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Millions of Texans have gone days without power or heat in subfreezing temperatures brought on by snow and ice storms. Limited regulations on companies that generate power and a history of isolating Texas from federal oversight help explain the crisis, energy and policy experts told The Texas Tribune.

While Texas Republicans were quick to pounce on renewable energy and to blame frozen wind turbines, the natural gas, nuclear and coal plants that provide most of the state’s energy also struggled to operate during the storm. Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the energy grid operator for most of the state, said that the state’s power system was simply no match for the deep freeze.

“Nuclear units, gas units, wind turbines, even solar, in different ways — the very cold weather and snow has impacted every type of generator,” said Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT.

Energy and policy experts said Texas’ decision not to require equipment upgrades to better withstand extreme winter temperatures, and choice to operate mostly isolated from other grids in the U.S. left power system unprepared for the winter crisis.

Policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.

“Clearly we need to change our regulatory focus to protect the people, not profits,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, a now-retired former director of Public Citizen, an Austin-based consumer advocacy group who advocated for changes after in 2011 when Texas faced a similar energy crisis.

“Instead of taking any regulatory action, we ended up getting guidelines that were unenforceable and largely ignored in [power companies’] rush for profits,” he said.

It is possible to “winterize” natural gas power plants, natural gas production, wind turbines and other energy infrastructure, experts said, through practices like insulating pipelines. These upgrades help prevent major interruptions in other states with regularly cold weather.

Lessons from 2011

In 2011, Texas faced a very similar storm that froze natural gas wells and affected coal plants and wind turbines, leading to power outages across the state. A decade later, Texas power generators have still not made all the investments necessary to prevent plants from tripping offline during extreme cold, experts said.

Woodfin, of ERCOT, acknowledged that there’s no requirement to prepare power infrastructure for such extremely low temperatures. “Those are not mandatory, it’s a voluntary guideline to decide to do those things,” he said. “There are financial incentives to stay online, but there is no regulation at this point.”

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which has some authority to regulate power generators in the U.S., is currently developing mandatory standards for “winterizing” energy infrastructure, a spokesperson said.

Texas politicians and regulators were warned after the 2011 storm that more “winterizing” of power infrastructure was necessary, a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation shows. The large number of units that tripped offline or couldn’t start during that storm “demonstrates that the generators did not adequately anticipate the full impact of the extended cold weather and high winds,” regulators wrote at the time. More thorough preparation for cold weather could have prevented the outages, the report said.

“This should have been addressed in 2011 by the Legislature after that market meltdown, but there was no substantial follow up,” by state politicians or regulators, said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow and economics professor at the University of Houston. “They skipped on down the road with business as usual.”

ERCOT officials said that some generators implemented new winter practices after the freeze a decade ago, and new voluntary “best practices” were adopted. Woodfin said that during subsequent storms, such as in 2018, it appeared that those efforts worked. But he said this storm was even more extreme than regulators anticipated based on models developed after the 2011 storm. He acknowledged that any changes made were “not sufficient to keep these generators online,” during this storm.

After temperatures plummeted and snow covered large parts of the state Sunday night, ERCOT warned increased demand might lead to short-term, rolling blackouts. Instead, huge portions of the largest cities in Texas went dark and have remained without heat or power for days. On Tuesday, nearly 60% of Houston households and businesses were without power. Of the total installed capacity to the electric grid, about 40% went offline during the storm, Woodfin said.

Climate wake-up call

Climate scientists in Texas agree with ERCOT leaders that this week’s storm was unprecedented in some ways. They also say it’s evidence that Texas is not prepared to handle an increasing number of more volatile and more extreme weather events.

“We cannot rely on our past to guide our future,” said Dev Niyogi, a geosciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin who previously served as the state climatologist for Indiana. He noted that previous barometers are becoming less useful as states see more intense weather covering larger areas for prolonged periods of time. He said climate scientists want infrastructure design to consider a “much larger spectrum of possibilities” rather than treating these storms as a rarity, or a so-called “100-year event.”

