How I Survived the 2021 Texas Blackouts

My experience during Winter Storm Uri on the third anniversary of the Texas Blackouts

I work as a Policy Fellow for a think tank based in Minnesota, the Center of the American Experiment, so many of you may not know that I was living in Allen, TX, during Winter Storm Uri and the 2021 Texas blackouts that ensued. In fact, I had just moved into my second Texas apartment the day before the blackouts hit.

The Energy Bad Boys frequently discuss the reality of blackouts threatening America’s electricity system and how devastating they can be for everyone involved. I want readers to know that these aren’t just empty warnings – they’re based on experience.

The blackouts were a nightmare scenario that had their beginning decades prior. Isaac and I go through the issues plaguing ERCOT in detail in another Substack post - issues that led to the power outages - and you can read about that below.

On the third anniversary of the blackouts, however, this article will highlight something different. I want to discuss the realities of surviving a near-total blackout during freezing temperatures in a state wholly unequipped to deal with them.

It was one of the most surreal events I’ve ever lived through. As a Minnesotan with 25 years of snow and blizzards under my belt, the snow and freezing temperatures were nothing new to me – it was the lack of food and shelter that stuck out.

Here’s my story of living through the Texas Blackouts of 2021 and why I take the risk of blackouts so seriously.

From Snowy MN to… Snowy TX

My wife and I moved from Minnesota to Texas in early February 2021. This was our second time moving to TX, after having moved back to Minnesota briefly during the COVID pandemic.

As it turns out, this was horrible timing.

Two weeks after arriving in the Lone Star State, on Sunday, February 14, Texas went through one of the snowiest and coldest days in state history. Snowfall accumulated from 4 to 10 inches from the Mexico border to northern Texas, and it ended up being the coldest day in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metro in the last 75 years, reaching a low of -2° F.

The view outside of our apartment on February 15, 2021.

My wife and I like to joke about how we “brought the snow with us.”

In Minnesota, this kind of weather is nothing more than a recurring nuisance. In Texas, it’s another story entirely. The state’s infrastructure simply wasn’t built to withstand these freezing temperatures — especially not the electrical grid — because it happens so rarely. They don’t even have enough plows or salt to maintain the roads.

Not to mention, Texas houses and apartments might as well be made of cardboard when it comes to insulation. They leak heat and air like a sieve.

On Monday morning, February 15, I woke up shivering at 4 a.m. because the power had gone out. Thinking it was a normal outage and that it wasn’t going to last for long, I bundled up and went back to sleep. I didn’t bother to check my phone.

I was wrong.

Rolling Blackouts

When I woke up the second time, this time even colder, I saw the power still hadn’t come back, so I started to investigate.

I discovered that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had issued rolling blackouts earlier that morning to maintain the integrity of the grid due to a lack of available power. Over 45,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity capacity on the grid went offline at one point — more than 22 percent of total capacity in Texas at the time.

Long story short, extreme weather caused problems for almost every energy source on the system – from freezing wind turbines and snow-covered panels to outages at thermal plants due to fuel supply interruptions and the increased pressure of holding up the grid. What was left of the grid, however, was maintained by mostly the surviving thermal power plants.

At one point on February 15, wind and solar produced a combined 1.5 percent of total generation in Texas, and natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation sources supplied 98 percent of the state’s electricity demand at that time. Had it not been for fuel-based energy sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear, Texas would have gone completely dark.

Due to these failures, millions of people went without power for hours at a time. My wife and I just happened to be two of these millions.

Poor Grid Conditions

Unfortunately, our apartment was located in one of the worst areas. We didn’t experience rolling outages - we experienced a near-total blackout.

According to Oncor, the transmission authority in our territory, customers who were experiencing outages longer than two hours were in areas of “poor grid conditions” that prevented it from restoring power, even during the “rolling” part. If you imagine rolling blackouts as “the wave” at a sporting event, my service area was the equivalent of the people who didn’t stand.

After waiting several hours in an apartment that increasingly became too cold to bear, it was clear that power was not coming back anytime soon.

Cooking breakfast was out of the question, and we were freezing at this point, so my wife and I left to seek refuge in our car, where we could at least get some warmth. We drove around looking for open restaurants to get some food, but almost every store was closed because of poor road conditions. We settled for gas station donuts.

By a stroke of luck, we drove by a taco shop that was open and serving breakfast tacos and burritos (Fuzzy’s Tacos). Talking to the owner, he told us how he had driven an hour in his pickup truck through unplowed highways to open his shop. “Someone’s gotta stay open,” he said. I remember thinking, “God bless this man… and his gas-powered truck.” An electric vehicle during an electricity blackout wouldn’t have been much help.

The power didn’t come back on until 1 p.m. after the temperature in our apartment dipped below 50° F. Crazy enough, our movers were scheduled that day, and the crew still made it on schedule. We spent a lot of this time going back and forth to our storage unit with the crew, and because of this semblance of normalcy, we almost tricked ourselves into thinking the worst was over.

We managed to heat some soup in between intermittent outages and got our apartment back to about 65 degrees before the power went out for good around 5 p.m. Based on the previous 4 hours, I thought we were in rolling outages and that power would come back on soon. In communication with my apartment leasing staff manager, I wrote the following message at 5:11 p.m.:

[The power] was back on for a while but now just went out again. I’m sure it’s just a rolling blackout so hopefully it’s back again soon. I hope you and your family stay safe and warm! This is all pretty crazy, thanks for keeping us up to date.

