This February will mark three years since the February 2021 freeze that knocked out power across the state and left at least 246 people dead. There are now multiple efforts to import record amounts of power into ERCOT by connecting the Texas grid to other parts of the country, while still avoiding federal regulation.
Past reports showed an estimated 246 people died in that February 2021 freeze after ERCOT’s electrical grid failed due to severe cold. In the years since the storm, the state has required upgrades to winterize the grid. Another effort: to bring in a record amount of power from outside Texas.
One plan to import power into Texas is called Southern Spirit Transmission. It's a project from Pattern Energy that would build a 320-mile direct current connection between ERCOT and a transmission station on the Mississippi side of the Alabama/Mississippi state line. The project was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2014 and is expected to come online by 2029.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the project to send or receive up to 2000 megawatts of power from the southeastern US. Because the connection would be through direct current, the federal government waived its right to oversee the connection, allowing Texas to maintain independent oversight of its grid.
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Experts said Texas has existing connections to grids outside the state that amount to a total of 1,200 megawatts. The Southern Spirit Transmission project would provide a 40% larger input of power on its own.
Michael Jewell, managing attorney of Jewell and Associates, a firm that represents companies before Texas regulatory agencies and lists Pattern Energy as a client, said he thinks that if ERCOT could have tapped into that 2000 megawatts of power in 2021 "we could have had a very different outcome."
“Even if you just tapped into it when things were at its worst, it would bring in an additional amount of power that would have allowed there to be rotating outages, rather than the more static outages that we had that caused the loss of life,” Jewell said.
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During the height of the 2021 winter storm, ERCOT lost 52,000 MW of power generation. Since 1MW powers roughly 200 homes, they were short the amount of power needed to keep the lights on in 10.4 million homes. An additional 2000 MW of power would have allowed ERCOT to potentially reduce the outages by 400,000 homes but still would have left roughly 10 million Texans without power.
The ability to import power is also not guaranteed. ERCOT could only import power if other generators had power to share and after action reports showed other states were also dealing with extreme cold and had little, if any, power to share.
Our partners at The Dallas Morning News report that Louisiana and Mississippi still have to approve the Southern Spirit Transmission project. The transmission lines would run through Louisiana, but the state would not receive any power. The DMN reported that some Louisiana communities have raised concerns over the environmental impact of construction and the effect on wildlife. Supporters said the project would bring 3,000 construction jobs and significant new tax revenue to those areas, while potentially helping Texas avoid future disasters.
A similar project called Pecos West would connect Texas to the southwest US grid through El Paso, bringing up to 3000 megawatts of energy to ERCOT. Last February, the state’s PUC rejected Grid United’s initial application for the project. NBC 5 reached out to the company to ask if they’ll try to move forward with Pecos West, but we haven’t heard back.
Some who suffered the worst of the 2021 freeze said they wanted Texas’s power grid to be strong enough to stand on its own. Roger Foggle remembers the damage the winter storm brought to Fort Worth.
“The pipes were busting and things like that, it was like a third-world country,” Foggle said. “People lost their belongings, lost their money, lost their lives.”
Foggle said he spent days trying to help friends and neighbors left homeless after their power went out.
“We really have to go and get help from somewhere else?” Foggle asked. “I don’t have 100% faith in that.”
An October 2023 report from ERCOT found that the state’s grid needed to generate an additional 3,000 megawatts of power to reduce the risk of an Energy Emergency Alert possibility during a severe winter storm this winter to be below 10%.