Katharine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist at Texas Tech University, highlighted a 2018 study that showed how a warming Arctic is creating more severe polar vortex events. “It’s a wake up call to say, ‘What if these are getting more frequent?’” Hayhoe said. “Moving forward, that gives us even more reason to be more prepared in the future.”

Hayhoe and Niyogi acknowledged there's uncertainty about the connection between climate change and cold air outbreaks from the Arctic. However, they emphasize there is higher certainty that other extreme weather events such as drought, flooding and heat waves are due to a warming climate.

Other Texas officials looked beyond ERCOT. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins argued that the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry — a remit that includes natural gas wells and pipelines — prioritized commercial customers over residents by not requiring equipment to be better equipped for cold weather. The RRC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Other states require you to have cold weather packages on your generation equipment and require you to use, either through depth or through materials, gas piping that is less likely to freeze," Jenkins said.

Texas’ electricity market is also deregulated, meaning that no one company owns all the power plants, transmission lines and distribution networks. Instead, several different companies generate and transmit power, which they sell on the wholesale market to yet more players. Those power companies in turn are the ones that sell to homes and businesses. Policy experts disagree on whether a different structure would have helped Texas navigate these outages. “I don’t think deregulation itself is necessarily the thing to blame here,” said Josh Rhodes, a research associate at University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.

History of isolation

Texas’ grid is also mostly isolated from other areas of the country, a set up designed to avoid federal regulation. It has some connectivity to Mexico and to the Eastern U.S. grid, but those ties have limits on what they can transmit. The Eastern U.S. is also facing the same winter storm that is creating a surge in power demand. That means that Texas has been unable to get much help from other areas.

“If you’re going to say you can handle it by yourself, step up and do it,” said Hirs, the UH energy fellow, of the state’s pursuit of an independent grid with a deregulated market. “That’s the incredible failure.”

Rhodes, of UT Austin, said Texas policy makers should consider more connections to the rest of the country. That, he acknowledged, could come at a higher financial cost — and so will any improvements to the grid to prevent future disasters. There’s an open question as to whether Texas leadership will be willing to fund, or politically support, any of these options.

“We need to have a conversation about if we believe that we’re going to have more weather events like this,” Rhodes said. “On some level, it comes down to if you want a more resilient grid, we can build it, it will just cost more money. What are you willing to pay? We’re going to have to confront that.”

Texas Tech University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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The state's week of weather hell started with a deadly 133-car pileup outside of Fort Worth. A winter storm unlike any Texas has ever seen quickly followed, and seven days later, millions are without power and reliable water.

And now Texans are running out of food. From farm to table, freezing temperatures and power outages are disrupting the food supply chain that people rely on every day.

Across the state, people are using up supplies they had stockpiled and losing more as items start to spoil in dark refrigerators. Some are storing their remaining rations in coolers outside, and trips to the grocery store often do little to replenish pantries.

“It was out of meat, eggs and almost all milk before I left,” Cristal Porter, an Austin resident, said about her local Target which she visited Monday. “Lines were wrapped around the store when we arrived. … Shelves were almost fully cleared for potatoes, meat, eggs and some dairy.”

Two days later, one of Porter’s neighbors went to that same Target, and the store was completely out of food, with no sign of additional shipments arriving or employees restocking shelves.

With grocery stores across the state shuttered for lack of power, supermarkets that remain open have seen supplies dwindle, shortages that ripple over to food pantries that count on grocery store surplus to keep their own shelves stocked.

Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable crops in the Rio Grande Valley have frozen over in what The Produce News described as a “Valentine’s Day produce massacre.” School districts from Fort Worth to Houston have halted meal distributions to students for the next several days, and Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said dairy farmers around the state are pouring $8 million worth of milk down the drain every day because they can't get it to dairies.

Celia Cole, the CEO of hunger-relief organization Feeding Texas, said that so far, eight food banks have asked the state for extra help feeding their communities. Several food banks affiliated with Feeding Texas have also started providing food supplies to emergency warming shelters in the state’s major cities. Wednesday afternoon, the Central Food Bank of Texas canceled its deliveries scheduled for Thursday in Austin and Rockdale.