Wrong again.

The power didn’t come back until after midnight, and this was the last time we ate anything other than chips and granola bars that day. After waiting for an hour and a half in our once again freezing apartment, we went back out to our car to get some warmth.

Panic

By this time, it was getting darker and colder by the minute; we were starving, and panic had almost overcome us. I remember having a very serious discussion with my wife, telling her to block out that panic as best as she could. Not knowing how long this would last, I told her, “We can panic when it’s over. Right now, we need every ounce of our attention focused on surviving.”

Luckily, we knew a thing or two about preparing for the cold and potential worst-case scenarios.

First of all, we knew what not to do, such as not running our vehicle in our garage, staying off of the roads as much as possible, and, if we had to drive, taking it very slowly. We stocked up on chips and granola bars to hold us over. We bought extra blankets for the night and in case something happened to our car - our only source of heat - such as an accident or battery or engine failure. We also purchased hand warmers, a flashlight, and other things of this nature.

Driving back to our apartment, the entire city was a ghost town. I had never seen anywhere in the DFW area so deserted. Here’s a clip from that drive.

We were living through a state of emergency, the extent to which I didn’t realize until after the *snow* had settled.

A Long, Powerless Night

We arrived back at our apartment at 8 p.m. Our normal dinner time was spent sitting in our car eating chips, where we sat for another four and a half hours.

I had fallen asleep, and woke up at 12:30 a.m. to my wife screaming, “The power’s back on! The power’s back on!” The desperation in her voice showed just how dire the situation had become. We had spent the entire day with only 4 hours of electricity and had eaten our last real meal nearly eight hours ago. I had never been so grateful for the intermittent moments we had power.

We often talk about how much of our lives depend on readily available electricity, but it doesn’t really hit you until you are forced to go without it. Almost every aspect of normal life was impossible to continue because everything we do requires electricity. As a history major, it stood out to me that even though electricity has only been around for a relatively short period, here I was, faced with the reality that most Americans are now so dependent on it that we likely couldn’t survive without it.

We rushed inside to warm up our apartment before we lost power again, which happened only one hour later. The night that followed was one of the coldest nights in my life, bundled up in every blanket we had.

At six in the morning on Tuesday, we still had no power. The temperature outside was around 0° F, and our apartment had hit freezing temperatures.

It was too cold to stay any longer. Instead of waiting for ERCOT to bring the power back online, which would’ve been for a very short duration anyway, we decided to risk driving on the highways and left early in the morning for my wife’s parents’ apartment — 45 minutes away in normal conditions, but more than an hour on icy and snowy roads. Power was more stable at their apartment because they had the luck of being in a critical zone.

Side note: If I can give Texans one piece of advice during a snowstorm, from a Minnesotan – SLOW DOWN. I witnessed several accidents on this drive from people who continued driving 80 mph, on ice.

This is when most of our troubles ended. Because my wife’s parents had 24/7 power, we were finally able to eat, sleep, and stay warm in somewhat normal conditions.

Our experience certainly wasn’t the worst. Hundreds of people died in Texas during the blackouts, and 10 million Texans went without power. We were lucky enough to have a functioning car (with seat warmers) and family who lived in areas that weren’t experiencing power outages. Not everyone was so fortunate.

However, it was still a life and death situation, one that presented the very real possibility of not being able to eat, not having adequate shelter, and the utter uplifting of normal life. With one wrong move, what little we had to rely on for survival could’ve ceased to exist.

Lessons Learned

The worst part about the Texas blackouts is that they didn’t need to happen.

Texas prioritized the building of intermittent, unreliable power plants for decades – resulting in a situation where on February 15, 2021, even if no plants had experienced outages, Texas lacked the generation resources to maintain the grid, as Brent Bennett from the Texas Public Policy Foundation has made clear.

Coal and nuclear power facilities were the most reliable energy sources during Texas’ state of emergency because not as many of these facilities were forced offline. Natural gas, despite increased outages, still managed to supply the bulk of generation to the grid, producing no less than 60 percent of total generation from Monday to Tuesday and, at times, over 70 percent.

The same cannot be said of wind and solar facilities unaffected by freezing temperatures, which only produced between 1.5 and 14.7 percent of total generation during the energy crisis. Renewable energy sources were by far the least reliable during the outages.

Despite those who quickly rushed to defend wind energy’s lack of performance during the blackouts, claiming wind energy “outperformed” forecasts for the day, the fact remains that wind and solar were no-shows during the coldest temperatures in Texas in 75 years and did little to bring the power back on. There should be no applause for wind energy “outperforming” a forecast of essentially nothing.

The Texas blackouts showed how important fuel-based energy sources are to maintaining a functioning grid. Had the Lone Star State been 100 percent renewable at the time, as renewable advocates across the country desire, this energy crisis would have been much worse.

If this experience taught me anything — or rather, reaffirmed — it’s that having reliable energy sources on the grid is important no matter where you live, from Minnesota to Texas, New York to California.

Reliability should be the main priority for grid operators, followed closely by affordability. Unfortunately, in the so-called “energy transition” era, both have taken a backseat to “climate action.”

As a country, we need to get our priorities straight before everyone is forced to suffer a similar situation.