(Reuters) – A sixth member of the board of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power grid operator, resigned in the wake of a massive failure of the state’s power network.
Randal Miller, who represented independent retail power providers, resigned late Tuesday, board Chairman Sally Tanberg said on Wednesday. The disclosure came at the start of the first meeting of directors since outages that left millions without power, heat and water for days last week.
Tanberg, ERCOT’s vice chairman and three other directors, all of whom live outside of Texas, submitted their resignations effective after the Wednesday meeting. Directors have been widely criticized for their handling of the outage and for not living in the state.
She defended the operator’s responses, saying ERCOT staff “worked tirelessly” to manage power available while acknowledging the anger and pain from up to 4.2 million Texans who suffered during the outages.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier called for resignations. The state’s investigation will “uncover the full picture of what went wrong” and ensure it is not repeated, he said in a statement on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Gary McWilliams; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Steve Orlofsky)
