The Winter Storm of February 2021
During February 2021 there was a sever winter storm that shut down a large part of Texas and affected over 5 million people. Unfortunately, 100 of those affected, did not make it out of the storm.
The catastrophic winter event that caused extensive damage left almost 4.4 million people across Texas without power for days. Many were deprived of water usage and later found to have unreasonably high energy bills, according to AmericanOversight.com.
About Texas’s Energy Usage
Unlike any other state in the country, Texas runs on an individual electric grid called ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas.) Because of this system it is harder to “import power from outside the system” making Texas more vulnerable to these sort of collective collapses like the one from February 2021.
President Joe Biden declared the catastrophe a major disaster and and authorized aid for the state. Texas and its’ energy system ERCOT faced lawsuits and subsequently the resignation of several board members. The event exposed “lax regulations in the energy sector” and forecasts future catastrophic events of the same level to affect the rest of the country.
