SPEAKER_03: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A little more than a year ago, in February of 2021, it was snowing in Austin, Texas, which is unusual.
SPEAKER_14: So this is the beginning. What might be a historic winter storm here in Austin. I love this.
SPEAKER_15: I was psyched. It was it was snowing, like really snowing in Austin. And that just it doesn't happen much here. Mose Bouschel is a reporter at KUT, the local public radio station in Austin, Texas.
SPEAKER_03: You know, I just wanted to get out and document this storm as much as I could.
SPEAKER_15: But then there's this moment in the tape that I mean, it still gives me chills when I listen back to it. The question for a lot of people right now is whether the electric grid is going to hold up.
SPEAKER_03: If you remember the news from Texas, the grid did not hold up. It went down pretty much all over the state. Millions lost power for days, some in houses not built to withstand freezing temperatures. According to at least one estimate, more than 800 people died.
SPEAKER_00: I'm so heated. Greg Abbott, what are you going to do about this power grid? See all these headlights? You see all these people? These are people that have had no electricity for 13 hours.
SPEAKER_02: And they don't have anywhere else to go. Day five and nothing.
SPEAKER_03: Mose has been covering energy in Texas for more than a decade. He reported on the whole blackout catastrophe with his colleagues at KUT, and they made a great podcast out of that reporting called The Disconnect. And today on our show, we wanted to talk with Mose about what exactly happened a year ago and how it connects to the strange history of the Texas power grid.
SPEAKER_15: So a few days after the blackout ended, you know, we started talking about making a podcast just to explain what happened because people really didn't understand. I was hearing all these questions about the Texas power grid, how it works and how something so catastrophic could happen in a state that is literally known for its energy industry. Right. It's baked into the entire persona of the state.
SPEAKER_03: Right. I mean, I know Texas is huge when it comes to oil production, but can you give us a sense of just how big oil production is? OK, so to give you like a sense of scale, about 15 percent of the entire world's oil is produced in the United States, and almost half of that is produced right here in Texas.
SPEAKER_15: That's a lot. Yeah, but it's not just oil. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but Texas is also the number one producer of wind in the country. We're number one in gas, too, not to mention solar, nuclear, coal. All of that makes what I'm about to say next really surprising. The Texas energy grid for decades has operated kind of on this knife's edge. I mean, in the few months after the last blackout, there were two more times Texans were warned that there might not be enough electricity to go around. Two.
SPEAKER_03: So if you had to sum it up, why? Why is the Texas grid so fragile? Why is it on this knife's edge? That's a big question.
SPEAKER_15: To answer it, we've really got to look back at the whole history of the grid and how Texas came to be what we call an energy island. It's the only state in the lower 48 that operates its own independent electric grid. OK, so let's get to that history. So we're going to start at the very beginning, right? Right when electricity comes out. And at first it's it's kind of a novelty, right? But but then people, you know, they start having in their houses, cities especially, they start using it to power streetlights, maybe streetcars. And as electricity expands, there was kind of this like hodgepodge mix of ways you could get it, of utilities. There were some some utilities that were run by cities and towns. And then there were like these independent outfits, private operators. Like at the beginning, like literally a person could kind of like buy a kit. You know, you get an electric generator and you set up shop and you just start trying to compete for customers. So it's kind of like the Wild West. Yeah, it was very unregulated. But all of that starts to change as it becomes more of a necessity. Starting in 1907, states began to regulate power companies.
SPEAKER_15: This is Julie Cohn. She wrote a book about the history of power in the U.S. It's called The Grid. They said, you know, this is becoming an essential service. We want to make sure that it's provided on a fair basis to the citizens of our state.
SPEAKER_10: So we will say who can operate where and how much you can charge your customers for your electric service. And you in return will promise us that you will be fair in how you provide electricity to your customers and it will be reliable. So this regulation she's talking about, it was happening in most states, like the state was regulating the utilities, but not in Texas.
SPEAKER_15: I can't say I'm surprised. Right. I mean, Texas was anti regulation even back then. So the oversight of our power companies here remained pretty light. But as the grid grew elsewhere in the country and especially as it started crossing state lines, regulation became a bigger issue. Because then it becomes a national issue because then it becomes the purview of the federal government if it goes across the state.
SPEAKER_15: Yes, it does. And it really changed in a big way when when this guy became president. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_15: This guy is FDR, of course.
SPEAKER_04: This nation is asking for action and action now.
