Texas side of Stateline Road is covered in snow while Arkansas boasts a plowed strip as Lone Star State is hit by ANOTHER storm, 3.4M are still without power and 33 die across the South amid freezing weather

Seven million Texans are also under boil water notices after the deadly storm compromised water filtration systems there – a problem exacerbated by the lack of power in many homes. Another blast of ice and snow forecast Wednesday threatened to sow more chaos.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday told the state’s natural gas producers to sell the fuel to in-state power generators. He called ERCOT ‘opaque’ and ‘not transparent’ after failing to say when Texans can expect their power back.

Now, furious Texans want to know why the infrastructure in place wasn’t properly prepared, especially after a similar storm in 2011 caused the same problems. The Texas Tribune reports that not all of the generators in the state were upgraded after 2011 to tackle the issue.

Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, said: ‘Where did those recommendations go, and how were they implemented? Those are going to be some pretty key questions.’

The upgrades are what’s called ‘winterizing’ the energy system but experts say it is regularly put off because the changes are expensive. Texas’ deregulated energy market gives little financial incentives for operators to prepare for the rare bout of intensely cold weather, an issue critics have been pointing out for years.

David Tuttle, a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a recent podcast: ‘There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money. About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.’

An ERCOT official, Dan Woodfin, said plant upgrades after 2011 limited shutdowns during a similar cold snap in 2018, but this week’s weather was ‘more extreme.’

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, rejected ERCOT’s claim that this week’s freeze was unforeseeable ‘That’s nonsense,’ he said. ‘Every eight to 10 years we have really bad winters. This is not a surprise.’

Restarting the frozen oil wells in Texas also isn’t going to be easy – even after power is restored – experts say, as output has plummeted by 65 per cent.

Jim Newman, Executive VP of Operations at Basic Energy Services, told Bloomberg: ‘There’s a good bit of water produced with oil and gas, so in areas with higher water, you’re going to have burst pipes. Safety will be paramount because of the hydraulics being damaged. So there’s going to be a very meticulous reactivation.’

Infrared imaging shows just how much powers has been lost to Houston in the last few days as the bumbling CEO of ERCOT said on Tuesday night he had no idea when power would be restored but claimed his agency managed to avoid an even bigger catastrophe by switching it off.

Southwest Arlington, Texas: After seeing a posting on Facebook, LaDonna (no last name given) drove from Johnson County, Texas to collect some of the dumpsters-full of ice cream thrown out at a Southwest Arlington, Texas, Kroger store, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, in Arlington TX. LaDonna said she’s collecting the frozen goods for her neighbors. Rolling power outages this week have forced businesses to clear merchandise that needs refrigeration.

Texas, which relies on its own electricity supply and grid, and is unprepared for winter conditions, has buckled so much so that Beto O’Rourke said on Wednesday that it was a near ‘failed state’.

The Texas city of Kyle, south of Austin, asked residents Wednesday to suspend water usage until further notice because of a shortage. ‘Water should only be used to sustain life at this point,’ the city of 45,000 said in an advisory. ‘We are close to running out of water supply in Kyle.’

Problems first began with Winter Storm Uri – a brutal weather system that is sweeping the country. Every other state in the storm’s path has been able to withstand it because they operate on a shared power source which means that if one state’s supply goes down, it can draw from the shared reserve.

The outages are the widest Texas’ grid has suffered – but hardly a first in winter. Some 600,000 had power switched back on by 6am and even more were turned back on before lunchtime but millions remain in the dark and without heating. With ongoing, forced blackouts in being carried out in different parts of the state, it is difficult to track exactly how many people don’t have it and where they are in real-time.

ERCOT – which is in charge of managing the distribution of all of the energy in Texas and maintaining its grid – underestimated the storm so didn’t produce enough reserve energy beforehand and now, plants can’t produce more power because they were unprepared for the bad weather.

The agency claims it predicted that peak energy demand would be 67 gigawatts but it reached 69 gigawatts on Sunday night – the first night of the storm. The agency then cut the power across the state by close to half – reducing it to just over 40 gigawatts. Each gigawatt powers some 500 homes.

What compounded the sudden demand for energy was that ERCOT didn’t anticipate not being able to produce more energy during the storm.

