Amid the calls for conservation, NBC 5’s Katy Blakey spoke to people about lessons learned from the February 2020 power crisis.
Texans are bracing for potential rolling outages after ERCOT issued a conservation alert, asking people to curb their electricity use on Monday.
Those who lost power for days during the February 2021 winter storm are once again worried it will happen again.
“During the snow storm they had ‘rolling outages’ which did not turn out to be ‘rolling’ for us,” said Jordan Richardson of Caddo Mills.
Home with their two-day-old baby and a toddler without power and under a boil water advisory, the Richardson's ultimately braved the icy roads to stay with family in McKinney.
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“Our infrastructure wasn’t built for super cold -- that I could wrap my head around,” Richardson said. “But we deal with heat and now we’re in the hot months and we’re having issues.”
“It seems like nothing got fixed. Whatever needed to be fixed, hasn’t got fixed, Richardson said.
Amy Corby had a four-month-old daughter during the February 2021 freeze when their home lost power for days. The experience prompted her to invest in blackout curtains and a generator.
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“It gave us a lot of learning lessons for this time. We feel a little more prepared and not as stressed out, but we have neighbors with babies and we’ve already told them if the power goes out we have a generator,” Corby said. “We’ll try to keep everybody as cool as we can for as long as we can.”
Denton Municipal Electric serves 60,000 customers and learned lessons from the power crisis, too.
“We were really able to fine-tune our circuits so we’re able to minimize fewer people for a shorter amount of time,” said Bill Shepherd with Denton Municipal Electric.
If ERCOT orders rolling outages, the electricity provider says the outages will be between 30 to 45 minutes and more evenly distributed.