“The Food Bank’s fleet, equipment, facilities and operations have been adversely impacted by the extremely low temperatures, and hazardous road conditions are hindering our staff and volunteers from getting to our building safely,” the organization announced in a media alert. “These conditions are also keeping us from distributing food safely.”

Food pantries also rely on donations from retail stores and grocery chains like Kroger and H-E-B, so when shelves run bare at the stores, there is less to share with the food pantries, Cole added.

For Texas residents, disruptions to the food supply chain, often combined with continued power outages, mean eating non-perishable canned goods or leftover items, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Porter has used a camping stove to make hot meals since losing her power, while others have resorted to heating their food in the fireplace. Andrez Rodriguez in Mission told The Texas Tribune that he hasn’t had power for over 80 consecutive hours now, and had to throw out most of the supplies left in his fridge before going to his brother’s home for a warm meal.

“I only come to sleep at my house to make sure nothing gets stolen,” Rodriguez said.

Residents around the state have also taken to social media to share their stories about struggling to find food or an open grocery store. Wes Wilson, a producer for KXAN News in Austin, tweeted a video of the line for fast food takeout in downtown Austin Wednesday afternoon and said “there is a significant food shortage in this city right now.”

Meanwhile, officials said Wednesday that disruptions to the state’s long-term food supply could present even more problems. Miller said livestock growers across Texas are out of feed, while a lack of available natural gas has caused some chickens and calves to freeze to death.

“All of the milk processing plants are full, they can’t get enough electricity to run, and if they could, they can’t get enough natural gas to pasteurize the milk,” Miller said. “So grocery store shelves are basically empty. There’s no dairy products flowing to Kroger or H-E-B or places like that, so we’re as bad as it was when COVID hit, could possibly get worse.”

Citrus and vegetable farms in the Rio Grande Valley also anticipate massive losses. Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, said 60% of the region’s grapefruit crop and 100% of the late orange crop will be lost. With the area producing 230,000 tons of grapefruit per year, farmers in the Valley are expecting to lose an estimated 138,000 tons of that crop.

There are also 40 different vegetable varieties grown in the area, including cilantro, kale and dill. Those will be affected by the storm, as well.

“I'd say if you’re looking for Texas citrus, [the effect] is going to be immediate,” Murden said. “If you’re looking for Texas vegetables it’s going to be immediate.”

Between the current strain on grocery stores and the potential for huge damages to the state’s agricultural sector, this storm could hamper food access for weeks to come. Miller and Cole emphasized that it’s impossible to know the extent of the losses until power returns, but the food supply will continue to drain unless farmers and stores get electricity back soon.

“They’ve been very, very badly hit – the agricultural sector, generally —by the pandemic, so they’re already struggling,” Cole said. “And so I think although the impact if the power gets restored quickly might not be huge in absolute terms, it’s hitting a sector that’s already reeling from the pandemic.”

Disclosure: Feeding Texas, H-E-B and Texas Citrus Mutual have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Image via Weather.com

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Millions of Texans didn’t have power Tuesday night, and the arctic blast was still pummeling the state. Many were looking for answers on why they were stuck in the cold and when their heat would return. And Gov. Greg Abbott was being interviewed on Fox News, decrying the Green New Deal — a massive framework of climate change policies that don’t exist in Texas.

Abbott said in an interview with Sean Hannity in the middle of a crisis that “the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Ignoring that experts and officials agreed that a disruption in energy powered by fossil fuels was the biggest culprit behind Texas' outages, Abbott added that losses in wind and solar energy “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis.”

Dan Woodfin, senior director at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, had said hours earlier that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy, mostly wind power, had gone offline as of Tuesday. But that made up only about a third of the lost power on the state’s grid. Nearly double that capacity had been lost from thermal energy sources like gas and coal. And ERCOT forecast in November that wind energy would make up less than 10% of the overall winter capacity.

