Eric Berger

The power situation is disastrous, and it likely won’t be fixed tonight

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.

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.

 

Bitter cold weather arrives in Houston, with roads iced over

Good morning. Winter Fest 2021 has arrived in Houston, complete with frigid temperatures, snow, sleet, freezing rain, howling winds, and power outages. It is everything we expected and dreaded.

An extremely cold air mass has descended upon the area and dropped temperatures to 20 degrees or below for nearly everywhere, including the coast. With the wind chill, it feels like 0 degrees for inland areas and 5 to 10 degrees elsewhere. Wintry precipitation overnight, a combination of primarily snow and sleet, has covered most area roadways with a sheen of ice. Travel today is a bad idea.

Temperatures across Texas at 4am CT on Monday. (Pivotal Weather)

Monday

High resolution models show precipitation ending from west to east this morning, and likely moving east of the Houston metro area by around 9am. This will not preclude the possibility of some snow flurries redeveloping later this afternoon. Unfortunately, temperatures are unlikely to recover much today, with highs perhaps in the low to mid-20s across the region. The ice on roadways is not going anywhere, any time soon.

We still expect an extremely cold night across Houston, with temperatures likely ranging from about 5 degrees over inland areas to around 20 degrees along the immediate coast. These will be the region’s coldest temperatures since at least 1989, and for some areas possibly much longer than that.

Tuesday

After a bitterly cold start to the day, sunshine will help lead to modest warming as winds shift to come from the east. By Tuesday evening, we anticipate that temperatures will climb above freezing for areas south of Interstate 10. Temperatures on Tuesday night really will not fall much as the onshore flow kicks in.

Wednesday

Sunshine will go away by Wednesday, as moisture levels rise in the atmosphere and the next front approaches. Most of the metro area should reach highs in the upper 30s to low 40s on Wednesday (the coast will be warmer still), although areas north of Conroe may remain stubbornly near freezing. As precipitation chances increase on Wednesday, it appears that most of the area will see rain, but we have concerns about freezing rain in Montgomery County, and points north, both on Wednesday morning and any lingering showers Wednesday night.

High temperatures on Wednesday should bring a (brief) end to the freeze for most areas. (Pivotal Weather)

Thursday

Another very cold day, with most of the region likely only reaching a few degrees above freezing. However, we think this probably will be warm enough to melt any ice on the roads by mid-morning or so in the metro area, with some caveats about the potential for lingering ice near and north of Conroe. Much of the area will see a hard freeze on Thursday night, with lows dropping into the 20s.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

As high pressure settles in we’ll finally a see a definitive warming trend heading into the weekend, with highs in the 40s on Friday, and reaching the 60s for most areas by Saturday.

Power outages

There are two sets of power outages this morning. One is due to ice accreting on power lines, and this is affecting about 5 percent of homes in the Houston area. In addition to this, there have been rolling blackouts ordered ERCOT across the entire state that should last about 15 to 45 minutes at any one location.

Sunday morning update: Snow likely tonight for much of Houston, followed by extreme cold

Good morning. Today is the last day most of the Houston area will see above-freezing temperatures until Wednesday. We have a section at the end of this morning’s post about preparations for the upcoming hard freeze, this really is your last opportunity to do so. After today, Houston’s weather is going to be full on winter until at least Friday.

We’re going to discuss this in three phases: Winter storm on Sunday night into Monday, Extreme cold on Tuesday morning, and a Second Arctic front on Wednesday through Friday morning.

Sunday and Monday

Today will be far from pleasant, but for most of Harris and surrounding counties, temperatures through at least the early afternoon should remain above just above freezing. Additionally, any precipitation that falls before around 4 to 6pm this evening should do so as rainfall. (Note: you don’t have to get too far west of Katy, or too far north of Conroe, before you run into freezing rain today). By late afternoon or early evening, temperatures should begin to drop below freezing across the area, from west to east as an Arctic front moves into Houston.

This front will have two immediate effects. From sunset on Sunday to sunrise on Monday, temperatures will plunge into the low 20s across the metro area. And it will bring a healthy dose of precipitation to the region. If this were to fall as rain, it would be about half an inch for most locations, but due to the cold temperatures, we’re going to see some form of winter precipitation. But what kind? We talked yesterday about how, for snow to reach the ground, temperatures must remain freezing from the surface all the way to clouds where precipitation forms.

