Why millions ran out of power in the storm, what went wrong

• Half a million Texans were still without power Thursday morning as Arctic weather hit the state.
• The cold weather caused power sources to go offline just as demand for electricity increased.
• Climate change could make events like these more frequent, experts say.
• Visit the Insider Business section for more stories.

Nearly half a million Texans remain without power Thursday as Arctic weather continues to plague the state. The blackout, which affected a few million residents at its peak, is one of the largest in US history.

“We know that millions of people are suffering,” said Bill Magness, president of the Texas power grid manager, ERCOT, in a statement Wednesday. “We have no other priority than to get them electricity.”

ERCOT said it made “significant progress” Wednesday night, but cuts are expected to continue through the week. About 490,000 customers are without power Thursday morning, according to an outage-tracking site.

The misinformation spread online Tuesday when some conservative groups and lawmakers falsely blamed the blackouts on frozen wind turbines that stopped generating power. In reality, thermal power sources that went offline, such as natural gas plants, contributed the most to the problem.

But the drop in power supply is just one reason so many people in Texas were without power this week. This is what you need to know.

Bronte Wittpenn / Austin American-Statesman / USA Today Network via Reuters

The simple reason millions lost power: a gap between supply and demand

A major winter storm that hit Texas over the long weekend caused two major things to happen: Sources of electricity, such as natural gas plants, went offline and demand for the power they produce increased as people across the state He turned on the heaters to stay warm.

That caused a huge power shortage.

The organization that manages most of the Texas grid, known as ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, responded by cutting millions of homes into pieces to limit the amount of time a home was dark. These so-called continuous blackouts are similar to what happened in California last year, also during extreme weather.

As of Thursday morning, 40 gigawatts of electricity were disconnected in ERCOT territory, up from 46 gigawatts on Wednesday. This is one of the largest power supply deficits in modern American history, Patrick Milligan, manager and energy expert at consultancy ICF, told Insider.

Most of the supply that was disconnected was coal and natural gas, not wind.

About 60% of offline power sources in Texas on Wednesday and Thursday were thermal – that is, power plants that run on coal, natural gas or nuclear power – while the rest came from solar and wind farms, he said. ERCOT.

Cold weather is the obvious culprit: All the different types of power plants in Texas, not just wind turbines, have trouble operating in arctic weather as their instruments freeze up. In fact, earlier this week, wind farms were outperforming forecasts, said Rebecca Miller, a Wood Mackenzie research manager that tracks production across the state.

It can be more difficult to pump natural gas from the ground or transport it to power plants in freezing conditions. Additionally, utilities have prioritized shipping natural gas to homes for heating over power plants, Miller said.

Nick Oxford / Reuters

There are less obvious drivers behind Texas blackouts

The United States is made up of three major electrical grids, one of which almost completely overlaps with Texas.

In other words, Texas essentially has its own network.

That can exacerbate a situation like this by making it harder for Texas to get power from other regions that aren’t under the same weather-related stress, said Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech who studies large infrastructure.

“The entire Texas network is subject to this emergency condition at once,” Grubert said. “It is a lot of pressure to put on a network that does not have access to other areas that are not in those conditions.”

But there were other issues at play, such as a lack of preparation, on both the supply and demand sides.

Homeowners weren’t told to do much to conserve energy, Miller said. Meanwhile, the power plants were not adequately heated.

Take wind turbines for example: they have no problem operating in states much colder than Texas. Minnesota and Iowa, for example, have large wind farms, but they don’t experience blackouts when temperatures drop to the single digits.

“The wind can work perfectly in cold climates,” Milligan said.

Like natural gas and coal power plants, wind turbines can be heated to withstand harsh winter conditions. But HVAC costs money, and turbines in Texas are generally not equipped for cold weather.

“Why would there be a snowplow in Austin? That kind of thinking applies to power plants,” Grubert said.

It didn’t have to get so bad

This is not the first time Texas has been hit by an Arctic blast. In 2011, around the Super Bowl, cold weather hit the state and plunged millions of people into darkness.

That has left many people wondering: Why didn’t power producers and regulators do more to prepare for this cold snap?

That summer, a federal report recommended things like HVAC to prevent the supply from going offline in the future, the Houston Chronicle reported.

But many of that advice was not followed, Milligan said, in part because it could not be enforced and there was no mechanism to pay for it. Air conditioning is expensive, he said.

Additionally, the Texas energy market is deregulated and suppliers are trying to produce energy as cheaply as possible, Milligan added.

“Generators are not really incentivized to undertake this type of [weatherization] investments, “Milligan said.

It would have been difficult to completely prevent these blackouts, experts told Insider; this type of weather is really unusual in Texas. But they said the effects would not have been as devastating if companies had done more to prepare.

David J. Phillip / AP

More blackouts are coming if we don’t do more to prepare

The irony of blaming wind turbines for power outages in Texas is that extreme weather events are made worse by climate change, which is driven by the burning of coal and natural gas. In theory, wind and solar farms offset the emissions emitted into the atmosphere, reducing the impact of climate change.

“Can you expect more extremes? Yes,” Grubert said. “In terms of what that means for the network, that’s an issue that we as a society will have to address.”

It is important not only to prevent power outages, but also to ensure we have ways to keep people safe when the grid goes down, he said.

“Even if the power system had been active, there would have been a lot of people in trouble during this event,” he said, such as those who may not have access to heat.

The importance of managing demand, for example, through measures that make buildings more energy efficient, cannot be underestimated either, he said.

Ron Jenkins / Getty Images

When will power be restored and what happens next

The outages are likely to continue through the week as a second winter storm brings freezing rain and sleet to the state.

“We are anticipating another cold front tonight that could increase demand,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, in a statement Wednesday morning. “The ability to restore more power depends on more generation coming back online.”

Gov. Greg Abbott called the blackout event “unacceptable” and said he would add ERCOT reform as an emergency item for the 2021 legislative session.

“The Texas Electrical Reliability Council has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also launched a task force to investigate outages in Texas and elsewhere in the US.