Backup power for a Central Texas business

The question worth asking in October is not whether a Central Texas business will lose power this winter. It is how long the building can run without it, and who already knows what to do when it goes. Backup power is a design decision, and the worst moment to make it is during the outage.

How long do outages actually last?

Long enough to matter, and longer than they used to. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that American electricity customers averaged 11 hours without power in 2024, roughly double the annual average of the previous decade. Major events accounted for 80 percent of those hours. Ordinary interruptions, the kind nobody plans around, add up to about two hours a year.

Those are national figures averaged across very different places, so the useful part is the shape of the risk: most of it sits in a few long events rather than many short ones. A building that can ride out two hours on nothing is not the same building as one that can ride out two days.

What February 2021 actually broke

The February 2021 freeze is still the reference event for Texas, and the federal review of it is specific about why. FERC and NERC found that more than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power, some for as long as four days, after ERCOT ordered 20,000 MW of rolling blackouts in what the report called the largest manually controlled load shedding event in U.S. history.

The causes were not exotic. Freezing issues accounted for 44.2 percent of unplanned generating outages, derates and failures to start, and fuel issues for another 31.4 percent, which is 75.6 percent of the problem between them. Natural gas units made up 58 percent of the failed generation. The report also concluded that protecting four plant components from icing could have cut ERCOT's outages by 67 percent.

The lesson is narrower than the politics around it: the event was long, cold and regional, so help was slow and a building with no plan stayed dark.

Has anything changed since then?

Two things have, and they point opposite ways. Texas Senate Bill 3 now requires energy facilities to weatherize and maintain service in extreme weather, and the Texas Comptroller's office describes penalties running from 5,000 dollars per violation per day up to 1 million dollars per violation per day.

At the same time the grid is being asked to carry far more. ERCOT's all-time peak demand is 85,508 MW, set in August 2023, and its preliminary long-term forecast published in April 2026 puts peak demand near 367,790 MW by 2032, driven by data centers, cryptocurrency mining and industrial processes. ERCOT itself cautioned that the figure is likely higher than actual future growth.

Both are true at once. The system is better protected than it was and carrying more than it was. Neither tells you what happens to your building on a particular Tuesday in January.

Portable power or a permanent standby system?

What has to stay running, and for how long, settles this faster than any specification does. Answer those two honestly and the equipment mostly picks itself.

A portable or skid-mounted unit suits work that moves or is temporary: a job site, a seasonal setup, or a building where a few circuits matter and someone is there to run the machine. A permanent standby system suits a building that has to come back on its own, at two in the morning, with nobody there to start anything.

The variables are ones only your building can answer: which circuits are non-negotiable, how many hours they have to hold, what fuel you can keep on site, where the equipment can safely sit, and whether anyone will be present when it matters. We work that list out on site. We do not publish a size, because sizing is a load calculation on your building and a number taken from an article is worth nothing.

What a portable generator cannot safely do

It cannot run indoors, and it cannot be plugged into the building's wiring. Both rules exist because breaking them kills people.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission puts it at about 100 deaths a year in the United States from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators, and its instruction is to never operate one inside a home, garage, basement, crawlspace, shed or any other enclosed space. FEMA's outage guidance adds the distance: run a generator outdoors and at least 20 feet away from building openings.

The second rule is the one businesses break more often. FEMA is explicit that a generator should never be connected to a building's wiring. Improvised through an ordinary outlet, it can push power back down the utility line toward the crew working to restore it. Tying one in properly means a transfer switch, which is service equipment work for a licensed electrician, not something to sort out the afternoon a storm is forecast.

What to check if you already have standby power

Run it before you need it, now rather than in December. A standby generator that has not started under load since last winter is an assumption rather than a plan.

• Confirm it starts on schedule, and that someone would notice if it did not.
• Check the fuel supply is present and current, not something that quietly ran down over the summer.
• Clear anything stacked, parked or stored against the enclosure since spring.
• Make sure whoever locks up at night knows what the machine does when it starts.

All of that is checkable from outside the equipment. Anything behind a cover, inside the transfer equipment, or on the service side of the building is ours to open, not yours.

Why October is the month to handle it

Because the work has a queue and the weather does not. A load calculation, the equipment, and the electrical work to tie it in each take time, and every schedule in Central Texas tightens the week the first freeze warning is issued. A system arranged in October exists in January. A system arranged during the event is one call in a long line of them.

JTX Electrical covers commercial and industrial electrical work, including generator installation and maintenance and portable and skid-mounted power, across Leander, Cedar Park, Liberty Hill, Georgetown, Round Rock and the greater Austin area, licensed under TECL #37015. Where backup power needs more capacity at the building first, our electrical services cover the panel and service upgrades. Call 512-663-7134 and we will work the load list with you before the weather does.

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