The vast majority of the state’s energy (40 percent) comes from natural gas, and the plants that produce it are propped up by an infrastructure that, unlike other states, cannot withstand severe winter weather; pipes have frozen in subzero temperatures and wells have been blocked with snow. It is preventing the fossil fuels from being pumped from the ground to the plants and into homes and businesses.   

The system was forecast to move into the Northeast on Thursday. More than 100 million people live in areas covered by some type of winter weather warning, watch or advisory, the weather service said.

‘There’s really no letup to some of the misery people are feeling across that area,’ said Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service, referring to Texas. 

Seven million Texans are under boil water notices after the storm compromised systems – a problem exacerbated by the lack of power in many homes. Another blast of ice and snow threatened to sow more chaos Wednesday.

Fort Worth, Texas: Gas stations such as this 7Eleven/Exxon on Highway 377 can not get deliveries of fuel, having run out on Sunday and not expecting another shipment until next week.

Dallas, Texas: Houses covered with snow on Wednesday afternoon as millions throughout the state were still without power.

Desperate Texans waited for more than an hour in freezing rain to fill propane tanks in Houston on Wednesday as more than 3million people remain without power. Some 600,000 had power switched back on by 6am Wednesday and even more were turned back on before lunchtime but millions remain in the dark and without heating. With ongoing, forced blackouts in being carried out in different parts of the state, it is difficult to track exactly how many people don’t have it and where they are in real-time.

Carlos Mandez waits in line to fill his propane tanks Wednesday in Houston after the CEO of ERCOT – the Texas energy agency responsible for the deadly blackouts that have driven people to burn furniture and accidentally poison themselves with carbon monoxide just to stay warm –  said he had no idea when power would be restored but claimed his agency managed to avoid an even bigger catastrophe by switching it off.

Frozen: More than 4million people in Texas were without power yesterday afternoon in subzero temperatures for the fourth day in a row.

ERCOT switched off millions of people’s power on Monday which reduced usage from around 70,000 megawatts to (70 gigawatts) to just over 43,000 megawatts (gigawatts). 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) is enough to power 500 homes

ERCOT says that had it allowed the power to continue being used, the entire grid would have gone down and it would have taken longer to get up and running than the current, forced outages will. The explanation has fallen on deaf ears in Texas, where millions want to know why the crisis wasn’t averted .

Texas uses its own power grid and has done since the 1970s. The energy-rich state wanted to use its own resources but also sit beyond federal energy regulation. Other states to the north of it share resources. Oklahoma has been just as affected by Winter Storm Uri but because it pools resources with neighboring states, it hasn’t run out of power.

Some 4.4million households don’t have it. In Texas, the average household size is 2.8 people. There are around 30million people in Texas. It means an estimated 12million people – 41 percent of the state – doesn’t have power.

Now, ERCOT has deliberately switched off people’s power to try to stop them from draining any remaining reserves.

It has created a diabolical situation in the face of freak weather in the southern state where temperatures on Tuesday plummeted to -2 F – the lowest they have been since 1903- and where eight inches of snow have fallen in some parts.

The nationwide death toll from the storm is 31. It’s unclear how many people have died in Texas so far but the death toll there includes a mother and daughter who died from carbon monoxide poisoning because they left a car running in their garage to stay warm, and a grandmother and three children who died after the fire they were using to keep warm spread throughout their house in Sugar Land.

ERCOT CEO Bill Magness – who made $880,000 in 2018 – claimed on Tuesday night that the situation could be worse. He refused to take responsibility for the fact his agency didn’t upgrade systems to make sure plants would withstand the cold, and instead chalked the whole crisis down to a ‘supply and demand imbalance’

There are delays to the COVID-19 vaccine distribution and many doses that were being stored are under threat because the freezers storing them can’t operate without power.

The outages have crippled water pressure which also threatens drinking water supply. It is a particular problem in hospitals, where pressure is dwindling. There are also fears that without any new gas becoming available soon, prices are about to skyrocket by as much as 20 cents per gallon.

People are also being told to boil water before they drink it or use it for cooking because it is no longer safe, due to the shortage in power plants. Many can’t – because they do not have power – and stores where they could buy bottled water are closed or empty.  Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday night called the situation ‘completely unacceptable’ and ordered a full investigation into how ERCOT had failed the state so drastically.

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