Power crisis: Shining a light on the generation outages
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued a level-three Emergency Energy Alert, meaning energy demand was very high, and conservation was critical. By noon, more than 4.3 million homes and businesses across the state were without power (around 34 percent of total customers) and around 26 percent remained wholly without power or with “rolling” availability—systematic temporary power outages—until Wednesday.1
These events occurred during a polar vortex, which brought temperatures in Texas to lows not seen in more than 30 years and led Governor Abbott to issue a disaster declaration in all 254 counties.
The results were catastrophic. To put the scale of the crisis into perspective, the International Energy Agency said that the level of power outages in Texas was more than 500 times higher than the outages in California in August 2020,2 and it’s been reported that more than 80 people have lost their lives.3