“Natural gas shortages and frozen wind turbines were already curtailing power output when the Arctic blast began knocking generators offline early Monday morning.”
More than a third of the state’s generating capacity went down in the cold. ERCOT says it followed best practices for winterization. The plants froze anyway, and the gas supply froze with them. Texas runs its own grid to dodge federal rules, so it couldn’t import much help when it broke. Millions of people sat in the dark for that independence.