SPEAKER_15: So this was the New Deal era. OK. And FDR was going after monopoly power all over the place. And these big electric companies, they were among his main targets. They had become increasingly monopolistic as all these discrete local grids grew into each other and became more of these bigger kind of regional entities. And FDR wanted to check that power, especially, you know, to make sure that ratepayers didn't get a raw deal. So Congress passed a law in 1935 that said if you crossed state lines, you're going to be under the regulation of the feds. And the key phrase there that I'm hearing is cross state lines. It sounds like you can get around federal regulation if these companies didn't cross state lines.
SPEAKER_15: Exactly. And that is what happened in Texas. You know, you can imagine why it was very attractive to these Texas power companies to say, OK, forget it.
SPEAKER_10: We're not going to sell power to anybody in Louisiana or Oklahoma or whatever. We're just going to form interconnected systems inside Texas and operate as we wish. I think it's interesting to note that at first, Texas was not alone in this. Some other utilities stayed within state lines, too.
SPEAKER_15: Maine had no interconnections, for example. But by the 1960s, Texas was the only state left in the contiguous United States with its own grid. And part of the reason why has to do with Texas's size. Texas, as everyone who lives in Texas knows, is a really big state.
SPEAKER_10: And not only are we big, but we're wide. We have two time zones. So the sun rises an hour later in West Texas than it does in East Texas.
SPEAKER_15: So Texas is like width. It means that not everybody needs energy at the same time. People in East Texas wake up, drink their coffee, turn on their air conditioning. And then gradually, an hour later, people in West Texas do the same thing. That is amazing to me. The reason why this holds together is just the geography of the state.
SPEAKER_03: So energy demand moves slowly across the state because it's so wide. And that means that the grid doesn't get overloaded. No one's turning on their coffee machine all at once across an entire gigantic state. Right. We can roll that power around.
SPEAKER_15: And there's also the weather to think about. Electricity is needed more when there's extreme weather. But Texas is so big that there's really hardly ever a moment when there's the same weather all across the state. So that really lets you kind of move the power around to where it's needed. And that's really important because having enough power to meet electric demand, that's critical. That is the name of the game. Otherwise, the entire system trips up and you start seeing blackouts. Maybe now we should talk about what is actually happening when a blackout happens.
SPEAKER_03: What is actually happening when a grid trips up and fails? OK, so this is fun. I think the best way to explain this is to take you into a blackout.
SPEAKER_15: So I'm going to take a break from Texas history now and we're going to jump ahead in time to 1965. In 1965, the Northeast suffered one of the biggest power failures in U.S. history. And I'm going to play you the sound from that blackout.
SPEAKER_03: That doesn't sound like a blackout. That sounds like a song. So why are you playing a song?
SPEAKER_15: This is Everyone's Gone to the Moon by a guy named Jonathan King. And this was a big hit in 1965. So on November 9th of that year, this song was playing on a radio station in New York City, WABC. When this blackout hit and what we're listening to is the tape of that broadcast.
SPEAKER_15: So you can hear the music start to wobble around a bit at the end there, sort of like its speed is changing. And that's because of actually what's happening on the electric grid. And a lot of people don't know this, but the grid has a beat. It's 60 hertz or 60 cycles per second. And this is the frequency that electricity runs over transmission lines. Almost everything electrical in your house is built to run on this 60 hertz, your toaster, your TV. And at this radio station in New York, the turntables were synced to that frequency. So when the beat starts to slow down on the grid, the DJ starts to notice it in the music.
SPEAKER_07: God, I wish I could be that good of a DJ. He's on. It's crazy. I love it.
SPEAKER_03: So this DJ doesn't know it yet, but something has gone really, really wrong on the electric grid around Niagara Falls.
SPEAKER_15: And that's basically created this chain reaction that results in not enough electricity getting to New York City. So when there's less supply than there is demand, that imbalance, that can fry the whole system. And you mean physically breaking the grid here, like a physical reaction?
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. Like I picture sparks flying, like things literally shorting out.
SPEAKER_15: The very equipment starts breaking down and that sort of damage that can take weeks or months to repair. So to stop that from happening, grid operators basically have two options. First, they can try to find more power somewhere to meet the amount of demand or they start cutting people's power off to lower that demand. And that's what happened in 1965. They cut power to 30 million people. Wow. Thirty million people. Did everyone just like freak out when that happened?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they kind of did, actually. That blackout, it made everyone kind of take a look around and say, we can't let this happen again.
SPEAKER_15: OK, so over the next few years, electric utilities started forming something called reliability councils. And these exist basically to keep that beat that we were talking about, to keep that 60 hertz on the grid constant. So now turning back to Texas. Texas is again, by this point, the only state in the lower 48 with its own grid. So it creates its own reliability council. It's called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. But here we just call it ERCOT.
