The good news is that both of the experts we talked to you believe the Texas power grid has made significant strides in resilience since the catastrophic Winter Storm in February 2021, that caused wide-scale outages.
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The bad news is that wildcards and unknowns still exist, particularly at the neighborhood level.
CenterPoint has reported the company has worked feverishly in the months since Hurricane Beryl (2.1 Million outages at peak), to clear lines from surrounding vegetation.
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Broken limbs, by wind, by freezing, may still pose a risk, especially inside tree-lined neighborhoods.
Doug Lewin / Publisher, Texas Energy & Power Newsletter:
“I’ll try to keep it simple, but it’s but it is not just one sort of point of failure. It takes several things going wrong for us to and then some kind of rolling outages. Think the biggest vulnerability on the system is freeze offs in the gas supply system. I think we will see some of those over the next few days, but probably not enough to cause problems and because some of the other factors won’t be as problematic, 1 or 2 of these things don’t make rolling outages.
Daniel Cohan / Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University:
I think statewide we’re going to have plenty of supply to meet the very high demand that we’re going to have on these very cold mornings, I think. Always the biggest risk comes at the neighborhood scale of the possibility when we have this freezing rain, freezing conditions that Texas doesn’t experience very often, that there could be local areas where lines or transformers get affected. But in terms of the the big scale issues like we saw in 2021, I think the state should be just fine unless there’s some really unexpected events.