Texas power-water coupled outages: What really happened?
Let’s use data to reveal the truth…
The day after Valentine’s day, Texas was less than 5 minutes from a black start — an indefinite blackout that could have lasted months. Thankfully this did not happen, but the 2021 Texas power crisis was a disaster, resulting in 70 people dead, and almost $200 billion in damages, making it the costliest disaster in Texas history. So what really happened?
In the middle of February 2021, a series of winter storms swept across the United States. This resulted in record low temperatures and many cities in Texas were colder than Alaska for a brief moment! At the lowest point, Dallas was at -2 degrees, Austin at 6 degrees, and Houston at 13 degrees F.
Low Temperatures and Energy Infrastructure Failures
On February 14th, Texas started out with nearly 28,000 MW of lost electrical power capacity. A large part of this was due to Wind capacity loss (14,000 MW) and natural gas loss (12,000 MW), due to inadequately winterized wind turbines and natural gas equipment. As you can see, initially there was a larger loss of capacity…
