SAN ANTONIO — The ERCOT grid is expecting its biggest test since last year’s snowstorm on Friday morning.
Energy experts we spoke to say they believe the grid will hold up and the state will keep power. This as tens of thousands of San Antonians lost power on Thursday
These outages were local as most of the outages here in Bexar County were due to ice and heavy winds. At 5:15 a.m., around 1,000 CPS Energy customers were without power with most of the outages reported in the north side of town. At 7 a.m., CPS Energy tweeted the number dropped to 292.
The peak usage time is expected to run until about10 a.m. this morning
As of Friday morning, ERCOT's website shows that there is enough power to meet demand. It began bringing generation online sooner than they did last year.
Still, while we head into that peak usage time, you can help to conserve energy
"Make sure any lights you're not using are off, any fans. Setting your thermostat to 67 instead of 72 or something like that. Even if you don't have electric heat, even if you have natural gas, you do use a lot of electricity for the blowers to blow the air around your house. And so, during that time, if everyone kind of conserves a little bit, I think we can keep the lights on for everyone.”
To check the outage map, you can visit CPS Energy's website here. The map also shows nearby warming centers
By 11 a.m. Friday morning, we should be in the clear.
Gov. Greg Abbott also provided an update Thursday morning on severe weather impacts across the state due to the winter storm.
He spoke along with Alternate State Operations Center in Austin and was joined by representatives from various state agencies. See the full press conference below:
You can also track ERCOT's supply and demand with a handy graph.
Here in San Antonio, there were about 30,000 CPS Energy customers without power on Thursday morning.