At least 1 in 10 power plants in Texas were offline Tuesday, according to WFAA. There are 680 plants statewide. "We have seen nothing like this honestly in Texas, that has covered the state like the storm has. It increased demand to an extreme, extraordinary height, and then the storm also made it difficult for the supply to be provided," Bill Magness, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that manages the state's power flow, told WFAA-TV in an interview Tuesday. -The problem started Sunday night, when Winter Storm Uri moved in and temperatures plummeted to the single digits. "Beginning around 11:00 p.m., multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather," Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, told WFAA. Key equipment froze, natural gas supplies were limited and, after daylight, solar farms were blocked out by cloud cover and snow, Magness said. (MORE: Here's When the South Will Finally Thaw After Record-Smashing Cold, Snow and Ice) -The record breaking weather led to record breaking demand for power, which strained the grid even more. By Monday morning, two million homes and businesses were without power across Texas. That number continued to go up throughout the day as temperatures went down. By the end of the day, there were more than 4.1 million outages being reported. More than 3 million remained without power by early Tuesday evening. And since each outage only represents a single utility customer, that number represents millions more people who were directly affected. -Rolling blackouts didn't go as planned. ERCOT ordered local power companies to institute periodic shutoffs to keep the grid from shutting down altogether. But because there was already so little power to go around - and neighborhoods with hospitals, fire stations and water treatment plants were prioritized for energy - it was hard to evenly rotate the blackouts, according to the Wall Street Journal. That meant some homes were without power for extended periods of time, while others never lost it all. -As of 2020, Texas got most of its power from natural gas-fueled plants, followed by wind turbines, coal and nuclear, the Journal reported. All were affected by the cold weather, Woodfin told Bloomberg. While it was widely reported that crippled wind turbines were largely to blame for the blackouts, Woodfin said that was the least significant factor. -Some say the bigger problem lies in Texas' power system as a whole. Texas is the only state that runs its own power grid without any federal oversight. It also doesn't require power equipment to be winterized against extended periods of below-freezing temperatures, like other states do, according to WFAA. David Tuttle, a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, said the issue comes up every decade or so, but cost is always a question. "All of us would love to say, we want super reliable [electricity]," Tuttle told WFAA. "It would be millions to really bulletproof the system for that. How much do we want to pay to go protect ourselves with insurance policies for rare events?"
