This January, an arctic blast barreled towards Texas with the certainty of an avalanche, and Texans went, once again, into emergency mode.
Grocery store shelves were cleared of some essentials even before the temperatures dropped.
People shared tips about how to prepare for a blackout: everything from dripping your faucets to pre-grinding your coffee beans.
A great number of people, no doubt, secured fuel for generators they had purchased since February 15, 2021.
The reason for all this, of course, is what began on that day five years ago: The worst blackout in Texas — and by some measures, U.S. — history.
It lasted for four days. Millions lost power. Hundreds died.
Some power companies, energy traders and natural gas suppliers got rich off the high cost of energy. Ratepayers got stuck with billions of dollars of debt that they are still paying off.
The shared experience of the disaster continues to shape what it means to be a Texan.
As the anniversary of that catastrophe arrives, people inevitably wonder what has changed with our state power grid, and some point to the performance in this most recent storm as a sign of improvement.
But even as they look for progress, grid anxiety remains a fact of life in Texas.
It also seems to be growing outside our state borders, as more Americans learn that their own regional energy systems may not be well prepared for the next big storm.
No state blackouts for five years and counting.
Despite days of freezing cold in some parts of the state last month, the Texas grid kept chugging along.
If anything, the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, may have overestimated the impact of the freeze, forecasting a higher energy draw than actually took place during some moments of the long freeze.
The relatively smooth ride in Texas was thanks, in part, to changes put in place after 2021’s winter storm Uri overwhelmed the Texas grid.
“The big fear on our end was these dropping temperatures and ice forcing generators offline,” said Tim Ennis, an analyst with Grid Status, a platform that tracks the energy system.
But, Ennis said, mandates to prepare power plants for cold weather seem to have paid off, keeping more energy flowing when it was needed most.
"A lot of the lessons that we've learned in Uri, that in some ways were paid in blood, have [...] been followed," he said.
Ennis also credits the proliferation of big grid-scale batteries for improving electric reliability. That’s despite some state lawmakers' attempts to curb battery growth.
But Ennis and others are quick to add that no storm since 2021 has come close to Uri when it comes to the extremes of temperature, weather and duration.
The most recent freeze was also just not as big.
“It didn't make it all the way down to the Mexican border,” Josh Rhodes, a power grid researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, put it simply. “That made a big difference.”
The fact that no storm has approached the severity of Uri makes it difficult to say how much better prepared the Texas grid has become in the last five years.
Analysts say no one knows for sure until Texans experience a similar storm.
Plenty of grid challenges remain
While Texas has avoided another grid-wide power failure since 2021, it’s also becoming clearer what has not been fixed.
For one, natural gas supplies to feed power plants remain highly unreliable in extreme cold.
In 2021, the drop in gas supply was a big contributor to power outages. In last month’s freeze, production plummeted again, to lows not seen since the 2021 storm.
That sudden gas scarcity in the face of desperate demand pushed gas prices to historic highs. It also renewed longstanding accusations that the natural gas industry practices a lucrative, and in some cases legal, form of market manipulation.
“The natural gas marketers know a thing or two about price gouging,” energy economist Ed Hirs said after the recent freeze. “It’s okay to call it that!”
The drop off in gas production also came despite post-2021 promises to “winterize” the Texas natural gas supply chain from state oil and gas regulators.
A state audit earlier last year found those rules lacked teeth, including no baseline standards for weatherization or, in some cases, independent verification that companies had done what they said they did.
The unreliability of the gas system, much of it in Texas, is increasing calls for more regulation nationally, as power grids outside of Texas increasingly rely on gas for electric generation.
“The gas trades have sponsored a number of voluntary actions that their members would take for winterization," Jim Robb, the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, told KUT. “But, as we've seen this past storm, voluntary may not get us there.”
Welcome to Texas?
Just this month, Robb’s group, which sets grid reliability standards, came out with its annual long-term reliability outlook.
The assessment was sobering. It found that the risk of power shortages across the country is increasing, as demand, much of it from data centers, spikes and older power plants retire.
The Texas grid, currently at an “elevated risk” of power shortfalls in extreme weather, will be at a “high risk” again by the end of the decade. The grids that cover much of the Great Lakes states and mid-Atlantic share a similar risk.
There are solutions.
Building out more dispatchable power generation is a must, according to NERC. How much will be green or fossil-based is unclear.
Increasing electric transmission between different regional grids to share power where it's most needed, and improving energy efficiency standards to reduce demand spikes are also sure ways to improve grid resilience.
But as the Texas experience has shown, just because we know what to do doesn’t mean we always do it.
That knowledge, along with forecasts like the one just dropped by NERC, mean grid anxiety will likely stick around in Texas, despite going five years blackout-free.
They also suggest people in other states may start feeling similar bouts of nerve when a cold blast descends. To them, we might recommend dripping your faucets and grinding your coffee beans in advance.
