RANEY ARONSON-RATH, HOST: In February 2021, a powerful winter storm blasted through Texas, leading to blackouts across the state.
NEWS ARCHIVE: Another day of winter misery for Texas.
NEWS ARCHIVE: Thousands of Americans in the state of Texas are bracing for another day in the dark.
NEWS ARCHIVE: Freezing temperatures and power issues also causing water restrictions.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Over multiple days, millions lost access to heat and electricity, and officials say more than 200 people died.
RAJITA SHAH: We never expected that this would be the last time we would be seeing her.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: A year and a half later, Texas officials are trying to reassure the state that the electrical grid has improved, and that the risk of another deadly blackout is low.
GOV. GREG ABBOTT: The Texas electric grid is the most reliable and resilient that it's ever been.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism partners at the Texas Newsroom have been investigating efforts to fix the state’s electrical grid. Season 2 of their podcast “The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout” premiered last month. I’m joined by Mose Buchele, Senior Correspondent for Energy & Environment at KUT, and the host of the Disconnect. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer and editor-in-chief of FRONTLINE, and this is FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, Mose, thanks for joining me on the Dispatch.
MOSE BUCHELE: Thank you.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So I want to actually just start with what happened in February, 2021. Texas's weather became a headline story across the country. Remind listeners what happened.
MOSE BUCHELE: Okay. So, uh, yeah, February, 2021, a massive winter storm moved into the state and obviously Texas is a huge state. It is incredibly rare that one weather system would cover the entire state of Texas. But in fact that's what it did. It covered Texas. And then a whole part of the country around Texas. It, it froze up the state's energy grid, basically, right as energy demand went through the roof. Basically you had the whole state of Texas trying to heat their houses, and demand skyrocketing and the, the cold weather coming in and knocking out power plants, knocking out the whole energy distribution system in the state and, and very quickly creating the worst blackout in Texas history, millions of people without power, for days. Hundreds of people died. Uh, it was a catastrophe unlike, you know, any that we've known in this state and, uh, you know, the last year and a half in a lot of ways in Texas has been the story of a state dealing with the aftermath of that and trying to make sure it never happens again.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You know, something that you said, um, on your show is that it also transformed how people live and think, and just think about the weather in Texas. So help me understand what that means just on a day to day, even.
MOSE BUCHELE: I mean, electricity is the kind of thing that we wanna take for granted. Right? You, you don't, you just wanna be able to turn on your lights and assume course, they're gonna go. And after this event, it, that stopped being the case. I think for a lot of Texans, people are worried about the state of the grid and they have been ever since, uh that's that, you know, and that's changed the way people live. You have a lot more people kind of, um, you know, prepping for emergencies in ways that they never used to. We talked to people who just, who, who have, you know, extra food or just extra supplies in case something goes wrong. Obviously, you know, there's been a lot of reporting around, increase in people buying backup generators, uh, or people buying things like solar panels and batteries for their houses, if they can afford that. It's, it's led to a lot of interesting questions about the type of energy security that people might have, if they can afford it, versus the, the rest of those who, who, you know, just don't have the means to kind of have that backup power. So basically there's a lot of anxiety and there are a lot of questions about whether the problems that led to that big blackout are being fixed. And that's a lot of what our, our project and our reporting is about.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. So talk to me about the grid and before we get to what is happening now, like what about the grid then? What happened?
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah, um, basically, you know, it was a failure on multiple different levels and the way that an electric grid works is that on an electric grid, you always need a balance supply and demand for, for electricity at all times, if that balance gets out of whack, the whole grid breaks down. It can cause a catastrophic failure. During that winter storm, as I said, demand skyrocketed just as supply crashed. So you had power plants quite simply freezing up in the cold and stop working. Right? You had the natural gas supply system stop working again. As cold weather came and froze all the different components that go into production and transportation of natural gas. Uh, you had problems essentially across the board at all different kinds of energy generation, but primarily it was natural gas, power plants that led to the big supply crisis. So what the state grid operator had to do in order to maintain that balance, that, that, that balance of supply and demand on the grid, they had to make the decision to cut power and there, we stayed, as a state for for four, five days, people had, uh, in millions without power and, and mind you, these are in extremely cold conditions that the state, most places in the state are not built for. Most houses are not built for. So people, you know, literally freezing in their homes. Um, and, uh, and so that, that was in a nutshell, the kind of, the kind of conditions that led to this crisis and in the aftermath, you know, they, they, they took a look at all this and they're trying to to decide how to fix it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So where do things stand a year and a half later? And of course we're just coming through a blistering hot summer up here too in the Northeast, but also in Texas. Um, so how did the electric grid hold up?
