Last week, the Texas power grid was "4 minutes 37 seconds away from a total collapse", meaning a statewide blackout, ERCOT officials said at an emergency board meeting Wednesday.
Had it happened, Electric Reliability Council of Texas says Texas would have been in the dark for weeks if not longer.
ERCOT officials said controlled outages were implemented to prevent a statewide blackout, saying the storm was unlike anything Texas has experienced before.
Three-hundred and fifty-six generators were knocked offline during the storm nearly doubling what Texas experienced during its last major winter storm in 2011. It led to millions of Texans being in the dark for a record 70.5 hours.
ERCOT said it has 13 units that it has contracted with in case of a black-out event, but six of those experienced outages last week, officials said Wednesday.
During the meeting, ERCOT did share some of the steps it took to prepare for the winter storms. These included cancellation of transmission maintenance outages and waving COVID-19 restrictions to bring in additional support staff.
An order from the Department of Energy allowed power generators to ignore certain environmental standards, which was extremely helpful, officials said.
6 ERCOT board members who live out of state resign.
