“We understand many PEC (Local electric company) members have been without power, some for an extended period of time. We understand the frustration this can cause. We want to explain the events that have required the majority of these outages.
Like other electric utilities across Texas, PEC is complying with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT) directive to implement service interruptions to ensure stability across the entire statewide grid. The demand for electricity on the ERCOT grid is currently greater than the supply of generated electricity. To protect the grid and ensure it remains stable, the demand is lessened in a controlled way. One way to lessen demand is to conserve electricity, and many of our members are graciously responding to these pleas. It’s greatly appreciated!
When demand cannot be adequately reduced through conservation and other measures, ERCOT can require that PEC reduce demand by a specific amount:
The requirement to decrease demand can happen almost instantaneously, and ERCOT can change the amount of the required decrease, up or down, almost instantaneously.
PEC interrupts service to different feeders across PEC’s system for limited periods of time. This has the effect of turning off electricity to the homes and offices on those feeders.
PEC “rotates” these interruptions, meaning that when one set of interruptions is restored, PEC will interrupt service on a different set of feeders; this ensures the same amount of load is interrupted each time, therefore keeping the same decreased demand on the system.
In addition to these interruptions, the extreme temperatures and icy winter weather have led to infrastructure damage across our 8,100 square mile service territory. The forecast says the Hill Country is in for another hard freeze overnight. These temperatures have created hazardous road conditions, particularly at night, that prevent our crews from restoring infrastructure power outages until conditions improve. Our lineworkers and other PEC employees have been working diligently around-the-clock to safely make restorations as quickly as possible. And we have made progress! But we know there are still members without power, and we are working to get everyone restored as quickly as is safely possible.
This combination of factors has made it difficult for PEC to provide the reliable electric service our members have always counted on. Unfortunately, it appears rotating service interruptions will continue until at least mid-day Wednesday at the earliest, or when the icy conditions start to dissipate. We ask our members to please bear with us as we work our hardest to restore power and resume normal operations as soon as possible.“
Self Reliance
or the Inmates are Running the Asylum
Management has not been to the complex since early Sunday. That’s 4 days ago.
Water is shutoff and electricity is on a system of rolling blackouts. The picture below shows a group of individuals dipping water from the frozen swimming pool.
©2021 Thomas E Williams
