Texas power grid was 4 minutes, 37 seconds away from 'total collapse' - New York Post

The Texas power grid was “four minutes 37 seconds away from a total collapse” during the recent historic winter storm — meaning that the state could have been left in the dark for weeks, according to a report.

“This was a devastating event,” ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said in his opening statements at the board meeting.

Officials said ERCOT lost 48.6 percent of power generation during the height of the outages — and if the dip had continued, remaining generators would have begun tripping offline, leading to a possible crash of the system that would have required a so-called “black start.”.

During the storm, 356 generators were knocked offline, nearly doubling what Texas experienced during its last major winter storm in 2011, KHOU reported.

ERCOT officials said Wednesday that it has 13 units that it has contracted with in case of a blackout, but six of those experienced outages last week.

On Tuesday, ERCOT announced in a notice to the Public Utility Commission of Texas that four of its board members will resign effective Wednesday

“The State of Texas will continue to investigate ERCOT and uncover the full picture of what went wrong, and we will ensure that the disastrous events of last week are never repeated,” Abbott’s statement read in part