Texas' power company CEO claimed we're 'ready for the frigid temps' days before blackouts: meeting records
The CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) told his board of directors ahead of the storm that they were prepared for the low temperatures five days before the crisis.
According to meeting records cited by NBC-DFW, "less than a week before the storm, ERCOT officials gave assurances that the state's power plants were ready to weather the elements, raising more questions about how such a massive failure of the state's power system could happen."
According to ERCOT, 40 percent of the state's power generators, four out of every ten, were knocked offline, accounting for 46,000 megawatts or 9.2 million homes.
As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow explained Wednesday evening, a 2011 freeze, exactly ten years ago, resulted in exactly the same problem that Texas is facing now. After it was over the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a 300-page report detailing what Texas needed to do to prevent it from happening in the future. ERCOT sent "recommendations" to its power generators, who apparently didn't implement the suggestions.
The meeting records on ERCOT's website cite CEO Bill Magness saying, "We're ready for the frigid temps to come our way".
He told the board that the agency told the power plants to ensure they were winterized properly. ERCOT even went so far as to issue an annual winter assessment in September, in which it promised the public that everything would be fine over the winter.
Magness told the network that he should be trusted to handle the situation.
"The people who folks in Texas really need to trust to lead us out of this crisis are those operators who are working on 24/7 shifts to make decisions that will keep the system safe," he said.
"The blame can be assessed very soon," Magness said, "Blame will surely be assessed."
The day previously, Magness said that he's never seen anything like this before, but he joined ERCOT in 2010, according to the website, one year before the major storm cited above.
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