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what texas taught the rest of us

I wasn't in Texas when it happened. I want to say that upfront so nobody thinks I'm claiming some kind of survivor credibility I didn't earn. I was sitting in my own house, heat running, coffee hot, watching the whole thing unfold on my phone like everybody else who wasn't there. But I was paying closer attention than most people, because what was happening in Texas in February 2021 was the thing I'd been thinking about for years. The thing that made me leave the grid in the first place. It was a single point of failure, failing.

And not failing in some abstract, theoretical way you read about in an engineering textbook. Failing in the way that kills people.

what actually happened

Winter Storm Uri hit Texas starting around February 13, 2021. This was not a light dusting. This was an Arctic blast that pushed temperatures below zero in parts of the state — places that hadn't seen that kind of cold in generations, if ever. Dallas hit minus 2. Houston was in the teens. San Antonio saw single digits. This was the kind of cold that breaks things, and in Texas it broke everything.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas — ERCOT — operates the state's power grid. I use the word "operates" loosely, because what they did during Uri was more like watching it collapse in slow motion. Within the first 48 hours, generating capacity started falling off a cliff. Natural gas plants couldn't get fuel because the gas wellheads and pipelines were freezing. Coal plants tripped offline because their fuel handling systems froze. Wind turbines locked up because they weren't equipped with cold-weather packages that would have kept the blades turning. Even some nuclear capacity dropped when a feedwater line froze at the South Texas Project.

At its worst, ERCOT lost nearly half of its total generating capacity. They were producing around 45,000 megawatts against a demand that was pushing past 69,000. The gap was catastrophic. And here's the detail that should keep you up at night: ERCOT came within four minutes and 37 seconds of a total grid collapse. Not a blackout. A collapse. The difference matters. A blackout means the power's off and you turn it back on. A collapse means the grid frequency drops so low that generators start disconnecting to protect themselves in a cascading failure, and you're not looking at hours or days to restore power. You're looking at weeks. Maybe longer.

They avoided total collapse by ordering rolling blackouts, except the blackouts weren't rolling. They hit neighborhoods and they stayed. Some people lost power for 80 hours or more. In below-zero temperatures. In houses built for Texas heat, not Texas cold. No insulation to speak of. Single-pane windows. Pipes in exterior walls with no heat tape.

4.5 million customers lost power. That's not 4.5 million people — that's 4.5 million accounts. The actual number of people sitting in freezing houses was significantly higher. At least 246 people died, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, though many researchers believe the true number is north of 700 when you account for deaths in the weeks that followed from related causes.

And the power loss was just the start. When pipes froze and burst — which they did in millions of homes — the water system followed. Boil-water notices went out across the state, except you couldn't boil water if you had no power and an electric stove. Grocery stores were dark and empty. Gas stations couldn't pump fuel. Cell towers went down as their backup batteries died. People were melting snow to flush toilets. In the United States. In 2021.

This is all documented. This is not exaggeration. You can read the FERC/NERC joint inquiry report. You can read the ERCOT postmortem. You can read the history of major U.S. power outages and see where Uri fits on the list. It fits near the top.

what failed and why

There is a version of this story where Winter Storm Uri was an unforeseeable act of God and nobody could have done anything. That version is a lie told by people who had a financial or political interest in telling it. The truth is considerably less flattering.

The biggest single point of failure was natural gas. Texas relies on natural gas for roughly half its power generation, and the gas supply chain was not winterized. Wellheads froze. Compressor stations lost power and couldn't push gas through pipelines. Processing plants shut down. The gas generators were sitting there ready to run, but there was nothing to run them on. It was like having a car with a full tank of gas but the fuel line is frozen solid. The engine is fine. The fuel is there. But the system between the two failed because nobody spent the money to keep it from freezing.

Wind turbines got a lot of the blame in the days after, mostly from people with a political ax to grind. And yes, some wind turbines froze. But wind was only expected to provide about 7% of winter capacity. The real carnage was in natural gas, which accounted for the majority of the lost megawatts. Blaming wind was a convenient distraction from the fact that the state's dominant fuel source had frozen solid because the industry successfully fought winterization requirements for decades.

That's the part that really burns. Texas had been warned. In 2011, a winter storm — not as severe as Uri, but bad — caused rolling blackouts across the state. FERC and NERC investigated and published a report in 2011 recommending winterization of natural gas infrastructure and power plants. The recommendations were not mandatory. Texas did not adopt them. The industry lobbied against them. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas despite its name, did nothing. ERCOT did nothing. The Public Utility Commission of Texas did nothing.

Ten years later, the same failure happened again, except worse, because the cold was worse and the demand was higher and the system was a decade older. The recommendations that were sitting on a shelf since 2011 could have prevented most of the generation losses. Nobody implemented them because it would have cost money and nobody made them do it.

Then there's the island problem. The Texas grid is intentionally isolated from the rest of the country. ERCOT is not connected to the Eastern or Western Interconnections in any meaningful way. This was a deliberate choice — by staying isolated, Texas avoids federal regulation from FERC. The tradeoff is that when your generation falls short, you can't import power from neighboring states. Every other state can lean on its neighbors when things go sideways. Texas chose to go it alone, and during Uri, that meant there was no backup. No cavalry coming. The grid was on its own, and it nearly died on its own.

what people got wrong

The infrastructure failures were one thing. The human decisions were another, and some of them were fatal.

