WHY TEXAS BROKE

The state is famous for its energy industry. But a winter storm left millions without power and water. How did things go so wrong—and what, if any, will change?

- Rachel Adams-Heard

The Houston skyline was lit pink for Valentine’s Day. It was cold—really cold, at least by the standards of the Gulf Coast, where wintertime lows are generally around 50F. That Sunday night it was below freezing; the forecast called for the first snow in years.

Earlier in the day, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, better known as Arcot, the nonprofit that manages the state electricity grid, had gently urged Texans to be mindful during the storm. “We know it’s cold. But if you turn down your heat to 68 degrees and put on a fleece, you can help keep the power flowing for everyone,” the group tweeted earlier in the day. Another post showed a picture of a KitchenAid stand mixer: “Unplug the fancy new appliances you bought during the pandemic and only used once.”

This was all comically inadequate. That night, icons on a massive screen at Ercot’s Austin headquarters that corresponded to the status of the state’s regional power plants started flipping from green to red. They were shutting down—spontaneously and unexpectedly because of the extreme cold—even as residents across the state cranked up the heat. Faced with the very real prospect of a catastrophic outage that would leave homes and businesses without power for months, Ercot ordered power to be cut from more than 2 million homes in the state. It was the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.