TEXAS, USA — UPDATE (5:25 p.m. Monday, Feb. 15): AEP Texas said current outages expected to continue through at least Tuesday, possibly Wednesday.
A release from the electric provider said, "Circuit loading due to the length of time customers have been without power could result in some customer groups not having their service restored before Wednesday or later. As of 4 p.m., over 367,000 AEP Texas customers remained without power."
UPDATE: The City of Abilene is asking residents to limit non-essential water usage to help save electricity used by water systems. Customers are asked to curtail water usage to only critically-essential uses.
ORIGINAL STORY: As of 10 a.m. Monday, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas reported at least 2,669,866 customers without power across the state.
In West Texas Monday morning, almost 30,000 appear to be without power, some reporting outages since 4 a.m.
ERCOT has continued its request for electric providers to continue controlled outages.
According to AEP Texas, at 1:25 a.m. Monday, ERCOT directed transmission and distribution companies to begin controlled rotating outages as an emergency procedure to avoid a sustained large-scale outage and prevent long-term damage to the electric system.
AEP Texas started rotating the areas affected so that consumers are impacted for a limited amount of time - typically 30 minutes to an hour, according to . The amount of time required to restore service could be delayed in some cases because of system and weather conditions.
Sunday evening, the Concho Valley Electric Cooperative issued a release asking its customers to conserve energy as much as possible to avoid overloading capacity on an already strained system.
An ERCOT representative said it determines what kind of reductions to transmission systems are necessary
ERCOT provided updates Monday morning to discuss the current power situation. We will provide updates as we receive them.
