DANIELKRAMERBloomberg Businessweek March 1, 2021and technology officer at French utility Engie SA, sees the
need for billions of dollars of investment to make homes more
efficient, weatherize power plants, and create connections to
grids in other states. He recommends building more storage
capacity and adding more high-voltage lines capable of deliv-
ering power over long distances. It would also be good to build
“micro grids” that serve as decentralized power stations in case
of systemwide problems. “Sorry,” he said. “I know I just rat-
tled off, like, six things.”
The focus of many Texans’ frustration is Ercot.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed the grid man-
ager for failing to provide a realistic assessment of
the state’s generating capacity prior to the severe
cold snap. “Ercot has failed,” Abbott said at a media
briefing on Feb. 18. On Feb. 23, five Ercot board mem-
bers, including the chair, announced their resigna-
tion. Abbot also demanded state lawmakers make
winterization of power plants mandatory. The last
time that recommendation came, it was from fed-
eral regulators following a 2011 winter storm that
left millions without electricity. That summer, the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the
North America Electric Reliability Corp. urged the
state’s utilities to use more insulation and to ensure
pipes could be heated during cold snaps, among
other steps to prepare for extreme temperatures.
But plant operators largely ignored those directions,
and Ercot has pointed out there’s not much the grid
operator can do about that. “There aren’t regulatory penalties
at the current time,” Dan Woodfin, Ercot’s senior director of
system operations, told reporters on Feb. 16.O
n Wednesday evening, I could see from my window that
the golden arches of McDonald’s were once again glowing
and attracting cars to the drive-thru like bugs to a light. By the
time I got there, the line was already spilling into Westheimer,
a main drag, so I parked and went to the Thai place next door.
Other people waiting to order were talking about plumbing and
which stores still had water. “Can you believe it?” one woman
asked, shaking her head. A little more than an hour later, I walked
away with two orders of pad thai. It wasn’t what I’d ordered,
but I didn’t care. I don’t think anyone did. As I was leaving, I
heard someone say that they’d tried going to McDonald’s. It
turned out it wasn’t even open. The lights came on automati-
cally once the power returned, and now dozens of cars were
lined up to get burgers that weren’t being served.
On Thursday morning, I was on the phone with an editor
when I noticed the ceiling fan in my room spinning. The power
was back, and Wi-Fi soon after. I checked in with colleagues.
Another energy reporter had spent two days trying to keep
his daughters, age 5 and 18 months, warm. At one point, heloaded his family into the car and called around in search of
a hotel. The closest one he could find was four hours away in
Alexandria, La., and even it couldn’t guarantee that the power
would still be on by the time they arrived.
“It was a horrible, horrible episode for millions of people,”
said Arnold, the philanthropist, on Friday,
as power was being restored. As we talked,
more than 14 million people were still
unable to drink their water. My parents’bathtub was full of dirty, half-melted snow—still the only source
in the house. Grocery stores had enormous lines but little on the
shelves, and customers of Griddy, the Texas energy company
that promised access to wholesale prices, were now facing bills
in the tens of thousands of dollars. “I think there will be a lot
of pressure,” said Arnold, meaning from very unhappy voters.
But even with that pressure, it’s not obvious where to begin.
Should power plants be forced to invest in cold weather pro-
tection if shale wells and gas pipelines are freezing too? James
Coleman, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University’s
Dedman School of Law in Dallas who focuses on energy, sug-
gests they might be required to source gas from producers that
have weatherized their infrastructure. Or perhaps, he offers,
the Texas Railroad Commission, tasked with overseeing the
state’s oil and gas industry, could step in and make weather-
ization mandatory for companies that drill for and ship natural
gas. So far, the agency has done little to push weatherization,
and one commissioner recently echoed other Republican lead-
ers in saying wind power was to blame.
“There will be changes,” Coleman said. “The scale of this
outage—and the human consequences—are too large to shrug
off.” <BW> �With Mark Chediak, Kevin Crowley, Naureen Malik,
Shannon Sims, and Catherine Traywick“The question for everybody ... is: To what level
of reliability should you build?”
A Randalls grocery
store in the Tanglewood
neighborhood of
Houston on Feb. 2046