updated, 9:50 p.m.
Thousands of people in Northeast Texas remain without electrical service as of Monday afternoon, as a night of record low temperatures approaches, with readings forecast to fall below zero across most of the region.
The outage-tracking website poweroutage.us reports amost one in three Oncor customers being without power as of late afternoon Monday.
"There are two major issues affecting many customers right now: winter storm outages & controlled power outages directed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas," Oncor said in a late-afternoon release Monday.
Most of Texas is served by the state’s own electrical grid, which is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Oncor is one of many private electricity providers that deliver power through ERCOT’s systems. Other power providers in Northeast Texas include Greenville Electric Utility System, Farmers Electric Cooperative, Texas-New Mexico Power Company, and others.
Early Monday morning, ERCOT released a statement saying that “emergency conditions” caused grid administrators to begin rotating outages, initially said to last 15-45 minutes.
However, thousands of Texas households and businesses have been without electricity all day long. It’s unclear to customers which outages are a result of the winter storm system, and which outages are part of planned blackouts.
As of about 9 a.m. Monday, about 30 percent of ERCOT’s generation capacity was offline, according to Jesse Jenkins, a macro-energy systems analyst and Princeton University (N.J.) faculty member. Jenkins, who credited his data to “confidential info from a market participant in ERCOT,” said that ERCOT was lacking about 30 gigawatts (GW) of its generation capacity, mostly due to natural gas-fired electricity generation plants that couldn’t receive fuel, either due to frozen gas lines or operative gas lines prioritizing customers who use gas, rather than electricity, for heating.
KETR is compiling a list of warming stations open in Northeast Texas tonight. Check back in this space for updates. If you have information to share about warming stations, please email news@ketr.org. Here's what we have as of 8:30 p.m.:
Hunt County
First United Methodist Church, 1709 State Hwy. 50, Commerce.
Generation Faith Center, 9003 S. State Hwy. 34, Quinlan.
Delta County
Delta County Community Center, 221 E. Bonham Ave., Cooper.
Hopkins County
Hopkins County Regional Civic Center, 1200 Houston St., Sulphur Springs: No bedding or food provided. Pets welcome if they can be secured, preferably in a kennel or crate.
Fannin County
Rains County
Lamar County
CitySquare Paris, 2515 Bohnam St., Paris.
Lamar Avenue Church of Christ, 3535 Lamar Ave., Paris.
Collin County (eastern)
First Baptist Church of Farmersville, 124 S. Washington St., Farmersville.
Rockwall County
Rockwall County Sheriff's Office Lobby, 950 T. L. Townsend Dr., Rockwall.
The Center At Rockwall City Place, 108 E. Washington St., Rockwall.
McLendon-Chisholm City Hall, 1371 W. Farm to Market Rd. #550, Rockwall.
Heath City Hall, 200 Laurence Dr., Heath.
Royse City Police Department, 100 W. Main St., Royse City.