MOSE BUCHELE: We went into last winter to start there, I guess, uh, with a lot of anxiety about winter weather, right Because, because the previous winter is when the blackout happened. We made it through last winter, uh, in part, thankfully, because we, we didn't have another storm of the, of the scale of that, of that 2021 storm. Uh, and I think people kind of breathe the sigh of relief we got through the winter. Uh, the, the grid held up, uh, maybe we're making progress, but then we get hit, as you mentioned with a super hot summer. In Austin, again, where I live, we've had, uh, close to 70 triple digit days already this year. It's been excruciatingly hot and all of that also drives up energy demand. People are running their ACS all the time. And so what we've seen this summer we've already had three conservation calls. This is when the state grid operator asks people — everyday people — to conserve power in order to make sure that the grid doesn't get too tight, essentially in order to avoid an emergency on the grid. That has not inspired confidence. People are very concerned and they wonder if a lot of the problems have been addressed.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, how is this playing out in state politics? You said every independent analysis of the blackout lays the blame on someone else. so how is this playing out? I thought that was a great statement.
MOSE BUCHELE: We get into this a lot in the podcast, the way that our energy system is organized in Texas, it is, responsibility can feel so diffused throughout all these different systems that it was really difficult for people, I think, even to figure out who to blame. As I said, the, you know, this was an intentional act, the grid operator cut power to people, uh, you know, because that was their job. They were trying to save the, the infrastructure itself from, from crashing. Um, in the, in terms of the politics of the state, it has been a big deal. Uh, the, the energy system has become, uh, a big part of the governor's race and a lot of other public officials, you know, who have, who have different responsibilities over the grid, uh, are, are, you know, trying to doing their best to frame things through their advantage. You know, oh, we fixed this. Oh, look at, we, you know, we made it through the winter. Doesn't that, doesn't that show you something? And there's, there's a lot of PR involved. Um, I, you know, it's, it's, it's well established here that the governor's office, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas is, is deeply involved in the kind of workings of, of the grid system now in a way that the government's office never was before. And a lot of that goes to the, the political question, right? You do not want a crisis like this coming back if you're the leader of a state.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mose, tell me about Governor Abbott and what he said about this situation.
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah. Um, this was very frustrating, uh, for, you know, for people who were trying to get the bottom of what really happened. Uh, I, it was before the, the crisis was even over that that the governor went on Fox News and blamed wind turbines, uh, for the power failure and, and, you know, blamed the Green New Deal you know, it should be repeated that that was not the case. The main cause of failure, uh, were natural gas, power plants in the state, which is what we rely on in the winter primarily to, to supply most of our energy. So the whole thing became politicized right out of the gate.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, okay. When we think about that, right. There are politics, but then there's real harm that happened. Um, I, I do wanna talk about the people who were the victims. Can you talk to me about one family in particular, the, the Shahs. San you tell me about them?
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah, the Shah family were kind enough to, to, uh, invite us into their home, uh, for the first episode of this second season of the podcast that that we're putting together. Uh, this is a family who lost their, their mother in the blackout. The cause of death ended up being hypothermia that, uh, you know, she suffered from. And they were stuck like millions of others in their homes without power. And, uh, when they realized that she was not well, brought her to the hospital, to the emergency room in really harrowing conditions. Uh, I was, I, you know, I like many others lived through this. The roads were terrible. It was, it was freezing cold out. Um, got her to the emergency room. Uh, but she did end up, uh, passing away in the hospital. Um, and so they shared their story with us. Uh, and, and it, it was important for us. I, to, to talk to people who, who lost so much, I think in order to remind people of what the stakes are here, but also because their specific family situation raises a question about the way the state went about tabulating the number of people who died in this event.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So officially about 250 Texans died in the blackout, but when you investigated this further, it seems possible that this was an undercount. Can you talk about that?
