FARMERSVILLE, Texas — The above video is from February 4, 2022.
Farmersville police announced Wednesday evening that the city, located east of MicKinney, will be conducting rolling blackouts at the request of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
However, ERCOT told WFAA that the request was not made by its agency -- and that Farmersville's claim was inaccurate.
Just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, the police department backtracked on its statement, stating that it was a "miscommunication."
"We are aware that the previous post caused alarm and we are sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused," City Manager Ben White said.
White said he received a phone call from ERCOT shortly after the original Tweet was posted. He said there was a misunderstanding between the City and its energy provider, Garland Power and Light. White said the City believed it had to cut back on its power usage by 3%, though he said that was what officials interpreted from their communication as opposed to what was actually said
"We received that message a certain way, and we own up to that," White said.
"Garland Power & Light serves as an intermediary for certain communications between ERCOT and the city of Farmersville. While conducting this service on July 13, there was a miscommunication by a GP&L employee when speaking to a Farmersville employee," said the provider in a statement. "GP&L has taken corrective action to improve processes to make sure this does not happen again. We apologize to the city of Farmersville, their customers, ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas for the confusion and concern caused by this miscommunication."
The Public Utility Commission of Texas had responded to a tweet from the Farmersville Fire Department about the outages, stating that any outages in the area "are local in nature."
Farmersville PD said on their Facebook page that power would be cut to "random homes" for about an hour at a time. When power is restored to one home, the statement explained, another random group of homes will be out for an hour.
This process, the police said, would continue until ERCOT believed that power equipment could handle the demand again without being overloaded.
"This is definitely inaccurate reporting and absolutely not ERCOT driven. Our team is making efforts to correct this immediately," said ERCOT in a statement to WFAA.
White said he was the one who communicated to the police department that there would be rolling outages, which led to original post.
Farmersville Fire Department tweeted that the blackouts would begin at 8 p.m. on Wednesday.
Farmersville was among many North Texas cities that went several days without power following a winter storm this past February.
"It's a very sensitive subject, so that question of what's going to happen is the most hurtful part," White said. "Again, we are sorry."