The outages have raised questions about the state’s handling of and preparation for the winter storm. Officials knew wintry weather was coming; why hadn’t they been warned about possible disruptions? Why weren’t the power-generating sources that went offline — wind, natural gas and others — better equipped to withstand winter weather? And why didn’t the state have more power in reserve?

Abbott has taken some steps to look into what went wrong for the state, declaring the management of the state’s electrical grid an emergency item for this year’s legislative session and applauding plans for investigations by the state Legislature. But he wasn’t a particularly visible presence for Texans during the storm. He delivered a handful of local television interviews in addition to his appearance on Fox News. His first press conference after the weather hit came more than 60 hours after the widespread power outages began.

In his public comments before that press conference, he wasn’t shy about casting blame. Not only did he denounce the Green New Deal, but also ERCOT, which operates the grid.

“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours,” Abbott said Tuesday.

During his news conference Wednesday, which began more than 45 minutes late, Abbott described the weather forecast, discussed energy production capabilities, urged Texans to call plumbers if their pipes are frozen, and listed off the assistance from the federal government. He invited other state officials to detail the help state agencies were providing. But he did little to acknowledge the state’s failure in preparedness, even though there were several warning signs. He also didn’t concede any possible underlying policy failures in his opening speech.

“The last time the state dealt with something like this was actually in 2011,” Abbott said. “That led to changes with regard to ERCOT, but also the power system in the state of Texas.”

He said a similar review will happen now and, without mentioning specifics, said the state might reconsider some of the changes it made then.

Pressed on the comments he made to Hannity, Abbott said he was only trying to convey that it would be a challenge for the state to rely solely on green energy, which did lose significant power-generating capacity during the storm. He said he has repeatedly mentioned that there have been problems with other sources of energy, too.

“I was asked a question on one TV show about renewable, and I responded to that question,” he said of the Green New Deal comment.

Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto, assistant dean for civic engagement at the University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, is an expert in political psychology. She said politicians typically try to blame other things during crises “to keep their brand clean.”

“You don’t want to be associated with negative incidents because we think about things in terms of association,” DeFrancesco Soto said. “When folks go into the ballot box, they see a symbol, an R or a D, and then based on how campaigns have worked, both offense and defense, they’ll try to link certain things, good and bad, to that brand.”

In terms of voting behavior and political psychology, she also said the imminence of an election — or lack thereof — also plays a role in how politicians react to natural disasters, but there are no elections slated for this year. Abbott is up for reelection in 2022.

“If we had an election coming up next month, then that would be disastrous for the party in power, in this case the Republicans, but we don’t. The impact of something of this magnitude is very real, but it dissipates over time. A year and a half from now, it’s not going to be as vivid and it may not have as much of a political impact,” DeFrancesco Soto said.

Texas Republicans are probably not going to accept any responsibility for failing to regulate the state’s power grid because politicians from either party usually don’t accept responsibility for natural disasters in terms of preparedness, said John Higley, professor emeritus in government and sociology at UT-Austin.

“If you go back to Hurricane Harvey and all the damage done in Houston along the coast, nobody took responsibility for that. And no one’s going to take responsibility for this disaster either,” Higley said. “There will probably be an investigation of some sort, but it won’t really change the situation. I mean, you’re looking at a well-entrenched profit-making system with powerful interests invested in that system. They’re not about to cave to an investigation.”

Democrats have blasted Abbott for his response, saying in a press release, “There is blood on Abbott’s hands.”

“Crisis after crisis, Greg Abbott has failed and passed off blame to somebody else. Texas is in dire straits,” said state Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa. “Texans are dying. Homes are being destroyed, people are cold and hungry, and we have no idea when things will begin to return to normal because our state Government continues to fail.”

Meanwhile, the focus from conservatives on wind power is nothing new. Renewable energy has regularly been a conservative punching bag during energy disruptions — whether they’re because of snow storms in Texas or scorching heat waves in California.