SPEAKER_03: And so how does ERCOT, how do they make sure that supply and demand are in balance?
SPEAKER_15: They do it by being the grid's traffic cop. ERCOT basically tells companies who generate power when and how much power they need to put on the grid to meet the amount of demand. Or if there's more demand than there is supply, they can also order power companies to cut service. And this is what you call a planned blackout. It's a tricky job and it became trickier later on during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Right. This is the decade when the price for oil in the U.S. skyrockets and we start seeing gas lines everywhere.
SPEAKER_03: And not only that, but Carter, you know, then quite literally comes out and asks people to conserve energy domestically.
SPEAKER_15: You know, if you're cold in your house, you know, don't turn up the heat. You know, just put a sweater on, put a sweater on. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.
SPEAKER_01: The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe.
SPEAKER_15: During this crisis, the Carter administration realized it needed to decrease the country's dependence on foreign oil. And part of how they went about incentivizing companies to produce more energy domestically was by deregulating the energy markets. Through a new top level review process, we will do a better job of reducing government regulation that drives up costs and drives up prices.
SPEAKER_11: The idea was that deregulation would spur oil production in the U.S. by encouraging investment.
SPEAKER_15: And at the same time, they argued that it would drive down energy prices by creating competition. And so we're seeing the baby steps of the philosophy of letting the market decide at this point.
SPEAKER_03: Right. And deregulation really gained steam in the 80s under Reagan, so that by the 1990s, politicians were talking about deregulating the electricity market, which, like we said, was always kind of run by monopolies.
SPEAKER_15: So, again, this is where Texas comes back into the picture. In the 1990s, deregulation came to Texas in a huge way.
SPEAKER_18: We got out a napkin and then we kind of drew out the direction we thought it ought to take if we were going to deregulate. So this is David Sibley. He was a state senator in Texas who led the efforts to deregulate back in the 90s.
SPEAKER_15: Sibley and a few other legislators had this unique plan for Texas, and he says they drew it up on this napkin in the back of a napkin. But basically, it would let people and businesses choose where they're getting their energy from, like they could choose their power company. So what does that mean? Like, what did David Sibley think that that would look like in practice?
SPEAKER_03: Because I can't even imagine how you would do that. You have one wire going to your house. What does that mean to choose your electricity? Yeah, and it's still not like this in a lot of the countries. So I think it is really hard for people to wrap their heads around.
SPEAKER_15: But basically, under this bill, if you're a consumer of electricity in Texas, you would get to buy your electricity the same way you buy a roll of toilet paper. You go to the store and you look for whatever brand you like. You compare prices and you pick whatever which one you want, right? This isn't the case in most of the U.S., like I said, where you still have your one utility that provides the energy to your town or your city. And I can imagine that these energy companies that have held these monopolies for decades at this point, they were not a fan of the David Sibley plan or himself, probably as a person, actually.
SPEAKER_03: No, they were not, because suddenly they wouldn't be the only players in town.
SPEAKER_15: We had a private dinner with utility executives and told them what we were going to do. And they were very, very opposed to our bill. They didn't like it.
SPEAKER_18: It was very clear how much they opposed what we were doing. I mean, they were very opposed to it. I think it's safe to assume they were very opposed to it.
SPEAKER_03: I think that they didn't like the bill. So who's on the other side of this? Who is David Sibley serving in this case with this legislation? This is a fascinating coalition. Basically, you know, you had big manufacturers, factories, anything that consumes a ton of electricity, they'd rather be able to shop around.
SPEAKER_15: And because they're buying in such bulk, they can probably negotiate better prices if the market is deregulated. Right. That makes sense. Also, you had environmentalists really on board with this in Texas. Environmentalists, yeah, they wanted to deregulate. Well, that really surprised me. I don't normally think of environmentalists as people who would prefer deregulated markets. So what was going on there?
SPEAKER_03: Back in the 90s, they saw deregulation kind of as an opportunity to break things up.
SPEAKER_15: If you imagine that you're like an environmentalist in Dallas, Houston, and you've been fighting some coal plant that you think has been polluting the country forever and you want to try to take it out, basically. Well, here comes an economic model that might suddenly give you an ability to do that and maybe put more renewable energy on the grid. And this wasn't like they weren't far off. This actually happened. They end up writing in renewable energy goals into the bill so that when they deregulate, they start bringing in more wind power.
SPEAKER_03: So Sibley's bill, they had the big manufacturers on board. They had environmentalists on board. And was it just kind of good to go at that point? No. Well, we're forgetting one other big key player in all this, and it's a little company from Houston that you might have heard of before.