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah, absolutely. Not, not just an undercount, but you know, maybe an undercount by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. Um, basically, uh, what happened, uh, was that the state came in and provided a death toll from this event that looked at official death certificates. Um, you know, coroner's reports, they, they, they would review these reports. And if, if it's mentioned in the death certificate, that the cause of death is related to something that they could say, okay, this is winter storm related or blackout related. Um, then they would say, okay, we're gonna put this on our list. This is part of the tally for how many people died in this event. But if you look at it, um, from statistical analysis, You can see that hundreds and hundreds more people died during this timeframe than would normally die. And in fact, hundreds and hundreds, as I said, more than the official number the state comes out with. So, and this is a, this is a, a technique called excess mortality analysis that I think a lot of people have heard of in the context of coronavirus. Uh, but you know, we talk to a researcher who's a statistician, who's looked at this in Texas and says about 814 more people died, you know, during this time in the state, then you would normally expect would have died. So, you know, that suggests that, that the state is undercounting this, you know, to in a, in a really serious way. And, uh, and you know, even, even if the, these deaths are not related to the winter storm, it seems like something that, that the state would want to look into. Right? I mean, the fact, the fact that you might have this anomalous number of people dying all in this week is something that you would expect officials to wanna get to the bottom of, but, uh, that has not happened yet.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, through the reporting that you all shared, I learned that Texas has a really unique power grid, unlike any other state.
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Can you tell me more about that?
MOSE BUCHELE: So the first thing that people need to know about the Texas power grid is that it is the Texas power grid, right? No other state in, you know, in the lower 48 anyway, has its own independent power grid. Other, other grids kind of cross state lines. Power can be shared more easily between different regions. There are interconnections between grids that allow for the, the easier flow of power between regions. Um, people in Texas, a lot of them did not understand that we had our own independent power grid until they're sitting freezing in their homes and asking, well, why aren't we just getting power from a different part of the country? It's because we literally couldn't. Um, in, in the early days of that storm, there wasn't much power to go around, but in the later days there was, but we just could not import it, uh, to, to re to reheat people's homes. So that's, that's, that's I think the first thing that we try to tackle in this series and the reason for that, you know, the shorthand version of the reason for that is that this arrangement allows the state and utilities in the state to avoid federal regulation. Um, this was a, a kind of handshake deal that was made decades ago, really, in the early days of the growth of, you know, of, of the electric grid in the United States, um, they, the, the operators in Texas decided they didn't wanna deal with federal oversight. And if they just don't cross state lines, well, then they don't have to. And there you have it Texas with its own independent power.
The other unique thing about the way the Texas grid is arranged is that when, when, uh, state, uh, officials here deregulated the energy grid back, actually about 22 years ago now, um, they created a competitive market system on the grid, unlike any other in the country. Uh, basically it was viewed as a kind of, uh, uh, a shining example of energy efficiency because it only paid power producers for the electricity that they could sell on the grid basically in real time. And so, uh, what it did is that it, it, it did away with a lot of extra energy capacity laying around the state. You didn't have like a cushion of extra power plants or power generators in the state that could come online if needed, if demand got really high. Um, and again, this is something else that's now being kind of debated in, in the halls of power in Texas, uh, whether we need to back away from that market situation to create what they call a capacity market, or if they maybe they don't wanna call it that, but something closer to that, that pays energy producers to kind of be around in case., Uh, you know, that, that, that was a system they really did away with when they deregulated and, and a lot of people think that that was a mistake.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So when you're, when you're asking questions, what has been the most surprising answer about like what the response has been to this?
MOSE BUCHELE: There's so many, there's so many different things that have surprised me about, about reporting on this. Specific to this, this last thing we just talked about, this, this question of Texas having its own independent grid. Um, the degree to which this may not be a financial benefit to the state is interesting to me. Um, obviously this is a state with a strong, independent streak and a kind of state myth or someone would even say national myth, you know, of self sufficiency and, and the state having its own electric grid appeals, uh, to those, to, to those feelings in, in a lot of ways. But, you know, I talked to, I talked to tons of energy analysts who say that not only would this help bolster our energy system, if we started interconnecting with, with neighboring grids grids better, but that it would also help power generators in the state make tons of money. A lot of people don't know this about Texas, but we lead the country in wind power production. And sometimes there's so much wind blowing in this state that we don't even have anywhere to put it. Um, you know, so, so what if, uh, that power could be sold in other, into other markets, it would, it could actually provide a great boon to state energy producers, but there is a real, uh, reluctance to even a address that question among state regulators. Most of the people I talk to who are in these positions to make these decisions— it's a, non-starter. They, they do not want to interconnect with other grids. And, and, and basically that's that. And again, as I said, a lot of this goes back to fear of federal oversight.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Right. So is anybody being held responsible? I mean, is there any sense of accountability here or how is that going down?
