Power plants in Texas say they are prepared for the cold

Texas power plants made the necessary upgrades to guard against cold weather and prevent a repeat of the devastating blackouts caused by last February’s cold snap, according to the state’s grid operator.

The Texas Electric Reliability Council (Ercot) inspected 302 generating units, which accounted for 85% of supply lost due to outages during last winter’s storm, and 22 transmission stations, the grid operator said in a statement on Thursday.

Ercot will conduct follow-up inspections at 16 facilities that had not made all the necessary changes to the mandatory winterization requirements.

Ten generating units, representing around 1.7% of the grid’s fleet, had elements identified on the day of the inspection that required correction, Ercot said. Many have since been repaired and all are now fully operational. Six transmission facilities had deficiencies that were “generally minor items“And most were corrected, the operator said.

A new cold wave would test whether new regulations and other changes made to the network, such as tightening reserves, added enough protections for the system that regulators still perceive as vulnerable to a prolonged freeze.

Extreme weather last winter forced Texas power plants to go offline and cut off the natural gas that fed many of them. For days, millions of Texans were left in the dark and more than 200 people died.