Reuters
Icy weather chills Texas wind energy as deep freeze
grips much of U.S.
Steve Gorman
Sun, February 14, 2021, 8:01 PM
By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) - Ice storms knocked out nearly half the
wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a
rare deep freeze across the state locked up turbine
towers while driving electricity demand to record
levels, the state's grid operator reported.
Responding to a request from Governor Greg Abbott,
President Joe Biden granted a federal emergency
declaration for all 254 counties in the state on
Sunday, authorizing U.S. agencies to coordinate
disaster relief from severe weather in Texas.
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The winter energy woes in Texas came as bone-chilling
cold, combined with snow, sleet and freezing rain,
gripped much of the United States from the Pacific
Northwest through the Great Plains and into the mid-
Atlantic states over the weekend.
An Arctic air mass causing the chill extended
southward well beyond areas accustomed to icy weather,
with winter storm warnings posted for much of the Gulf
Coast region, Oklahoma and Missouri, the National
Weather Service said.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the
state's grid operator, issued an alert asking
consumers and businesses to conserve power, citing
record-breaking energy demands due to extreme cold
gripping the state.
"We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation
outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited
natural gas supplies available to generating units,"
the agency said.
Wind farms in West Texas, stricken by weekend ice
storms, were particularly hard hit.
Of the 25,000-plus megawatts of wind-power capacity
normally available in Texas, some 12,000 megawatts was
out of service as of Sunday morning "due to the winter
weather event we're experiencing in Texas," ERCOT
spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said.
Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of
energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power
supplies last year, behind natural gas, which
represented 45%, according to ERCOT figures.
Forecasts call for heavy snow and freezing rain to
spread across a larger swath of central and eastern
sections of the country through Monday, with a storm
front in the West likely to dump 1 to 2 feet of snow
in the Cascades and northern Rockies through Tuesday,
according to the weather service.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional
reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston and Heather Timmons
in Washington; editing by Diane Craft)
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