With the sudden cold snap, Texas has been hit especially hard. Most of Texas is on it's own power grid, separate from the two major grids in the continental US and the Texas grid is overseen by ERCOT, the governing body of Texas that's supposed to keep the electricity flowing. Well as you might expect, sudden all-time record lows across the whole state has put a lot of strain on the energy grid, so much so that there's been a ~34 gigawatt shortfall in production resulting in massive blackouts across the whole state.
Early reports touted frozen windmills as the culprit, but if every windmill was operating at 100% capacity, it wouldn't even be that much, and in fact the most disparaging numbers I could find pegged wind at a 4 gigawatt shortfall compared to where it should be at this time of year. Instead the massive shortfall is coming from coal, nuclear, and especially natural gas. Natural gas being the biggest source of energy in Texas by a fairly wide margin, a couple of factors have caused it to crumble. For one the freeze has closed off gas pipelines, rather like the windmills getting frozen over. But the much larger factor is that with the cold snap everyone started buying up gas for heating, leaving none for the state or energy companies, and our governor didn't think to buy any before the cold snap hit.
The result has been what ERCOT is calling rolling blackouts, but they didn't even get that right. Millions of Texans haven't had electricity all day when temperatures have gone to single digit Fahrenheit (negative Celsius) and largely stayed there. Meanwhile millions of other Texans haven't had their electricity turned off at all, and many empty business districts have remained lit up, across the street from blacked out houses. As an extra kick in the teeth, the energy companies have sent out messages (many to people who haven't had electricity for 16+ hours) to conserve energy. And finally, since it's Texas and it doesn't have infrastructure for dealing with snow and ice, the roads are all frozen over, nobody had snow tires or equivalents, nobody knows how to drive in these conditions, so trying to go to somewhere with power is ridiculously dangerous and there's already been a 100 car pileup with fatalities because of this storm.
And even if they could.
Early reports touted frozen windmills as the culprit, but if every windmill was operating at 100% capacity, it wouldn't even be that much, and in fact the most disparaging numbers I could find pegged wind at a 4 gigawatt shortfall compared to where it should be at this time of year. Instead the massive shortfall is coming from coal, nuclear, and especially natural gas. Natural gas being the biggest source of energy in Texas by a fairly wide margin, a couple of factors have caused it to crumble. For one the freeze has closed off gas pipelines, rather like the windmills getting frozen over. But the much larger factor is that with the cold snap everyone started buying up gas for heating, leaving none for the state or energy companies, and our governor didn't think to buy any before the cold snap hit.
The result has been what ERCOT is calling rolling blackouts, but they didn't even get that right. Millions of Texans haven't had electricity all day when temperatures have gone to single digit Fahrenheit (negative Celsius) and largely stayed there. Meanwhile millions of other Texans haven't had their electricity turned off at all, and many empty business districts have remained lit up, across the street from blacked out houses. As an extra kick in the teeth, the energy companies have sent out messages (many to people who haven't had electricity for 16+ hours) to conserve energy. And finally, since it's Texas and it doesn't have infrastructure for dealing with snow and ice, the roads are all frozen over, nobody had snow tires or equivalents, nobody knows how to drive in these conditions, so trying to go to somewhere with power is ridiculously dangerous and there's already been a 100 car pileup with fatalities because of this storm.
And even if they could.