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Bloomberg Businessweek March 1, 2021were climbing. Blackouts were more probable than not, he
predicted. Demand was set to rise significantly, and the grid
was already struggling.
By Monday afternoon, local and state officials were urg-
ing Texans to stay off the roads, which were slick with ice.
That left the millions in the state who were going on 12 hours
without heat with a choice: Bundle up indoors, or brave the
streets to stay with friends and family who still had power. The
Texas National Guard was deployed to move the elderly into
warming shelters. Air travel in and out of Houston was halted.
A facility storing Covid-19 vaccinations lost power, forcing
county officials to race to distribute more than 8,000 doses.
A friend had dropped her brother off at Houston’s sprawling
Texas Medical Center to try to get one and urged me to do the
same. “Just go,” she said over the phone.
The line at Ben Taub Hospital, one of the distribution sites,
wrapped around the building. It was 4:45 p.m., and the sun was
starting to set. Either because the county was out of vaccines
or because officials didn’t want hundreds of people outside in
temperatures that were predicted to fall to the teens that night,
security guards told new arrivals they were done with distribu-
tions. If there’s an experience that feels like the apocalypse, it’s
watching hundreds of masked people line up hoping to get vac-
cinated against a pandemic virus during a widespread black-
out in the middle of a snowstorm—in Texas.T
exans, particularly those of us near the coast, know how
to prepare for a storm. A hurricane warning triggers a
familiar routine of gas station trips, bathtub fill-ups, and H-E-B
grocery runs. Talk of a winter storm had been mounting for
days, so we’d prepared, sort of. I checked to make sure I had
a pallet of water, pulled out my winter jacket, and bought a
few bottles of wine. But while the state’s power plants and
residents alike can function in extreme heat, it had been
decades since Texas had experienced
a polar vortex like the one that hit on
Valentine’s Day.
Homes here are usually warmed
by underpowered electric furnaces or
baseboard heaters, which are turned on
maybe a few weeks a year in some parts
of the state. Almost nobody has a more
efficient oil or gas furnace, and insula-
tion is designed to keep our homes cool
in the summer, not warm in the win-
ter. Pipes are often exposed to the ele-
ments. In New England, when all else
fails, you drip your faucets to keep the
pipes from freezing and bursting. But
in Texas, where much of the water dis-
tribution depends on electric pumps to
pressurize lines, officials worried power
outages would cause a drop in water
pressure. “Please do not run water to
keep pipes from bursting,” HoustonMayor Sylvester Turner begged on Twitter. “It is needed for
hospitals and fires.”
On Sunday and Monday, Ercot’s capacity—the amount of
electricity available on its grid—plummeted nearly 40%, to just
under 44,000 megawatts, leaving wide swaths of the state in
the dark. The grid was already handicapped: Several power
plants had been taken offline for weeks of maintenance. The
purpose, ironically, was to ensure they’d be ready for sum-
mer demand, when energy usage normally peaks.
Even as iPhone batteries drained and Wi-Fi cut out, much
of the conversation online centered on a tweet from a local oil
and gas industry lobbyist that showed a helicopter attempt-
ing to de-ice a wind turbine. “A helicopter running on fossil
fuel spraying chemicals made with fossil fuels onto a wind
turbine made with fossil fuels in the middle of an ice storm
is awesome,” the post said. The photo was from Sweden in- No matter. It kicked off a mad dash to assign ideolog-
ical blame. “We should never build another wind turbine
in Texas,” Sid Miller, the state’s agriculture commissioner,
wrote on Facebook. “Texas’s Blackouts Are The Result Of
Unreliable ‘Green’ Energy,” read the headline to an article
in the Federalist.
Elsewhere, the fault was ascribed to the state’s choice to
avoid federal regulation of its electric grid. Former Governor
Rick Perry, who later served as U.S. energy secretary, dis-
missed this by arguing that a few days of blackouts were
preferable to interference from Washington. Tim Boyd, the
mayor of Colorado City, Texas, resigned after telling constit-
uents in a Facebook post that they should “think outside of
the box” rather than seek government assistance and that
“only the strong will survive.” He apologized and said he’d
been angry about a situation over which he had no control.
The political schadenfreude extended to Senator Ted Cruz,
who was spotted boarding a flight to Cancún, Mexico, while
power outages—and freezing homes—were widespread. He
later apologized.
Texas’ grid is almost entirely disconnected from the rest
of the country, which exempts it from federal rules but also
TAMIR KALIFA (2)Manessa Grady with her
sons Zechariah, 8, and
Noah, 9, at their home in
Austin on Feb. 16