 450 megawatts of electricity.

“The number one job of everybody here at ERCOT is to get people’s lights back on. We’re seeing demand in the winter nearly like we see at the top of the summer, when we’re all using our air conditioners,” Magness told WFAA. “We have seen nothing like this honestly in Texas, that has covered the state like the storm has. It increased demand to an extreme, extraordinary height, and then the storm also made it difficult for the supply to be provided.”

In Fort Worth, the city’s economic director called the power outages a “colossal failure,” and urged the city to address it.

“This has been such a colossal failure,” Robert Sturns, Fort Worth economic development director, wrote Tuesday on his Twitter feed. “So many without power and water. I hope we have some serious discussions about upgrading our energy infrastructure after this.”

Staff Writer Eleanor Dearman contributed to this report.