MICHAEL CORBIN
There is no doubt Texas legislators, local officials and citizens will spend the foreseeable future investigating the massive power outages that impacted the state the week of Feb. 15, 2021. Record cold temperatures, huge increases in electrical usage, and an isolated electrical grid all led to issues impacting millions.
For SWEPCO customers in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, the impacts from the winter storm were quite different. Why?
SWEPCO began to prepare for the winter weather a week prior to the weather reaching our area. Messaging on social media, our website and app, texts, radio and television interviews and printed advertisements asked our customers to prepare for the predicted weather and possible multi-day power outages. SWEPCO crews and equipment were staged throughout the areas we expected to be impacted by snow and ice. Additional line and tree crews were called in to assist SWEPCO with restoration. Base camps to house and feed workers, while maintaining COVID-19 protocols, were established in Mansfield, Shreveport and Center, Texas. SWEPCO was prepared to begin restoration work as soon as conditions allowed our crews to safely start repairs. As a result, SWEPCO was able to quickly restore outages in the Shreveport-Bossier City area. For our customers farther south, between Natchitoches and Leesville, where much more damage occurred, most power was restored by the weekend.
SWEPCO customers did not experience the widespread, controlled outages seen in Texas largely because of the differences in design of each area’s electrical grid. SWEPCO is part of a much larger, 14-state electrical grid managed by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). Due to the larger area served by our grid, including over 800 power generation sources feeding the grid, most of our customers experienced uninterrupted power throughout the weather event.
SWEPCO saw two periods on the mornings of Feb. 15 and 16 when SPP called for emergency controlled outages to allow power production to catch up with customer demand. Controlled outages were implemented in the Shreveport-Bossier City area – as well as multiple other locations across SWEPCO’s service area in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas – generally lasting from two to four hours on both days. Though difficult for our customers during the extreme cold, these emergency actions quickly stabilized the grid and ensured a constant steady supply of power to our customers.
Most of Texas is served by a single grid managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The ERCOT grid relies on power generation sources within the state of Texas and operates in a less regulated, competitive market. Many of the problems in Texas developed as available power supply could not keep up with customer demand over an extended period.
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE February 26 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.