ERCOT says state's electrical grid won't be shaken during wintry weather this week

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Ahead of the wintry mix that could impact Dallas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is issuing a weather watch for North Texas.

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told KXAN Tuesday that the state's electrical grid won't be shaken. It is expected to be tested as demand for energy is predicted to spike. Vegas told us they are prepared after making impactful changes.

"What we're expecting this week is expecting reliability. We've been preparing for the last week knowing this weather was coming in, coordinating with a lot of the market participants, the generators, the transmission companies, the Public Utility Commission," Vegas said.

This month alone there are expected to be about 170 inspections across facilities, according to ERCOT.

"We focus on those areas where there's either been issues in the past or if there are newer resources onto the grid. We want to make sure that they're set up to be able to perform. That's had a really big impact in terms of the availability of these generating resources to be able to perform when it gets very cold," Vegas said.

He said ERCOT has seen good performance this week with those resources. Vegas said ERCOT will continue to work closely with utility partners to respond to any issues.

"Typically during icing events, what you'll find is local utility outages that are caused by either ice on the lines or ice on the trees that fall into lines. The local utility then needs to respond and repair those facilities and get power flowing again. But for this event, we don't expect any statewide or any system wide issues with the power grid irrespective of the precipitation that's coming," he said.