At least one person died in the freezing weather. High demand for electricity is forecast to continue into Saturday.
Sign up for The BriefHOUSTON — As freezing temperatures enveloped Texas late Thursday and into Friday morning, demand for electricity shattered the grid operator’s peak expectations for the maximum amount of power people would use to stay warm this winter.
“That’s been the big surprise so far,” said Daniel Cohan, an atmospheric scientist at Rice University. “The demand forecast wildly underestimated how much electricity Texans used last night.” Temperatures dropped to single digits across the state Thursday, with lows hitting 1 degree in parts of the Panhandle Thursday night, according to the National Weather Service. The winter weather brought wind gusts up to 40 mph in parts of North Texas. Some parts of the state saw light flurries, but the precipitation did not stick to the ground.news reportsThe grid operator’s performance so far highlighted the uncertainty in forecasting power demand in such rare, freezing conditions, Cohan said.
The Texas electric grid is designed primarily to be reliable during the summer, said Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. Power plants aren’t housed in buildings to keep in heat but rather left exposed so heat can escape in the summer. This, of course, becomes a problem in the winter.
But soaring electricity use further showed that ERCOT has done little to encourage reducing demand at the individual level, helping people improve energy efficiency of their homes, for example, or paying them to turn the thermostat down, said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas.
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