I drill gas wells and also salt water disposal wells all the rigs are shut down. There was also a massive shut.in of gas and oil wells for a whole slew of cascading failure modes. The cold , ice and snow being the prime factors. Without storage to take the place of.well.head gas the supply crashed and forced curtailment of generation. The last group curtailed from gas use is residential. Over 40,000 megawatts of thermal power dropped off line that’s just a fact. Where the remaining 50_60000 megawatts went to is up to Oncor I watched in real time the grid frequency drop from 60.1hz to 59.2 at which point 10,000 megawatts of demand was shed or the whole grid would have cascaded down. Large office parks and buildings have diesel and natural gas powered generators, as do hospitals and college campuses. UTD has enough generation onsite to run completely off the grid should they need too and during my tenure there as a researcher they did run on internal power during the great ice storm of 2012 for three days. My wife’s school has been off and on their generators since Monday night they opened it up to staff and theirs families who are without power at all it’s a private school facility. Just because lights are on at a commercial facility does not mean it’s getting that power from the grid. Generators have gotten cheap. A whole house generac is $3000 installed and thats the top.end Wi-Fi enabled 15kw dual fuel.propane and natural gas with 250 gallon propane back up tank. People are up in arms about highland park not being dark but most of those homes are well over a million five and nearly everyone has a back up generator and power supply for the security and fire suppression system. My in-laws are parkies and all of their homes have back up power battery that cranks the generators to power the home, water pumps for the sprinklers and security systems 3 grand is nothing in the price of a million dollar home.
Retail strip centers usually don’t have generators capable of running for days. I was out all over the city and most still had power where homes nearby did not. Ercot claimed they had no choice to use controlled rolling blackouts yet at the same time they would say they don’t know where the blackouts will be or how long in duration they would last. So which is it? If they are controlled blackouts then they would know where when and for how long. So which is it? All I can say is Ercot has some serious explaining to do. My opinion, these people are lying their asses off. This was a leftists manufactured crisis. Ercot is about to find out this is not California.