Texplainer: Why Does Texas Have Its Own Power Grid? weatherforddemocrat.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from weatherforddemocrat.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Texplainer: Why Does Texas Have Its Own Power Grid? krgv.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from krgv.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Kind of stands out doesn't it?Despite the rest of the central US getting slammed by the same weather system, Texas seems unique in it's catastrophic inability to respond. Part of the reason is ERCOT.ERCOT is the Texas power grid, and it is almost unique among grid systems in that it has very few connections to…
This story was originally published in 2011.
Why does Texas have its own electric grid?
Texas secessionist inclinations have at least one modern outlet: the electric grid. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection and Texas.
The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT does not actually cover all of Texas. El Paso is on another grid, as is the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas. This presumably has to do with the history of various utilities service territories and the remoteness of the non-ERCOT locations (for example the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas, notes Kenneth Starcher of the Alternative Energy Institute in Canyon), but Texplainer is still figuring out the particulars on this.