The Texas energy system is having a wintry moment of reckoning.
The past 48 hours of record-cold temperatures have forced much of the state’s thermal generation fleet offline, requiring grid operator ERCOT to institute widespread blackouts to prevent the risk of a further grid collapse.
About 4.3 million utility customers, approximately one-third of the state’s electric customers, were without power in Texas as of Tuesday morning, up from about 2.5 million on Monday morning, according to data from PowerOutage.US. What started as rotating blackouts meant to last no more than an hour at a time have expanded to outages of 24 hours or longer for some customers.
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