I want to know what exactly could have happened in those 5 minutes?
It's mentioned in the title, and then just another sentence that repeats the title: "One chart presented at the meeting shows Texas was less than five minutes away from a blackout that might have crippled the power system for weeks or months."
I too am very curious. I've seen this same message repeated a few times now. I've noticed there strange echoing in the reporting and messaging around this whole event, so I'm taking it all with a grain of salt.
My assumption is that if someone/something hadn't reacted quickly and cut load off the grid & remaining generators, the entire grid could've been pulled offline by the load. Since the TX grid would've been in bad shape, and isolated from others, a Black Start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start is what could've taken months.
I'm not any sort of expert, but I know that getting phases of AC grid synced back up can be tricky.
Slide 12 from the link in the 4th paragraph[0] shows a 4-minute period in which generation was below 59.4 MW, and notes that more gen units would have tripped if generation stayed below the threshold for 5 minutes longer, though it's hard to say exactly how much longer the grid would have been down.
It's mentioned in the title, and then just another sentence that repeats the title: "One chart presented at the meeting shows Texas was less than five minutes away from a blackout that might have crippled the power system for weeks or months."
And? And what was it?