The Manmade Disaster in Texas: A Cascade of Failures

8 min readFeb 27, 2021

In February 2021, Texas shocked the world with the failure of its electrical grid in the face of colder than usual temperatures, resulting in rolling blackouts that have lasted days. Texas, the largest energy producer in the US, replete with refineries, covered in oil and gas wells and dotted with power stations, went dark Monday night as a powerful cold front strangled the state with temperatures it had never seen- temperatures that are quite normal in much of the US, but record-breaking there. Wind turbines have frozen in place; coal, natural gas and even nuclear power plants have been shut down. Blame is being thrown every which way, with Republicans especially targeting renewable energy and Democrats pointing their fingers at fossil fuels. Why and how did this actually happen, though? To answer that, we’ll need to look at what happened with the weather in Texas, what caused the failures and, crucially, how Texas’ unique electrical grid is set up and designed for massive profits and easy failure.

We begin, however, with the weather. On the evening of February 8, a cold front passed through much of the southern US, including Texas. On February 3 of this year, the temperature in Dallas reached 71F. On Sunday, February 14, the temperature dropped to 14F. By Tuesday night, it had dropped to 3 degrees Fahrenheit. The storm dropped 3–5 inches of snow in some areas. While these temperatures and snowfall totals may seem mundane to people in the Northern US, Texas and much of the South are simply unequipped for it- these are temperatures never before recorded in these areas.

In colder climes, homes are heated with gas furnaces. In Texas, most homes use inefficient electric heaters several times a year they need it. Air conditioning in this normally hot region is far more important and homes are usually designed to shed heat rather than retain it. Water lines enter homes above ground, rather than underground and insulated as in most colder areas- a design flaw that has led water pipes to burst by the tens of thousands across the state. Today, Texas not only faces power outages, but much of the state is also facing water shortages and outages, with burst pipes draining precious water onto the ground and water utilities facing the same electrical outages as everyone else and struggling to keep the supply coming.

A shock weather system like this would place a terrible strain on any electrical system, but most communities in the developed world would hold up. Texas’ electrical grid failed catastrophically and it’s important to understand why. The story begins with the grid’s very design.

During the Second World War, electric utilities in Texas agreed to work together to improve reliability. This arrangement continued until the 1970’s, when the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) began organizing North America’s chaotic electrical grid system into large geographical regions with standardized outputs and safety measures. This was put in place after the largest ever electrical outage struck the Northeastern US in 1965, knocking out power to 30 million people for 13 hours. NERC focused on organizing and standardizing the North American electrical system to prevent major outages like that from occurring again. If shortages occurred in one area within a geographic region, power plants in another area could maintain power and keep the grid functional. The map below shows how the grid was divided.

(source: https://www.naes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FRCC-dissolution-Image.jpg)

There are several important things to note about this map. Firstly, colors represent regional reliability councils, which are largely responsible for, as the name suggests, keeping the supply of electricity reliable. The map is divided into interconnections, however; these are standardized production regions- a region where all the power plants generate power at the same frequency and phase. So power generated anywhere within the Eastern Interconnection can be shared anywhere else within it, from Baton Rouge to Manitoba. Also, note the cooperative/collaborative nature of the interconnections. These interconnections and many of the reliability councils are shared between the US and Canada. Now, however, draw your attention to where Texas lies at the center and bottom of the map. That is the Texas, or ERCOT (Energy Reliability Council of Texas), Interconnection.

When NERC was going about joining disparate grids together, Texas scoffed and resisted. “Don’t mess with Texas” is the old saying they’re so fond of. Local legislators and politicians recoiled at the idea of anyone from outside of the state setting regulations and requirements for their electrical grid, and so they created their own interconnection separate from the rest of the nation.

And in case you were wondering, yes, that is exactly the region that is out of power now, days after the worst of the storm passed.

Texas is unable to draw significant power from any other parts of the country because its interconnection regulates electrical production at a different phase and frequency from the other interconnections. That means that Texas is on its own, electrically speaking. If it generates more electricity than it needs, it can’t be shared elsewhere. And if it fails to generate enough, then the lights go out. Power plants across the border in Oklahoma can’t provide Texas any power when its own power plants fail.

