SAN ANTONIO – As temperatures drop, memories of the February 2021 freeze and power crisis tend to rise for some.
Even five years later, they hung like icicles over a Monday news briefing at CPS Energy headquarters. CEO Rudy Garza said he hoped the seasonal prep sessions would start to feel more routine for the community.
“We are ready for anything that mother nature has to throw at us this winter,” he said, “but I’m proud of the fact that it’s been quite some time since we’ve had a winter or summer event that has as has impacted our customers, and we hope to keep it that way this winter season.”
CPS Energy says its energy capacity is twice as high as the record winter peak demand it saw in January 2024.
But the 2021 freeze prompted a power shortage across the Texas grid, which led to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) ordering CPS Energy and other utilities to implement rolling outages to conserve power.
In Bexar County, though, those outages hit unequally. Some people went the entire freeze without having their power shut off, while others sat in the dark for up to 59 hours in all.
The utility has since said it has increased its “load shed” capacity to better manage a similar event. One of the biggest changes are addition circuits in the system, according to Chairwoman Francine Romero.
“If we did have to cut power on a rolling basis — if there was an ERCOT demand to do that — there would be more of a cascading of it instead of just certain people being out for long periods of time," Romero said to KSAT. “I think that it would be that everybody would just have...short outage periods.”
Romero also pointed to better weatherization efforts at the utilities’ power plants to ensure they can keep running if temperatures plummet.
Unlike during the freeze, CPS Energy does not plan any outages for maintenance during January or February, and Romero said the utility also has a more diversified supply of natural gas.
If another 2021-style event were to happen, Romero said “of course it would be bad,” and there would be “impacts.”
“But I firmly believe that things would be much better if it happened again,” she said.
KSAT Weather Authority Meteorologists said another freeze, like the one Texas experienced in 2021, is unlikely this year.
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