HARRIS COUNTY, Texas – Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo held a news conference Saturday to share the county’s readiness plan ahead of the hard freeze expected this upcoming week.
The Harris County Chief Emergency Manager was also present as well as the Fire Marshal’s Office and TranStar.
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“The next few days will not be as bad as the winter storm in 2021 as Winter Storm Uri, that winter storm included a lot of low probability events that all happened at the same time, low temperatures, precipitation, many powerplants offline, the low temperatures were very consistent,” Hidalgo said.
Hidalgo stressed the fact that that Monday is MLK Day, which means more people won’t be on the roads. She also said we are expecting very limited precipitation compared to 2021.
“I don’t have so much heartburn about our critical infrastructure this time around, back then in 2021 I said this was going to be like a category 5 hurricane and we were sitting upstairs, making plans, bracing ourselves, this time we are making the plans, but we don’t have that heartburn that we had in 2021,” she said.
Hidalgo said she has spoken to both CenterPoint and ERCOT. She said they told her the situation is better than it was in either 2021 or 2022.
“That doesn’t mean that there is a zero risk of outages, Monday morning before the sun comes up, we will have a peak in energy needs as we will be pretty cold all throughout the county, there will be an even bigger peak the next morning,” she said.
Hidalgo said those peak times will mean the energy supply will be pretty tight. If there were to be any rotating outages, it would most likely be at those peak times.
“ERCOT as they have assured me has worked to have additional winterization, additional generation, batteries that can store some of the generation, and the ability to pay big industrial customers to go offline, and the ability to get more generation online,” she said.
We’re expecting to be in the 30s on Monday, then we’ll see below freezing temperatures in Houston on Tuesday and Wednesday.