ABC13 2/15/2021
Governor Greg Abbott says the massive outages leaving millions in the dark Monday were caused by private power companies that "fell short," calling it the winter version of "Hurricane Harvey."
"The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies," Abbott said.
In a call with ABC13, Abbott expressed frustration that power generators hadn't done enough to ensure the flow of electricity would continue.
"There's a separate part of the system that is not working right now, and those are the private companies that generate the power that goes into ERCOT. And it's those private companies that generate power that are not working," Abbott said. "They were working up until about midnight last night, but after midnight, some of them literally froze up, and were incapable of providing power, and some are still incapable of providing power."
Abbott promised that power would begin to be restored to about 200,000 residential customers as power plants begin coming back online after the winter storm that paralyzed the state left families desperate for power during the bitter cold.
After a cold event in 2011 that took power offline, power generators claim they did a better job of "winterizing" power plants, but Abbott says it didn't go far enough.
"I think after what happened in 2011, an assessment was not made to gauge for this type of event, because the last time we had this type of weather was more than 100 years ago," Abbott said. "We need to calibrate for this type of weather to make sure that the companies that are contracted with to provide the power generation in the state of Texas are going to be capable of providing power generation in these ultra cold temperatures."
More:
https://abc13.com/texas-disaster-declaration-governor-greg-abbott-winter-weather-winterizing-roads/10342268/