Eric Berger

Good morning. Temperatures are bottoming out at 10 to 15 degrees across much of the metro area in what will be the region’s coldest night in more than three decades. The city’s official low temperature, measured at Bush Intercontinental Airport, looks to be 12 degrees.

Making matters worse today, power outages persist across the state, with more than 4.1 million customers without power. Many of these power outages are concentrated in and around the Houston area. Weather conditions will begin to slowly improve today, but there are no reliable estimates for when widespread power will be restored. We discussed why in a post on Monday.

Tuesday

Clearing skies and winds shifting to come from the east later today will help warm temperatures somewhat. Most areas south of Interstate 10 should reach above freezing later today, but road conditions are iffy this morning. Some streets dried out with Monday’s sunshine, but roads and bridges that remained wet iced over again on Monday night. Sunshine later this morning should help with most roadways later today.

However, precipitation will return this evening and overnight as moisture moves in from the Gulf of Mexico. Most likely the precipitation will begin around midnight, but we can’t rule out it starting earlier. For Houston, it should begin as rain, but could transition to freezing rain over night. North of a line from Matagorda to Houston to Winnie, we can probably expect temperatures to freeze tonight. Galveston and Brazoria counties, for the most part, are unlikely to rain transition to freezing rain as they will remain above 32 degrees.

Bottom line: Travel Tuesday evening and overnight in Houston and could be very problematic due to icy roads. For Montgomery County and points north accumulating freezing could be exceedingly dangerous, and pose problems for power lines.

Wednesday

By mid-morning Wednesday, or shortly thereafter, temperatures should rise above freezing across nearly all of the metro area, and this should melt ice. Highs in Houston will reach about 40 degrees, if not a touch warmer. Some additional sleet or light snow is possible Wednesday night, but this seems unlikely to be too problematic. Areas south of Interstate 10 are unlikely to freeze.

Thursday

The precipitation should end by late Wednesday night, setting the stage for a dry and cold Thursday, with highs near 40 degrees. Expect one more very cold night on Thursday night, with lows in the 20s. Fortunately, it will be dry,

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

As high pressure comes to dominate our weather, expect sunny skies on Friday, with highs in the 40s, with temperatures reaching the 60s by the weekend. At last, our winter blast will be at an end. Not soon enough.

Millions of customers in the greater Houston region continue to experience some of our coldest weather in decades without the benefit of electricity to heat their homes. (Full disclosure, I am one of them, and have been since 2 am CT. I am typing this from my office, wearing a winter jacket).

To understand what is going on, and when the power might return, I spoke this afternoon with Kenny Mercado, CenterPoint Energy’s Executive Vice President for Electric Utility.

First, it is important to understand how power generation works in Texas. Power plants across the state generate electricity from natural gas, coal, wind, solar, and other sources. This is all put onto the grid, which is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Then it is up to companies like CenterPoint to deliver electricity to your home through its network of lines and poles. (Reliant, the sponsor of Space City Weather, markets and sells electricity to the customer. They are not directly responsible for generation or delivery).

What happened

As of 2 pm on Monday, about 1.1 million of CenterPoint’s 2.6 million customers are without power in the greater Houston area. Mercado said customers without power are unlikely to get electricity back today, and quite possibly not tonight—when temperatures are forecast to reach near all-time record lows.

Two things happened last night to contribute to these outages. First, demand was extraordinarily high across the state, Mercado said. And then, beginning at about 1 am, generating units started to shut down. This is almost certainly due to extremely cold conditions. Eventually about one-third of the anticipated capacity went offline. This included a handful of freezing wind turbines, but the majority of the volume losses were due to coal and natural gas plants going offline.

CenterPoint had been planning to manage increased demand overnight and today through rolling outages, which would last about 30 to 45 minutes. However, when power plants began going offline, CenterPoint had to prioritize circuits that fed power to emergency units, such as hospitals and police stations. After this, there just was not enough capacity to implement rolling outages so if your power went out, it mostly stayed out. (Note: If you have power, do your part by conserving energy. If you use fewer watts, access to the grid can be expanded to others).

Although some small generating units are beginning to come back online, Mercado said demand for electricity will increase tonight as temperatures bottom out. Thus, he said, for those currently without power, “It’s pretty risky to assume the power will come back on tonight.” I realize that’s a pretty sobering statement.

Mercado said he is hopeful that decreased demand on Tuesday (statewide temperatures should be 10 to 15 degrees warmer) as well as more generating units returning will allow for power to be restored to more locations, if not all of the state.

Blame to go around

This obviously is a monumental screw-up by the state of Texas, ERCOT, and the companies responsible for power generation in Texas. Why was demand not better anticipated? How are generating plants rated for cold weather production? The list of questions goes on and on. There is plenty of blame to go around, as it seems likely that people will lose their lives due to cold, or medical needs for electricity.

Be wary of those quick to scapegoat wind turbines or any single government official or political sides for this failure. This is a failure of the whole government and a lack of sensible regulation of electricity generators. We need to learn from this mistake so that it is not repeated. After our teeth stop chattering, of course.

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.