Current National Weather Service snowfall forecast for Sunday night. Subject to change! (Weather Bell)

On Sunday evening, the atmosphere is unlikely to be below freezing all the way up, so I think most areas will see a glaze of freezing rain fall before it turns to snow. We’re now reasonably confident that areas north of Interstate 10 will see on the order of 1 to 4 inches of snowfall by around mid-morning on Monday. We’re less certain what will happen closer to the coast, where there may be enough lingering “warm” air from the Gulf of Mexico to produce sleet or more freezing rain rather than snow.

The forecast models now suggest this precipitation will end by mid-morning, as the atmosphere dries out. We still can’t have complete confidence in what area roadways will look like, but the potential for a glaze of ice on the surface, covered over by snowfall, is a rather dangerous one. You should be prepared to not go anywhere from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning. Some major roadways may be cleared by authorities, but this kind of winter storm is unprecedented in recent decades because temperatures on Monday will not get high enough to melt roads. Rather, daytime temperatures will remain in the low to mid-20s. So anything that falls, will stick.

Monday night and Tuesday

We still have lots of questions about the severity of cold weather on Tuesday morning, but if the snowfall forecast verifies for Houston it will amplify the cold weather. The combination of snow cover, light winds, clearing skies and an Arctic air mass is pretty much about the most ideal conditions you could conceive for cold temperatures in Houston. However if the region gets more sleet or freezing rain, and clouds linger, temperatures could be somewhat warmer.

As a result, I think we’re looking at a range low temperatures from 5 to 15 degrees for western Harris County and Montgomery County, 10 to 20 degrees in central Houston, and 15 to 25 degrees along the coast. As Matt discussed yesterday, this would be a historic cold snap for the region.

Sunrise temperatures on Tuesday morning. (Weather Bell)

Another question we have is where temperatures may briefly rise above freezing on Tuesday. The coast is a definite yes, where highs may reach the upper 30s. Many areas south of Interstate 10 may briefly see highs of 33 degrees or slightly warmer. I do not know whether this, in combination with mostly sunny skies, will be enough to melt and dry roads. Much of the region north of Interstate 10 will remain below freezing during the daytime. Temperatures Tuesday night will only drop a little bit below freezing.

Wednesday and beyond

Part three of our collision with winter will come later in the week. Yet another storm system will approach from the west early on Wednesday, and it will draw Gulf moisture into the region. Much of the Houston metro area is likely to see another 0.5 to 1.0 inch of precipitation on Wednesday. This may start out as freezing rain early in the morning, but as daytime temperatures climb to about 40 degrees, it should turn to rain. This should also melt any lingering ice on roads.

However, temperatures on Wednesday night will probably drop below freezing for everywhere but the coast, so this sets up a situation where roads are problematic again on Wednesday night and Thursday morning due to ice. We’ll have to nail down these details in the coming days. Highs Thursday should rise above freezing and will hopefully melt any ice on the roads, but we’re going to remain close to freezing. Again, details to come on this.

Friday morning should produce the last freeze of the week (and perhaps of this winter?) (Weather Bell)

Highs Friday should finally push at least into the mid-40s, with sunny skies. That will be the end of the winter storm. By Saturday, we should be into the 60s.

Final preparation tips

These suggestions were provided by Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District.

PIPES: Protect all and any exposed pipes, shut off and drain sprinkler systems. Open cabinet doors and closet doors to get as much heat against outside facing wall pipes as possible starting Sunday night. In some cases the best course of action may be to shut off water to a structure and drain pipes overnight when water usage is low to avoid pipes freezing and bursting.

PLANTS: Heavily cover and protect any tropical vegetation, citrus, or vulnerable plants. Given the intensity and depth of the freezing conditions this will likely be a killing freeze for much of the tropical landscape of this region.

PETS: Pets and livestock should have proper shelter, feed, and water. Normal water supplies will likely freeze over including stock ponds and lakes.

PEOPLE: Persons should plan to limit outdoor exposure Monday and Tuesday as wind chills will be dangerously cold for our region. Prolonged exposure could result in frostbite and hypothermia. Please ensure your neighbors have adequate heating.

Matt will have our next update on the site by around 4 or 5 pm CT today.