Current Events
Texas Winter Power Outage
The temperatures in Texas started dropping precipitously during the second week of February 2021 and continued dropping until they plummeted to historically low levels on the night of Feb 15 and morning of Feb 16. The ERCOT system load rose to 70 GW on the evening of Feb 14, an unprecedented level for the winter. The temperatures were still falling and load was trending up, but ERCOT could not bring additional generation online. To avert a disaster involving a collapse of the grid, ERCOT started shedding load (rolling blackouts). The weather kept getting colder hitting the lowest temperatures a day after the load shedding started. The effect on Texas was devastating. The reason for the shortfall in accessible generation was the malfunctioning of generators and fuel supply systems due to cold weather.