A group that manages a large percentage of Texas’s power supply issued an alert ahead of a forecasted cold front this weekend that is expected to send temperatures plunging.
Further, AccuWeather described it as the “coldest weather so far” this winter season. “This outbreak of cold air will rival the arctic air mass right before Christmas 2022,” AccuWeather forecaster Tom Kines said in an article Wednesday.
Several forecasters said that the low temperatures that are slated to inundate the United States is due to the return of the polar vortex.
“That polar jet will be pushed further south, and guess what that does? It opens up the freezer door,” said Fox Weather Meteorologist Kendall Smith, who added: “All of that cold, arctic air that has been bottled up right over Canada, right over the Arctic, is going to be blasting its way right into the Lower 48.”
Last month, ERCOT said that its inspectors were deployed to examine electric generation units and transmission facilities to strengthen efforts to prepare for the winter season.
“The winter preparedness efforts made by market participants, reinforced by ERCOT weatherization inspections, continue to strengthen the reliability and resiliency of the ERCOT grid,” said ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas, reported Reuters.
More than half of the United States and parts of Canada, home to around 180 million people, could fall short of electricity this winter owing to a lack of natural gas infrastructure, the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) warned in November.
The Texas grid operator has been concerned about extreme weather after a winter in February 2021 left millions without power for days as ERCOT fought to prevent a grid collapse due to the suspension of an unusually high amount of generation.
Also, a storm in December 2022 brought sub-freezing temperatures and extreme weather warnings to roughly two-thirds of the United States, prompting generators to add more power to the grid, while power prices in Texas spiked to $3,700 per megawatt hour.
The grid operator announced earlier this month that it had canceled the procurement of an extra 3,000 megawatts of winter power reserves after receiving bids for only 11.1 MW of capacity.
