TEXAS, USA — As temperatures continue to dip down the demand for energy continues to increase.
According to the Upshur Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation the Southwest Power Pool, a power grid which covers parts of East Texas and the panhandle area, has issued a winter advisory to local energy providers.
The SPP is a grid that extends from the Canadian border into North Dakota and all the way down to the Gregg and Upshur County areas.
URECC and the Southwestern Electric Power Company are not connected to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and rely on sharing power with northern states.
"It's not just the cold weather that is our concern," said Tony McCullough, the marketing and communication manager for URECC. "It's the high winds that are coming in beforehand."
Strong wind gusts could cause tree limbs to snap in rural parts of East Texas and knock down power lines.
"If we have outages like that it could take a while (to fix) in some of these areas," McCullough said. "Especially if it's in some of the swampy areas that are like little cypress creek bottoms, It could take a while to get those repaired."
In the meantime, both URECC and SWEPCO said they have plenty of on-call workers ready to find outage problems and restore power.
"The fantastic thing about SWEPCO is we have a partnership with Texas State Technical College and several other colleges with lineman training programs," said Mark Robinson, the external affairs manager for SWEPCO. "We have been able to fully staff our docks and are completely full of lineman right now."
Although these companies have plenty of workers, they're still asking residents to prepare for any possible outages.
"What you can do as a customer, I would say, have a plan, literally right now look to the person to your right or your left and say, 'what would I do if the power went out?'" Robinson said.
McCullough said you can stock up on firewood or even purchase a generator.
"Even if it's not a big Generac system that's going to run your whole house," McCullough said. "A portable generator that could run a heater, some lights and maybe even a TV so you can get communications."