Texas Gov. Greg Abbott detailed his plans to do so on Wednesday restore energy to the millions of residents who have had to leave without a brutal and deadly winter storm. As temperatures remain well below frost, the state has been criticized for widespread outages that have left many jeans struggling to stay warm.
On Wednesday morning, about 3 million households had no electricity.
Abbott said about 40,000 megawatts of power remain offline due to mechanical problems, lack of gas and weather problems. But he added that at midnight, 6,000 megawatts were added to the grid, enough to provide power to about 1.2 million homes, and said thousands of megawatts are likely to be added soon.
The governor also announced that he signed an order that would prevent companies from selling natural gas outside the state and instead demand that the fuel be sold to state power generators.
“I understand people are angry that this has happened … We’re turning on the power again,” ERCOT CEO ERCOT, the power company that supplies most of Texas, told CBS News.
Texas is the only state that has its own power grid. The network is not regulated by the federal government and many have blamed the lack of federal regulation for its bankruptcy during the storm.
Abbott has promised a public service investigation. Magness said he welcomed the investigation, but defended the public service’s handling of the crisis.
“I think the key decisions our operators made could have prevented a catastrophic shutdown,” Magness said. “The result of preventing that catastrophic blackout, unfortunately, turned out to be a long period of downtime like we haven’t seen before.”
“It is a very terrible time to be in this situation with the climate we are having especially, but we will get a backup of these services,” he added. “We’re going to get these people on fire. Now it’s the number one priority to do that.”
Falling temperatures have also caused water problems as pipes burst and water treatment plants have lost energy. Millions of jeans are now under a boiling water order, officials said Wednesday.
The storm has also been blamed for at least 24 deaths, 11 of which occurred in Texas, officials said.
Omar Villafranca contributed to the reports.