Rolling the outages “quickly became impossible,” Nye said. “We sat there praying that electrons showed up.”
With millions of Texans without power, Nye got an urgent request from DeAnn Walker, then chair of the Public Utility Commission: She needed Oncor to turn the power back on to certain natural gas facilities that couldn’t deliver fuel to power plants without electricity. A PUC spokesperson said Walker was “ceaselessly” on the phone, calling Nye about dozens of natural gas facilities that weren't on Oncor’s “critical” list.
That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the natural gas facilities had unwittingly shut off some of the state’s power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages. Time is a peculiar thing, it keeps ticking on with or without us. They say time heals all, if you’re not changing your dead, and sometimes history repeats itself. I have seen a lot of changes since hiring on at Dallas Power & Light in 1978. The name of the light company has changed numerous times, the utility industry was deregulated in Texas, and most of the faces have changed however, some of the names remain the same. For those of you that were not working for the light company or maybe not even born in 1995, the CEO for TXU was Erle Nye. TXU was a multinational energy company with operations on three continents and more than $41 billion in assets. On July 25, 2002, TXU released their second-quarter earnings report claiming strong second quarter results. But despite the warm and fuzzy talk, TXU was headed for bankruptcy. Then two federal lawsuits charged that TXU executives committed securities fraud in 2002. The complaints alleged that TXU executives knew the company was risking bankruptcy and never disclosed the dangers to shareholders. TXU executives had incentive for hiding the company’s financial decay. Releasing this information would no doubt hurt the stock price and TXU’s bonuses for top executives. Nye received a stock bonus of $4.3 million in 2002, out of $7.8 million in total compensation. In addition to the bonus, Nye also saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling more than 47,000 of his TXU shares on September 10, 2002, at $44 per share, it came to be a cool $2.179 million. Three weeks later, on October 9, the stock price went to $16.90 a share. In 2003, Mr. Nye earned stock bonuses worth $16 million. Life at the top must be good!
Fast forward to Sunday Valentine’s Day 2021, Texans were preparing for a severe winter storm. As Sunday turned to Monday, Allen Nye, the CEO of Oncor, thought his people were ready. As the winter storm continued to get worse the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, ordered the first cut of power to bring demand down to match an extremely low power supply as the freezing temperatures caused power plants to trip off.
Oncor, along with other utilities, began a plan to roll outages at 15 and 30 minute intervals. Just before 2 a.m. ERCOT ordered them to take even more power offline
The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas’ electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said.
Mr. Nye would later tell state legislators at hearings the week after the storm. “I don’t know where [power plants] are buying their gas, and I don’t know how that gas is getting to them,” Nye said during his testimony. “They’ve gotta tell me, or, whoever’s delivering that gas [does]. Take your pick.”
By Wednesday, February 17, natural gas supply in the state hit its lowest point during the storm, experts said. Nye told legislators during his testimony that they were so concerned about the supply of natural gas that his chief operating officer called him and said: “I’m just going to turn on the Permian and see what happens.”
“And we just turned it on,” he said.
James Cisarik, chairman of the Texas Energy Reliability Council, told legislators “In my opinion, if we had kept the supply of (natural gas) on, we would’ve had minor disruptions.
A month after the storm, lawmakers are investigating multiple failures that led to 4.9million customers losing power, some of them for days during subfreezing temperatures in a storm that caused at least 57 deaths statewide.
What a tragedy for all Texans! Leadership is important, you can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results.
Until next time work safe and may God bless you, your family, and IBEW Local 69.
Bobby W. Reed