Texas's power grid was so overloaded at the time officials decided to implement rolling blackouts that had officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas not acted when it did, the system could have broken in a catastrophic way.
The Texas Tribune reports: “‘It needed to be addressed immediately,' said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. ‘It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.' Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, ‘then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you're sunk.' Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that ‘could have occurred for months,' and left Texas in an ‘indeterminately long' crisis.”