This explains why Texas is alone in suffering the outages and why they are lasting so long, but it hasn’t yet explained why Texas so dramatically lost the ability to generate power in the first place. Yes, the demand for electricity was sky high, but Texas is also the largest power-producing state in the US- it was more than equipped to handle the demand.

The reason for the failure goes back to ERCOT and its refusal to allow outside regulations to govern its operations. Thus, while virtually all other regions required winterization of their power-generating facilities, ERCOT did not. In a state where temperatures rarely dip below freezing and where global climate change is still widely regarded to be a liberal hoax, the idea of a deep freeze like this ever happening was virtually unthinkable. Thus, features like winterization were regarded as expensive and frivolous accessories that would never be needed.

Throughout the northern latitudes, wind turbines continue turning through cold snaps. Antifreeze and internal heaters keep parts lubricated and at optimal operating temperatures through adverse conditions. There are windfarms in Norway and Finland that operate all winter long. Those turbines include these winterization features. ERCOT saw an opportunity to cut costs and did; now approximately half of the wind turbines in Texas have stopped turning.

That has led to right-wing politicians and media personalities railing against renewable energy in Texas. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News, “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”

Republican US Representative from Houston, Dan Crenshaw, tweeted “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”

Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Sid Miller, went so far as to say “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas.”

It might strike you as peculiar, however, that the entire state’s electrical system could be brought down by the freezing up half of its wind turbines if wind and solar together only make up 10% of electrical production. While that failure hasn’t helped matters, it certainly is not the biggest culprit. The state has lost 16 GW of electrical production from frozen renewable generators it had never bothered to winterize, but it has lost far more- 30 GW of production- from traditional sources.

The reason for this is the same: no winterization. Power plants are cooled using water. Loss of feedwater pumps at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station knocked the Unit 1 reactor offline, leading to a loss of 1.4 GW of production. Frozen water lines have led to coal power plants going offline as well. Most of the remaining loss, though, has come from natural gas power plants which have had to go offline due to a lack of gas.

Texas is one of the biggest producers of natural gas in the world so it’s shocking to hear that it has run out of gas, but the problem may sound familiar. The equipment involved in transporting that gas from the well heads to the plants was not winterized. The well heads have frozen and natural gas production has been cut in half overnight. In short, the failure to winterize natural gas infrastructure means that when the weather got cold, it became impossible to get the gas out of the ground and to the power plants that needed it.

(source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ice-formation-from-Joule-Thomson-JT-cooling-on-the-exterior-of-the-wellhead-system-of-a_fig1_332870392)

The weather will eventually warm and power will be restored, but the public’s faith in ERCOT and the Texas electrical system will have been damaged beyond repair. While many in the public sector may try to forget about what’s happened as quickly as possible, clearly change will have to happen within the Texas power sector. Already, however, right-wing politicians are attempting to push their agenda by blaming the entire crisis on the failure of its wind turbines and by pretending that this failure happens everywhere. Their cry is that they had tried renewable energy and that it has nearly destroyed them, warning the rest of the country away from following that path and to instead invest in more fossil fuels. It is a uniquely Republican narrative.

The truth of the matter is that Texas was unprepared for this cold snap in nearly every way. Homes are heated electrically, placing demand on the grid. Those same homes are not properly insulated against cold weather, nor are water pipes- in homes and even in some power plants. When demand outstrips capacity, Texas can’t import power like other states can because it has isolated itself from the rest of the nation’s electrical grid to exclude outside regulation and to humor the perennial secessionist fantasies of its furthest right politicians. While infrastructure is winterized in virtually every other temperate region of the globe, the state’s internal energy regulators chose not to winterize their energy infrastructure in order to save money and because they failed to anticipate that climate change might ever affect Texas. Frozen turbines, frozen coolant systems at power plants, frozen wells and pipelines supplying natural gas and all of it can be easily preventable for just a little more cost.

The temperature dropped, demand jumped and production froze to a standstill in Texas’ isolated energy island. It turns out the weather can mess with Texas.