9/14/2023 0 Comments Yep energy rates in texasThe 2021 Texas blackout triggered the largest energy crisis in the state's history, leaving millions stranded for days without power and leading to hundreds of deaths. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.īUCHELE: And I'm Mose Buchele. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Hello and welcome to PLANET MONEY. (SOUNDBITE OF AMON TURNER'S "NO QUELLING THE INQUISITIVE") And me and my co-reporter, Audrey McGlinchy, we decided to head out to Vernon to get to the bottom of it. So what happened was a Texas utility basically tried to open up the state grid, to sneakily link up its power lines across state lines in this tiny town called Vernon, Texas. That's catnip for reporters like you.īUCHELE: Exactly. While I was digging into this, I came across this mysterious scheme back in the 1970s called The Midnight Connection. It's called "The Disconnect: Power, Politics And The Texas Blackout." So tell me what happened next.īUCHELE: In the aftermath of the storm, a lot of people started thinking about the Texas grid and asking, why don't we just connect our power grid to the rest of the country? And it turned out that that had been tried before. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And you and your colleagues have been looking into the backstory behind Texas' power grid for a new podcast. But that means that we are also largely on our own when these ice storms hit. Texas companies, they wanted to run their own power system without a lot of regulation and federal oversight. So what happened was that Texas utilities really decades and decades ago, they made this kind of handshake deal where they all promised not to connect to grids outside of Texas because it would put them under federal jurisdiction. Instead, ever since basically the early days of electrification, the state has gone its own way when it comes to power.īUCHELE: Yeah. If Texas were more like those other states, when the storm came power companies would have been able to just pull in the extra power they needed from across the state line. Most state's grids are interconnected so that the power utilities in one state are linked not just to each other but to the power grids in neighboring states. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And one of the big reasons for all this mayhem is that the Texas power grid does not work the same as power grids in the rest of the country. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: There are long lines for food, for gas and even for plumbing supplies.īUCHELE: It's worth remembering that hundreds of people ended up dying not just because it was cold but because of everything else that broke down, that failed in this blackout. Tap water was undrinkable for a lot of people. So you have homes and buildings that are both flooding and freezing. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And then pipes started to burst. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #7: Thousands of Austinites have been left without power for almost two days now as temperatures have plummeted. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: In parts of hard-hit Texas, snow is still falling. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And that is what they did. They have to cut power or risk frying the entire system. And the state grid operators kind of face this dire choice. And so this creates a huge imbalance on the state grid. The real story was what happened to the power grid.īUCHELE: So power plants start freezing up and breaking down right when everyone is turning up their heaters. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And the storm was just the beginning. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: For the first time in Texas, all 254 counties are under a winter storm warning. We're going to begin with breaking news tonight on the severe weather disaster that. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Good evening and thank you for joining us. Like, everyone who knows about the Texas energy system knows that this could cause some serious problems. You know, you never see snow like that in Austin, but there was also this sense of foreboding. Temperature in Dallas already colder than in Anchorage, Alaska.īUCHELE: At first it was kind of exciting. Temperature's at 18 degrees here in Corpus Christi. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Here in Houston in southeast Texas, tonight it's record cold. It was Valentine's Day, and it was just freezing cold. And, Mose Buchele, you are KUT's energy and climate correspondent based in Austin, which is where you were when the first snowflakes started falling. There were ice storms, single-digit temperatures, power lines got knocked down all over the place. SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.įebruary of 2021 was brutal for the state of Texas.
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