An official with the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) publicly pledged that the state power grid will be able to endure the upcoming winter without catastrophic disruption.

PUCT Chairman Peter Lake made the comments in an interview roughly 20 months after historic Winter Storm Uri plunged many Texans into freezing darkness for days.

“I know the lights are going to stay on because, as we showed last winter, our generation fleet is hardened against cold weather. Weatherization is just one part of the many reforms we have put in place,” he claimed.

Some other reforms include adding more transmission lines and reorganizing the electricity market to incentivize power generation companies to stay in Texas, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.

Lake went on to express confidence in Pablo Vegas, the new president and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the organization that manages the state’s electrical grid.

He told Fox 26, “There is a lot of critical computer engineering and software programming that goes on behind the scenes to make the grid and the ERCOT market work. So that’s why [ERCOT’s board of directors] was very deliberate in finding a CEO with an extensive background in information technology.”

Lake further explained some of the other changes in operations pursued by PUCT and ERCOT, much of which had to do with securing more generators and implementing strategic pricing to help sustain electric delivery to households and protect consumers financially.

“So it’s not any one single thing, but all of these reforms combine to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s why we know that we can absolutely be certain the lights will stay on this winter no matter what mother nature throws at us,” said Lake.

Lake’s comments followed the release of a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which claimed that the Texas electric grid, despite the measures taken by PUCT and ERCOT, remains relatively vulnerable if ravaged again by a winter storm as severe as Uri.

“Basically, what [FERC] is saying is if we get weather conditions like in February ’21, we would have close to a repeat of what happened,” stated Doug Lewin, president of energy consulting company Stoic Energy, speaking with the Austin American-Statesman.

Still, the grid did not falter during a relentlessly brutal summer this year, which saw record demand for power, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.