When California experienced power outages and rolling blackouts last year, U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Republican who was, at the time, the presumptive next representative in his Panhandle district, tweeted, “This is what the Biden/Harris plan for our energy sector looks like. Corrupt ‘green’ policies that leave us in the dark, and Texas energy workers out of a job.” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, mocked the state’s energy disruption by tweeting, “Alexa, show me what happens when you let Democrats control energy policy.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even mocked California’s advisories for consumer-led energy conservation by tweeting, “Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

Democrats like Beto O’Rourke and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the forces behind the Green New Deal, fired back at Abbott for his criticism of the climate change proposal and his overall handling of the crisis.

“As with Covid, a natural disaster has become far deadlier due to the inaction & ineptitude of Abbott and Texas’ Republican leadership,” O’Rourke tweeted Tuesday. “Energy experts and State House Dems, among others, were warning of this for years. Abbott chose to ignore the facts, the science and the tough decisions and now Texans will once again pay the price.”

Ocasio-Cortez also criticized Abbott’s interview with Fox News in a scathing tweet.

“I go offline a few days and return to a GOP Gov blaming policies he hasn’t even implemented for his own failures. Gov. Abbott doesn’t seem to have a grasp on his state, so here’s a reminder: Texas runs 80-90% on fossil fuels,” she wrote. “The real ‘deadly deal’ is his failed leadership.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The operators of Texas’ power grid said Wednesday that their best-case scenario is returning energy customers in the state to short rolling blackouts soon, with the aim that most homes will not experience outages longer than 30 minutes to an hour at a time.

But Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told reporters during a virtual news conference that he did not think it was likely that could start to happen "today or before at least the morning tomorrow."

That projection, he said, was based on forecasts and information being received from generators. Many Texans are currently facing hourslong outages during freezing weather— or have been without power for days.

Bill Magness, ERCOT's president and CEO, said during the news conference that he's optimistic that the state's grid will see some of the power it has lost return Wednesday as the state warms slightly from a massive winter storm that prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an emergency for all 254 counties.

"Looking at the next couple of days," he said, "if those things break right and we get the generation online in the quantity we need to, we're optimistic we could move through this."

Magness said ERCOT has been unable to project specifics on when long-lasting power outages would end "because of the variables we've identified around the resources, the weather."

ERCOT, a nonprofit that manages the power grid used by almost all of the state, has come under scrutiny this week after a massive winter storm caused millions of residents to lose power for long spans during below freezing temperatures. During the frigid weather, which has brought massive demand for electricity, 185 power generating units have tripped offline, ERCOT officials said Wednesday, with some failing multiple times. The loss has come from multiple sources of power — including natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear. On Wednesday morning, ERCOT said around 2.8 million customers were offline.

Abbott declared reforming ERCOT an emergency item for the 2021 legislative session Tuesday, and hours later said he thinks leadership at the entity should resign. Abbott earmarking the issue as a top priority for the Legislature allows state lawmakers to take up legislation related to it during the first 60 days of the session, which began Jan. 12. Committees in both the House and Senate are set to hold hearings in the coming weeks on the issue, with one scheduled in the lower chamber for Feb. 25.

That House hearing will happen the day after a Feb. 24 "urgent meeting" that ERCOT board chair Sally Talberg called for in a letter dated Wednesday.

"Given ERCOT’s charge by the Texas Legislature for resource adequacy and reliability, this crisis warrants the board’s full and prompt attention, beginning with an understanding of the key events and known causes to date," Talberg wrote, adding that she expects ERCOT management to "provide a chronology of key events and critical actions as well as data and explanations in response" to a number of questions she listed in her letter.

Magness, asked Wednesday about Abbott saying ERCOT leadership should resign, said an assessment "can be done after we get the power back on" and defended grid operators who imposed outages early Monday in an attempt to avoid a complete shutdown of the grid.

"Blame can be assessed — very soon blame will surely be assessed," he said when asked why residents should trust ERCOT to lead the state out of the weather crisis. "But this team that has been protecting the grid from a much worse situation are really the key people who will lead us out and who have saved us from those sorts of very bad blackout situations in the past."