Carbon monoxide poisoning was the leading cause of death during Uri that wasn't hypothermia. People were running portable generators inside their homes, inside their garages, on their porches right outside open windows. CO is colorless and odorless and it will kill you before you realize anything is wrong. At least 11 people in Harris County alone died from carbon monoxide poisoning during the storm. Statewide the number was much higher.

People were running their cars in closed garages to charge phones and stay warm. People were using charcoal grills and propane camping stoves indoors for heat. People were burning furniture in fireplaces that hadn't been inspected in years with dampers that didn't work properly. These are desperation moves, and I understand desperation. When your house is 30 degrees inside and your kids are shivering, you're not thinking about ventilation rates and parts-per-million thresholds. You're thinking about heat. Right now. Anything.

But this is exactly the kind of thing that generator safety education exists to prevent. A generator needs to be at least 20 feet from any door, window, or vent, running in open air. That's not a suggestion. That's the line between waking up the next morning and not waking up. And during Uri, too many people were on the wrong side of that line because nobody had told them, or they forgot, or they decided the cold was a bigger threat than the gas they couldn't smell.

Others tried to use space heaters powered by overloaded extension cords, plugged into circuits that couldn't handle the draw, in homes that still had power but were trying to heat rooms that were never designed to lose their central system. House fires followed. Water damage from burst pipes followed. Insurance claims followed. Denied insurance claims followed. The cascade of consequences from a five-day power outage reached months and years into the future for people who thought they just needed to get through the week.

what people got right

Here is the other side of it, and the reason I'm writing this.

The people who had prepared — genuinely prepared, not theoretically prepared — rode it out. Not comfortably, necessarily. Not like nothing was happening. But they kept their pipes from freezing. They kept their refrigerators running. They kept their families warm. And they did it without poisoning themselves or burning their houses down.

The people with properly installed standby generators and a full propane tank didn't lose power at all. Their generators kicked on automatically when the grid dropped. They never had a cold night. Their pipes never froze. Their food never thawed. Some of them didn't even realize how bad it was outside their own walls until they turned on the news and saw their neighbors' pipes bursting.

I talked to a guy afterward — friend of a friend, lives outside Austin — who had a whole-home standby generator on a 500-gallon propane tank. He said the generator ran for five days straight. Used about 300 gallons. His total cost for fuel was around $600. His neighbors were dealing with $30,000 in water damage from burst pipes, temporary housing costs, spoiled food, and the kind of stress that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet. Six hundred dollars versus thirty thousand. That math is not complicated.

Even the people with smaller setups — a decent portable generator, a few five-gallon gas cans, and the knowledge of what to plug in and what to leave off — came through in reasonable shape. They couldn't run the whole house, but they could keep the fridge cold, run a space heater in one room, charge phones, and keep the pipes above freezing with heat tape on a dedicated circuit. It wasn't luxury. It was survival that didn't require risking your life.

The difference between those two groups of people — the ones who panicked and the ones who managed — was not luck. It was not wealth, not primarily. It was the decision, made well before the storm, to take the grid's reliability claims with a grain of salt and have a plan for when those claims turned out to be fiction.

the lesson

I watched Uri from several states away and I felt a lot of things. I felt sick for the people suffering. I felt angry at the institutions that failed them. And I felt the grim satisfaction of having been right about something I'd rather have been wrong about.

Because the lesson of Uri is not "Texas has a bad grid." The lesson is that the grid — every grid, any grid — is a single point of failure. And single points of failure fail. That's what they do. That's the defining characteristic of the thing. You depend on one system, that system goes down, and now everything that depended on it goes down too. Your heat. Your water. Your food storage. Your communication. Your ability to cook, to see in the dark, to keep your medications refrigerated, to keep your kids warm. All of it hangs on one wire coming into your house from a system you don't control, don't maintain, and can't fix.

Texas made it worse by isolating their grid. But don't get comfortable if you live somewhere else. The Eastern Interconnection has had massive cascading failures. The 2003 Northeast blackout took out power for 55 million people because of a software bug and some untrimmed trees. The western grid deals with fire season shutoffs every year. The fundamental vulnerability is the same everywhere: you are dependent on a system that is aging, underfunded, increasingly stressed by weather, and managed by entities whose incentive is to extract profit, not ensure your survival.

If you think Winter Storm Uri can't happen where you live, you're not paying attention. Maybe it won't be a freeze. Maybe it'll be a hurricane, a derecho, an ice storm, a heat wave that pushes demand past capacity, a wildfire that forces preemptive shutoffs, or a cyberattack on a utility that hasn't updated its SCADA systems since the Clinton administration. The trigger changes. The result is the same. The power goes out. It stays out. And then you find out very quickly whether you have a plan or you're just hoping.

I don't say this to scare you. I say it because Uri was five years ago now and most people have already forgotten it. The reforms in Texas were modest. Natural gas winterization requirements were passed but enforcement has been inconsistent. ERCOT is still isolated. The fundamental structure hasn't changed. And the next Uri — wherever it happens — will catch people flat-footed again because the human capacity to forget uncomfortable things is stronger than the human capacity to prepare for them.

So here I am on the porch, saying it plainly. The grid is a single point of failure. Single points of failure fail. The only question is whether you'll be standing in the dark wondering what happened or sitting in a warm house because you decided, ahead of time, that depending entirely on a system you can't control was a risk you weren't willing to take.

I know which one I chose. You can read about it in the rest of this journal.