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Oncor officials apologized to the Dallas City Council on Wednesday for their role in the nearly weeklong winter storm power outages last month. The company also vowed to improve communication with the city and residents, and declared that intentional bias did not play a role in what areas lost power.
But Oncor Electric Delivery Co. did not present any data on affected customers, their locations or how long they lacked power.
Some executives acknowledged that the Texas electricity distributor failed to give customers accurate estimates of how long blackouts would last or inform them promptly when outages were out of the utility’s control.
Additionally, though millions of people contacted Oncor’s call center the week of the storm, many were unable to reach anyone, the executives said.
Information was “changing minute to minute, and we didn’t do a good enough job keeping our customers informed minute to minute as we were walking through this deal,” said Charles Elk, Oncor’s customer operations director. The company says it provides power to more than 10 million Texans.
Oncor executives spoke during a City Council briefing two weeks after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s energy grid, stopped ordering Oncor and other utilities to shed power to avoid a total systemwide blackout. Both the grid operator and the company face lawsuits over their storm response.
ERCOT officials said the entire grid was minutes from collapsing on Feb. 15 as extreme weather shut down power generators during record demand for electricity.
The state’s top utilities regulator resigned Monday, following the exit of at least six ERCOT board members.
City Council members, several of whom personally lost electricity, criticized the overall lack of communication from Oncor, saying it left residents confused and misinformed about the outages and how long they would last.
Council members also said updates from the utility during the storm were not provided quickly enough in Spanish. Confusion swirled around which areas still had power and which ones lacked it at any given time, with some areas never losing power.
“People sat in their houses for days waiting for the power to come on at any moment,” said council member David Blewett.
Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates called Oncor’s communication with the public during the storm “abysmal.”
Council member Adam Bazaldua called for someone in the company’s communication department to be “held accountable.”
Oncor executives told the council that they shed power Feb. 15 to 17 and that everything they did was to prevent the entire grid from collapsing.
About 40% of major lines from Oncor substations remained online via reserves, and if they had been cut off or had failed, the whole grid would have gone down, Elk said. Officials did not specify where those areas were.
He said that’s why some neighborhoods never lost power and how hospitals, 911 call centers and other critical facilities weren’t in the dark.
Mark Carpenter, Oncor’s senior vice president of transmission and distribution operations, said the company began preparing for the storm a week before snow started falling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area late on Valentine’s Day. The company brought in more than 2,300 workers from out-of-state utilities to help it prepare.
Before the storm hit, Carpenter said, Oncor initially planned only controlled outages — staggered, intentional cuts of power all around the city for 15 to 30 minutes at a time.
The brief outages would be followed by longer stretches with electricity.
But there wasn’t enough energy being generated to keep the outage rotation going, so some areas stayed dark, Carpenter said.
The cold weather caused transformers, fuses and other equipment to fail, leading to other outages that weren’t planned, he said. Oncor’s system saw 2,300 transformers fail, he said.
Carpenter said Oncor did at times have limited control of where outages occurred. He said the company never intended to leave people without power for hours or days.
“Your electrical providers totally failed you,” said Carpenter, who also is an ERCOT board member.
Debbie Dennis, Oncor’s chief customer officer, said the utility “didn’t move quickly enough” to tell the public when outages moved from “rotating” to “sustained” and that many who called were unable to reach anyone.
Oncor received more than 3.3 million calls from residents the week of the storm, she said. By comparison, its call center got 2.2 million calls during the entirety of 2020.
Dennis said Oncor’s own review found no evidence that purposeful bias played a role in where outages occurred.
She cited as an example power being cut off to 178 electrical feeders north of Interstate 30 while 170 were cut off south of the highway, an economic and racial divider in the city. She didn’t say how many customers both figures encompassed.
“You can cherry pick data, and in some cases some areas, cities or ZIP codes fared better in the process,” Dennis said. “But as we look at the process overall, we have not found evidence that institutional bias or any intentional conduct favored one city or one area over another.”
Several council members asked Oncor to provide either raw data or a report on the information presented.
Mayor Eric Johnson told Oncor to thoroughly review all of its analysis to ensure that no intentional or unintentional bias affected the power outages.
Elk, Oncor’s customer operations director, said the company would donate $1 million to community nonprofits in its service area to help people affected by the storms.