“We hope to reduce outages over the course of the day,” ERCOT said. The grid operator said 2.8 million people in the state are without power as of early Wednesday morning.

Officials are warning the power outages could continue throughout the day and into the rest of the week. Oncor, the state’s largest electricity provider, said ERCOT is still directing it to impose rotating outages on customers to balance high electricity demand with supply.

The utility company said in a statement Wednesday morning that ERCOT “has been unable to predict when more generation will be available and when there will be enough electric supply to meet customer demand.”

Austin Energy, in a tweet Wednesday morning, said its customers in Texas’s capital city “should be prepared to not have power through Wednesday and possibly longer.”

ERCOT, for its part, said in a statement later on Wednesday that around 185 power plants have gone offline since the winter storm began on Monday. Factors behind those incidents include frozen wind turbines, a squeeze on natural gas supplies, and frozen instruments at coal and nuclear plants, all issues that might not be fully resolved until the weather warms.

“The ability to restore more power is contingent on more generation coming back online,” said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, in a statement. As of 9 a.m. in Texas, around 46,000 MW of power generation remain offline. More than half of that, 28,000 MW, are gas, coal, and nuclear. The remaining 18,000 MW offline are wind and solar, the grid operator said.

Woodfin added that Texas customers were using a little less energy Wednesday morning as temperatures were slightly less cold, but he cautioned that the state is anticipating another cold front in the evening that could increase power demand.

The outages have left many in Texas without heat, as well. Cities across the state have set up warming centers for those in need of shelter and heat.

At least 23 people have died due to the winter storm conditions across the southern and central U.S., according to reports. That has included deaths due to the extreme cold, as well as people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning and fires while trying to heat their homes.

The sheriff’s office for Harris County, Texas’s largest county, said Wednesday morning that its emergency dispatch center received more than 10,000 calls to its 911 and nonemergency lines Tuesday, triple its usual call volume.

“We know people are suffering and frustrated,” the office said in a tweet. “Please remember 911 is for life threatening emergencies only.”

Texas officials are also warning people to shut off the main water valves to their homes if pipes burst from freezing.

Winter storm conditions aren’t subsiding yet, either. The National Weather Service forecast Wednesday morning that a developing winter storm will “produce heavy snow and treacherous ice accumulations” from the south central U.S. to the mid-Atlantic region.

And while the National Weather Service says the “dangerous Arctic blast” will “moderate” in the next few days, temperatures in the Plains, Mississippi Valley, and lower Great Lakes will stay at or below freezing.

Meanwhile, grid officials said the Texas grid has made some progress in preparing for winter since the last time the state experienced power outages during a cold snap in 2011.

“This storm has been extraordinary,” said Bill Magness, ERCOT’s chief executive, during a Tuesday interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas. “We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”

Magness added that the power has been out in his home in Austin, where he lives with his wife and middle school-age child, since Sunday night.

“So that frustration of having to live without power when you’re in the coldest time of the year, we absolutely understand the difficulty of that,” he said.