Snow falls on a ground crew working outside a parked plane at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Grapevine, Texas, on Thursday. (LM Otero/AP)Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says the state’s power grid has “plenty of power available at this time.” The state is currently “dealing with one of the most significant icing events that we’ve had in the state of Texas in at least several decades,” he said during a Thursday briefing. “The power grid is performing very well at this time,” he said. “At the expected peak demand, there should be about 10,000 megawatts of extra power capacity. To put that in context that is about enough extra power to supply about 2 million homes,” Abbott said. Roughly 70,000 customers are without power across Texas, PowerOutage.US showed on their website. Abbott explained that “the most probable cause of a power outage right now… is either because of heavy winds affecting lines or more likely, because of an icing conditions.” “There are more than 10,000 linemen already working for power transmission companies to assist with power lines that are not working. And, in addition to that, almost 2,000 more linemen are coming in from outside the state of Texas,” he added.The winter storm has over 100 million people are under winter alerts in parts of 25 states, where snow and ice are causing power outages. These states are seeing the largest impact from power outages:
- Texas – 71,456
- Tennessee – 70,438
- Arkansas – 24,406
- Mississippi – 8,465
- Louisiana – 6,037
- Illinois – 5,195
- New York – 4,659
- Virginia – 4,311
Elsewhere, Kentucky and Indiana are experiencing over 3,000 outages; Ohio and Oklahoma have over 2,000; and New Mexico and New Jersey are seeing more than 1,000 outages each.