The nonprofit corporation is subject to oversight from the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Legislature. Greg Abbott called the situation 'unacceptable' and said he would add an emergency item to the state's legislative session on reforming ERCOT. Why is Texas having power outages and rolling blackouts?Īt the most basic level, the outages have been caused because demand amid the bitter cold has outpaced the supply of energy used to heat and power homes, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.Ī combination of mostly natural gas, some coal and a nuclear power plant failed to meet customers' demand, Cohan said.ĮRCOT said it is instituting rolling outages across the system to prevent more outages as it worked to restore power for Texans.
