A Flexible Grid Resource
Allan Schurr is Chief Commercial Officer at Enchanted Rock.
Hurricane Beryl, a Category 1 hurricane, devastated Houston's power infrastructure and left over 2.7 million utility customers without electricity — many for more than a week. The prolonged outage forced residents to endure extreme heat and seek refuge in cooling centers due to devastating storm damage and sweltering summer temperatures. This storm and its aftermath highlighted the increasing challenges to reliability posed by extreme weather events.
One (literal) bright spot during the storms was the role that backup power providers played in keeping the lights on at critical facilities across the region. As a pioneer in deploying distributed natural gas generators as the foundation of our microgrid systems, our resiliency-as-a-service business model has helped us build strong partnerships with utility providers and customers needing reliable utility-grade backup power.
In the past ten years, we've deployed over two hundred megawatts at more than a hundred fifty microgrid sites across the greater Houston community and even before Beryl hit, the Network Operations Center was ready to support local utilities in keeping the lights on as they worked to restore power.