SAN ANTONIO – CPS Energy customers who are experiencing blackouts may not have power by Tuesday night, when freezing rain is expected, according to officials.
John Moreno, a representative for the energy company, joined GMSA @ 9 for a virtual Q&A on Tuesday morning and said customers can be affected by outages into Wednesday.
“This is a pretty serious issue and we’re in it for the long haul,” he said, adding that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has mandated the outages as a winter storm continues to swallow most of Texas.
Roughly two-thirds of the CPS Energy grids will continue to have rotating outages during that time. The other one-third is dedicated to critical services, like a hospital, base or police department.
For those residents experiencing outages, Moreno said it’s hard to tell if it is due to a technical issue, like a downed power line, or because of the rolling outage.
“They’re all together, they’re not separated into groups,” he said, referring to the outage map.
The goal was to rotate outages in 15-20 increments, but the demand has not allowed them to be consistent, he said.
Paula Gold-Williams, CPS Energy president and CEO, on Monday said the bulk of the outages residents are experiencing are due to the rotations.
Without the rolling blackouts, entire grids would be knocked offline, leaving them without power indefinitely, Gold-Williams said.
Because of the demand — which has surpassed the demand seen in the summer months — CPS officials are asking people to conserve energy when possible.
When asked about CPS Energy’s downtown headquarters using electricity to light its buildings overnight, Moreno said he would “need to take a look” at the issue.
“We definitely need to do our part to conserve energy, so it is something I’ll definitely follow up on,” he said.
Moreno said CPS Energy has also asked for critical services to conserve energy.
The dangerous cold air mass in San Antonio will keep temperatures below freezing for most of Tuesday. Partial melting will take place, only to see everything re-freeze Wednesday morning.
Freezing drizzle and freezing rain are expected after sunset on Tuesday.
Some San Antonio residents without power told KSAT that they have resorted to bundling up or heading to their vehicles for a brief relief from their cold homes.
As of 11 a.m., about 320,000 customers in Bexar County are affected by power outages.
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