Last February, a storm knocked out power to nearly five million Texans, and, according to the state, 246 people died. This time, the grid held up—not, however, because of any substantive change taken by state lawmakers.
On Wednesday, I woke up, in Marfa, to steely skies and tension in the back of my skull, a sign that the pressure was dropping and a cold front was moving in. Not that I needed to be reminded: the winter storm was all that anyone could talk about at the bank, at the post office, at the unusually busy liquor store. It would be the most significant statewide cold snap since Winter Storm Uri, last February, whichand left millions of Texans without power for days.
Last year’s disaster stemmed from a confluence of extreme weather and systemic weaknesses. On February 10th, a severe and prolonged cold front moved into Texas. Within days, temperatures had plummeted thirty to forty degrees below normal, and stayed below freezing in parts of the state for nearly a week. Many natural-gas facilities—the largest source of electricity in Texas—were inadequately winterized and began to fail as wells froze and equipment seized up.
In the aftermath, Governor Abbott blamed the grid failure on renewable energy. But iced-over wind turbines. Wind turbines supply a fraction of the grid’s winter power supply, much less than the similarly icebound natural-gas processors. Instead, blame rested with Texas’s unique energy structure, and its lax approach to regulation.
In 1935, as the federal government moved to regulate electricity sales across state lines, Texas opted to fend for itself and avoid regulation. Uri also plunged Oklahoma into frigid conditions, and that state similarly struggled with frozen turbines and disrupted natural-gas processing. There were rolling blackouts there, too, but for a fraction of the population, and only for an hour or two at a time; Oklahoma, part of a multistate grid, could pull power from elsewhere.
Sufficient winterization didn’t happen then, and not much substantively changed after Uri.
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