Thousands of Texans are without power as arctic cold front hits state
Although thousands of Texans are without power, CenterPoint Energy was reporting about 600 outages in the Houston area.
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- As an arctic cold front sweeps across the state, many Texans are concerned about whether the power will stay on.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) says there is enough power to meet the demand, but still, thousands of customers across Texas are without power.
As of 1:30 p.m. Thursday, over 52,000 customers were without power in Texas. You can check the number of outages in real-time at poweroutage.us.
Most of the outages were reported in north Texas.
In the Houston area, CenterPoint Energy was reporting about 600 customers without power. You can check CenterPoint outages on the utilities company website.
SEE ALSO: ERCOT's winter weather advisory for TX is in effect. Officials say they don't expect grid to fail.
Gov. Greg Abbott said some Texans may lose power due to fallen trees or power lines.
"People may lose power. It could be that power lines are down. Power lines run by the company that customers enter into contracts with," Abbott said. "Those power lines could go down because a tree falls on the power lines and the power lines are no longer, at that particular time, able to deliver power to a home."
He said weather conditions like ice on power lines and trees could also cause outages.
"That doesn't mean that there are problems with the power grid in the state of Texas," Abbott warned. "It means that, for a short period of time, a particular neighborhood may be without power."
ERCOT said it expects the highest demand from the grid to be on Friday morning. Officials are expecting that they will have an excess of 15,000 megawatts of power available, even at the time of highest demand.
READ MORE: ERCOT issues winter weather advisory for Texas ahead of 'very substantial' cold front
