Widespread power outages on Houston’s coldest day in decades

Like many of you, my home in League City has been without power since about 2 a.m. this morning. The power went out just as the winds came up and temperatures really began to plunge across the Houston area.

Before the winter storm impacted the region, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said there would need to be rolling blackouts that would last 15 to 45 minutes. However, what is happening across much of the Houston area is more significant than that, or power lines affected by ice.

“These are not rolling blackouts. We are dealing with systemwide power outages across the state,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted shortly after 8 a.m. on Monday morning.

ERCOT is responsible for managing the flow of power across the state. Companies such as CenterPoint are responsible for maintaining the “lines and poles” that deliver electricity to your home. That CenterPoint’s website is experiencing technical problems this morning is not helping to clarify the situation.

One local public official told me that ERCOT has had to take several power generating plants offline, presumably due to the extremely cold weather. This is unfortunate, given that these conditions have been forecast to occur for almost a week now.

I don’t have confidence in any time frame for when power might be restored to the metro Houston area. It’s really outside my area of expertise. But this is a bad situation when Houston is seeing high temperatures around 20 degrees today, and will be much colder tonight, and we can’t be certain when the heat will come back on.

We’ll have a weather update by around 1 p.m. this afternoon.