A Texas cooperative gives medical priority electric accounts for life support equipment first priority restoration after an outage, but not before the shared lines are fixed

What a medical priority electric account gets a Texas household with life support equipment

Big Country Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit power provider serving 6,055 members across 12 West Texas counties, lets a household with someone depending on life support equipment, what the cooperative calls life sustaining medical equipment, register as a medical priority electric account. A member contacts one of the cooperative own 3 offices, in Roby, Snyder and Stamford, Texas, and reports the equipment in use, such as a ventilator, a home dialysis machine or an oxygen machine. The cooperative states that once registered, a household power restoration is first priority after an extended widespread outage in Texas. Medical priority status is not a guarantee of immediate power, the cooperative states, since no one can make that guarantee.

Registering also requires details about the medical condition and the type of life sustaining equipment in use, plus how much backup power the household already has available. The cooperative requires a medical certification from a physician stating that the equipment in use is life sustaining.

Where medical priority electric accounts actually sit in the restoration order

Reading the cooperative own restoration order in full, rather than only its shorter promise of first priority, shows what that promise actually means. The order names 6 steps, the transmission system, substations, main distribution feeders, distribution laterals, medical priority accounts, then individual loads. Counting those steps places medical priority accounts 5th of 6, after every piece of shared infrastructure that every member, medical priority or not, depends on is already repaired, and ahead only of ordinary individual homes and businesses. First priority means first among individual connections, not first ahead of the repairs the whole system needs before anyone gets power back.

The order power gets cut if the cooperative has to shed load

A separate list governs what the cooperative cuts first if it ever has to shed load voluntarily because supply runs short. That list runs outdoor, flood and street lighting, oil field and irrigation loads, schools and churches except those used as emergency shelters, industrial loads and gins, commercial loads, residential loads, then medical priority accounts and other critical loads last, meaning they are the last of the 7 named groups the cooperative would cut. The requirement to keep such a list traces to Texas Utilities Code Section 38.076, the law the cooperative own load shedding page cites by name. The Texas Legislature passed the law as Senate Bill 3 after the February 2021 winter storm blackouts, and it took effect June 8, 2021, requiring every electric cooperative in the ERCOT power region to designate its own critical load customers and file a load shedding plan with the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

Keeping a medical priority account active

Members are encouraged to start renewing a medical priority registration by April 30 each year, to allow time for review before summer, though Big Country Electric Cooperative does not state that registration lapses or expires if a member misses that date. The same registration process also covers a facility, not only a household, when the facility depends on electric service for critical safety operations. Whatever the timeline, medical priority status is not a guarantee of immediate power, so members are told to keep a personal backup plan alongside registering.