Winter storm wreaks havoc in Texas

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Winter Storm Uri has covered 75 percent of the continental United States in snow, with another storm expected to hit the already-strained American South. [The Wall Street Journal / Talal Ansari and Elizabeth Findell]

Across the South, whose energy grids are largely unwinterized, power outages have left people without heat and water, causing rolling — and in some cases continual — power outages. [Vox / Umair Irfan]

In hard-hit Texas, deregulation has disincentivized power companies from securing their grids for winter weather. Now, pipelines have frozen, power plants have gone dark, and the price of electricity is soaring — and over 4 million Texans are without power. [The Washington Post / Will Englund]

The natural gas companies that primarily power the grid have enforced rolling blackouts in order to reduce the load at the direction of state regulators, with some areas experiencing persistent outages. [The Houston Chronicle / Marcy de Luna and Amanda Drane]

The outages, combined with nearly a year of the coronavirus pandemic, have pushed many Texans to the physical and mental brink: People are unable to charge their medical devices, sleeping in their cars, and losing access to water and grocery stores. [The Texas Tribune / Shannon Najmabadi and Marissa Martinez]

Minority neighborhoods were among the first to lose power and could be the last to see it returned. Their houses often lack proper insulation and will be at risk of pollution exposure due to proximity to stopping-and-starting industrial sites. [The New York Times / James Dobbins and Hiroko Tabuchi]

Across Texas, hundreds of cases of hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning have been reported in hospitals as people desperately try to get warm using stoves, grills, gas ovens, and other dangerous means. [The Dallas Morning News / Joseph Hoyt]

A political battle has ensued, as Republicans have blamed wind and solar energy shutdowns for the blackouts and used it as an opportunity to criticize the Green New Deal — which has not been passed. In actuality, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy are responsible for the vast majority of outages. [The Associated Press / Ali Swenson and Arijeta Lajka]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The deep freeze in Texas, which overwhelmed the power grid and knocked out electricity for more than 3.5 million people, leaving them without heat. It has taken the lives of at least 23 people.

Most of Texas is on its own power grid, a decision made in the 1930s to keep it clear of federal regulation. This means both that it avoids federal regulation and that it cannot import more electricity during periods of high demand. Apparently, as temperatures began to drop, people turned up electric heaters and needed more power than engineers had been told to design for, just as the ice shut down gas-fired plants and wind turbines froze. Demand for natural gas spiked and created a shortage.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) told Sean Hannity that the disaster “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal” for the United States, but Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the organization in charge of the state’s power grid, told Bloomberg that the frozen wind turbines were the smallest factor in the crisis. They supply only about 10% of the state’s power in the winter.

Frozen instruments at gas, coal, and nuclear plants, as well as shortages of natural gas, were the major culprits. To keep electricity prices low, ERCOT had not prepared for such a crisis. El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT but is instead linked to a larger grid that includes other states and thus is regulated, did, in fact, weatherize their equipment. Its customers lost power only briefly.