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah, it, it has become a big political question in the state. I mean, at the end of the day, uh, this is a system that seems sometimes intentionally set up to diffuse responsibility, right? It's a bunch of generally private companies operating, you know, for their own profit in a market that's overseen by a, by a state that is not known for strong regulation. Um, but, but at the end of the day, you know, it's the governor who appoints the members of the public utility commission of the state and the public utility commission oversees the operation of the state grid. And so it is a political question. There it is. Also, Texas is rather unique in that our oil and gas regulators are, uh, elected at large in the state and so every election people turn out to vote for the, for the top oil and gas regulator of the— it's actually a three member board so it's, there's staggered elections, but it's called the railroad commission of Texas for reasons I won't get into.
Um, so these are also elected officials who have responsibility over this big important part of the energy system. And so you do see people talking about it in a political context. And then of course, there's just the state legislature who, who also, you know, make the rules. You often hear this talked about as though it's this kind of like, uh, thing independent from public oversight, which I think shocks people because it's such an important part of our, of our quality of life —obviously getting electricity. It's not, you know, there, there are, there are people that oversee this and, and they are, you know, they're responsible for, for its maintenance.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right with that in mind, I mean, climate change means more extreme weather's coming, I'm stating the obvious. Colder winters and really hot summers, um, for Texas and all of us. I was in England in the summer, right, during the heat wave.
MOSE BUCHELE: Yeah.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Um, yeah, I mean, it was quite an experience so, when you look across the landscape of just looking at the future, how do you think Texas is gonna do? Not that you have a crystal ball but what do you think this says about the rest of the country?
MOSE BUCHELE: Well, I mean, so specific to climate change, uh, there, there is an unwillingness on the part of, uh, most, uh, state leaders in, in, in real positions of power in the state, uh, to come to terms with, with, you know, what this means. People talk around it. So people will talk about preparing for more extreme weather. And this really actually started after Hurricane Harvey. Um, you know, they they'll talk about extreme weather in vague terms without ever connecting the dots to, to global climate change — the climate crisis. And, and that is, that puts us at a huge disadvantage in terms of preparing for things like the blackout. Uh, you know, we, we need to prepare for massive extreme weather events that are going to do crazy things to our energy system. And right now our state regulators aren't even really incorporating some of those climate models into their planning. So, so how can you say that you're getting ready for what comes next uh, you know, specific to Texas, that's a huge problem.
More broadly speaking, you asked about what this means for other parts of the country. There are a lot of problems that we have in this state that are shared all across the country. We have essential infrastructure that has gone decades without, without major investment. We, in many cases, we have systems, uh, market systems now that have, that were arranged during the kind of great deregulation fervor of the eighties, nineties, and early aughts, from which, from which there is constant kind of profit taking from these systems, but without any of the traditional accountability that used to go into them, um, which, which leaves the, you know, I think leaves us at further the disadvantage for, for trying to find solutions. And, uh, and those are problems that are not unique to Texas. These are problems that exist in many parts of the country and are things that we try to explore in our project.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So I guess I want to end with this question and the answer could just be no, but do you think any lessons have been learned from this? Um, even if it's not just in Texas, but just across the country, are you seeing any progress lessons learned anything along those lines?
MOSE BUCHELE: I mean, in Texas, uh, there is a demand for, uh, for stronger regulation. Uh, after this event, the public utility commission of the state did mandate weatherization standards at power plants. This is something. They were told they should do have done 10 years earlier. Uh, but it is something, uh, in a state that is, that has such a light touch when it comes to oversight. Uh, you know, it, it suggests that that regulators may be flexing their muscles a little bit more in terms of, in terms of exercising their power. Uh, again, you also have on an individual level Texans becoming aware of all of this, people are having conversations about this in ways that they never would have before the blackout. And it's becoming, uh, you know, an issue of public policy. And so I do think that there is , there's a, there's a desire both politically for on the, on the part of our elected officials and then just, you know, because of quality of life from everyday Texans to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's just a question of whether we we've gotten there yet.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mose, thanks so much for joining me on the Dispatch.
MOSE BUCHELE: Thank you.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thanks again to Mose Buchele for joining us on the Dispatch. We’re sharing Episode One from Season Two of KUT and the Texas Newsroom’s podcast The Disconnect in our feed this week. You can hear the rest wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode of the FRONTLINE Dispatch was produced by Emily Pisacreta. Erin Texeira is our senior editor of Local Journalism Initiatives. Maria Diokno is our Director of Audience Development. Katherine Griwert is our Editorial Coordinating Producer. Frank Koughan is our Senior Producer. Lauren Ezell is our Senior Editor of Investigations. Andrew Metz is our Managing Editor. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE.
Music in this episode is by Stellwagen Symphonette. The FRONTLINE Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX.
