The Economist February 20th 2021 21
United StatesA perfect storm
Light a candle for the kids
W
hen it rains, it pours, and when it
snows, the lights turn off. Or so it
goes in Texas. After a winter storm pum-
melled the Lone Star State with record
snowfall and the lowest temperatures in
more than 30 years, millions were left
without electricity and heat. At the worst
moment on February 16th, 4.5m Texan
households were cut off from power, as
providers were overloaded with demand
and tried to shuffle access to electricity so
the entire grid did not collapse.
Whole skylines, including Dallas’s,
went dark to conserve power. Some Texans
braved the snowy roads to check into the
few hotels with remaining rooms, only for
the hotels’ power to go off as they arrived.
Others donned skiwear and remained in-
side, hoping the lights and heat would
come back on. Across the state, what were
supposed to be “rolling” blackouts lasted
for days. It is still too soon to quantify the
devastation. More than 20 people have
died in motor accidents, from fires lit for
warmth and from carbon-monoxide poi-
soning after using cars to get warm. The
storm has also halted deliveries of covid-19
vaccines and may prevent around 1m vacci-
nations from happening this week. Several
retail electricity providers are likely to go
bankrupt, after being hit with surging
wholesale power prices.
Other states, including Tennessee, were
also covered in snow, but Texas got the li-
on’s share and ground to a halt. Texans are
rightly furious that residents of America’s
energy capital cannot count on reliable
power. Everyone is asking why.
The short answer is that the Electric Re-
liability Council of Texas (ercot), which
operates the grid, did not properly forecast
the demand for energy as a result of thestorm. Some say that this was nearly im-
possible to predict, but there were warn-
ings of the severity of the coming weather
in the preceding week, and ercot’s projec-
tions were notably short. Brownouts last
summer had already demonstrated the
grid’s lack of excess capacity, says George
O’Leary of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co
(tph), an energy investment bank.
Many Republican politicians were
quick to blame renewable energy sources,
such as wind power, for the blackouts, but
that is not fair. Some wind turbines did in-
deed freeze, but natural gas, which ac-
counts for around half of the state’s elec-
tricity generation, was the primary reason
for the shortfall. Plants broke down, as did
the gas supply chain and pipelines. The
cold also caused a reactor at one of the
state’s two nuclear plants to go offline.
Transmission lines may have also iced up,
says Wade Schauer of Wood Mackenzie, a
research firm. In short, Texas experienced
a perfect storm of equipment failure.
Some of the blame falls on the unique
design of the electricity market in Texas. Of
America’s 48 contiguous states, it is the on-
ly one with its own stand-alone electricity
grid—the Texas Interconnection. This
means that when power generators fail,
the state cannot import electricity from
outside its borders.
The state’s deregulated power market is
also fiercely competitive. ercotoversees
the grid, while power generators produce
electricity for the wholesale market. Some
300 retail electricity providers buy thatThe freeze in Texas exposes America’s infrastructural failings
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