Alerts
Customers use the light from a cell phone to look in the meat section of a grocery store in Dallas last week.
Photo: LM Otero (AP)
Right now, Texas is in the balmy mid-50s. Yet just a week ago, it was colder than Alaska, and we all know what happened next. Much of the state’s energy capacity got knocked offline, leaving millions of people without power, heat, and water for days.
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The extreme weather itself was an anomaly, caused by a particularly nasty blast of chilly Arctic air from the polar vortex. In many ways, there couldn’t have been a worse part of the country for a cold snap like this to hit. Texas’ utility system is different from the rest of the nation’s in that the state has its own independent grid which is highly unregulated.