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he Houston skyline was lit pink for Valentine’s Day. It was
cold—really cold, at least by the standards of the Gulf
Coast, where wintertime lows are generally around 50F. That
Sunday night it was below freezing; the forecast called for the
first snow in years.
Earlier in the day, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas,
better known as Ercot, the nonprofit that manages the state
electricity grid, had gently urged Texans to be mindful during
the storm. “We know it’s cold. But if you turn down your heat
to 68 degrees and put on a fleece, you can help keep the power
flowing for everyone,” the group tweeted earlier in the day.
Another post showed a picture of a KitchenAid stand mixer:
“Unplug the fancy new appliances you bought during the pan-
demic and only used once.”
This was all comically inadequate. That night, icons on a mas-
sive screen at Ercot’s Austin headquarters that corresponded
to the status of the state’s regional power plants started flip-
ping from green to red. They were shutting down—sponta-
neously and unexpectedly because of the extreme cold—even
as residents across the state cranked up the heat. Faced with
the very real prospect of a catastrophic outage that would
leave homes and businesses without power for months, Ercot
ordered power to be cut from more than 2 million homes in
the state. It was the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.
We’d been warned about possible rolling blackouts that
might last anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, so most people
assumed their lights and heaters would kick back on soon.
My power was still on, so I turned down the thermostat to do
my part. The next morning, Texans woke up to videos of ski-
ers taking Austin’s windy 2222 ranch road like it was a run in
Vail and photos of dogs seeing snow for the first time. Later
in the day, CenterPoint Energy Inc., a major power provider
in the Houston area, warned that if customers didn’t have
electricity they shouldn’t count on getting it by nightfall.
Texas’ famous energy network, one of the most expansive
in the country and a source of state pride, was crumbling.
The Friday before, I’d written a story for Bloomberg News,
where I cover energy in Houston, about Chris Bird, president
of a Tulsa oil and gas company. He’d spent much of that day
driving around Osage County, in northeastern Oklahoma, with
a propane torch, trying to melt ice off old wells. Many of these
wells hadn’t made money in years. But natural gas prices had
climbed more than 4,000% over two days, and Bird was hop-
ing to cash in. His wells were faring better than the much newer
ones that make up Texas’ rich shale fields. By the end of that
week, there were rumors that some producers were experienc-
ing freeze-offs, when heavier hydrocarbons and water in the gas
form hydrates, basically ice crystals, that block the wellheads.
Prices for electricity in some parts of the state had already
hit $9,000 per megawatt-hour, the highest an energy seller is
allowed to charge. For a Texas household, that translates to
about $9 per kilowatt-hour. That’s a lot. Normally, Texans pay
an average of around 12¢ or so. “I’m not sure ‘Black Swan’
can properly define what we are currently experiencing,” one
power trader texted me a day before the outages as pricesHouston’s Galleria area
on the morning of Feb. 14March 1, 2021WHY TEXAS BROKE
By Rachel Adams-Heard DANIEL KRAMER