SPEAKER_15: Enron was going around the country trying to persuade all of these legislatures and policymakers that full tilt electric competition is a wonderful thing and here are all the benefits that it will bring.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. Enron.
SPEAKER_14: Yes, Enron. Okay. This is Allison Silverstein, who worked at the Public Utility Commission of Texas in the 90s while deregulation was happening. And she, like lots of folks, doesn't have a ton of great things to say about Enron.
SPEAKER_09: Enron and other traders were able to develop a number of strategies that allowed them to make a ton of money in sleazy ways. She doesn't mince words.
SPEAKER_03: No, not at all. What she's talking about here is, when she says Enron's making money in sleazy ways, deregulating the energy market means that companies like Enron can start trading energy basically kind of like a stock or a bond.
SPEAKER_15: And so around this time, there's this famous case on the West Coast where Enron traders would straight up call a power plant and say, hey, can you shut down for maintenance? And the power plant is like, why? And they're like, just do it. And so what are they trying to accomplish when they do that?
SPEAKER_03: Basically, it's market manipulation. The more scarce something is, the more valuable it becomes. So in this case, Enron used their influence to drive up the price of energy by making less of it available.
SPEAKER_15: That's diabolical.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that is.
SPEAKER_03: But at this point, people weren't all that aware of all the awful things Enron was doing, right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And remember, Enron back then, Enron was wildly powerful. It was a corporate titan like Amazon or Apple.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, OK. So Enron is on board with deregulation because they think it'll open up another avenue for them to make money. Yep. And so what happens with Sibley's bill? Well, now it's good to go. The bill passes and it's signed into law June 1999. And this piece of legislation, basically what it did was it created two key things.
SPEAKER_15: The first was the ability for consumers in a lot of the state to choose their own electric providers, which is what we talked about earlier. But the second thing, and this is one of the most critical parts of all this, is that this bill created what's called an energy only market.
SPEAKER_03: So tell me more about that. What is an energy only market?
SPEAKER_15: So Texas's energy only market is the first and only one of its kind in the country. In most other parts of the country, a power plant is kind of paid just to sit around to provide energy just in case it's needed. But in Texas, power plants are only paid for the power that they produce and sell on the market. People in favor of this system, they said it was the most efficient way to do things. And the critics looked at it and they said, wait a second, power plants can charge more for electricity the less of it there is available. You know, just like we were talking about with Enron, it kind of creates this incentive for scarcity. OK, so I'm starting to see how this all fits together. Texas operates on its own grid to avoid federal regulation, making it the only energy island in the country.
SPEAKER_03: It's also been deregulated to the point where there's purposely almost no excess energy on the grid, which means that when there's a huge surge in demand, like, say, I don't know, during a serious winter storm, a blackout isn't just likely. It's like, you know, almost a certainty.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. And because it's an energy island, when the state's grid does go down, like the cavalry isn't coming. You're not going to be able to get energy from neighboring states the way that you can in the rest of the country. So this is where we found ourselves last year, as this historic winter storm bears down on the state. Demand for power is expected to potentially exceed supply during parts of Monday and Tuesday.
SPEAKER_17: Help us to keep the system from being overloaded. Lower that thermostat just a little bit.
SPEAKER_03: So this unprecedented storm is coming. How does the state begin to prepare? So this is where ERCOT, the reliability council that we talked about earlier, comes back into the picture.
SPEAKER_15: You remember ERCOT, you know, its job is to make sure that the grid doesn't break down, that we don't get to that point. And how does ERCOT do that now that it's in this completely deregulated energy market in Texas?
SPEAKER_03: OK, so they're still doing the traffic off thing, right? They're trying to direct enough energy onto the grid to meet demand.
SPEAKER_15: But like you said, now they're operating this energy only market, which means that the incentive basically for power generators is to operate as close to a blackout as possible. Right. You could even say that ERCOT is trying to manage a grid that's kind of working directly against their interests. It's like being an air traffic controller where the planes want to fly into the ground.
SPEAKER_15: I never thought of that before, but yeah. So it's a lot of pressure to do the job. There's a ton of pressure and you can hear them feeling that pressure the afternoon before the storm started. ERCOT is requesting all Texans to conserve energy today, Sunday, through Tuesday, February 16th, to the extent that they can do so safely and reliably.
SPEAKER_07: This is ERCOT's VP of System Operations, Dan Woodfin.
SPEAKER_15: He's on a conference call with media basically saying, hey people, we should stop using electricity so that maybe a blackout doesn't happen. But then the winter storm hits and people, reasonably enough, they just can't conserve electricity. They need it to heat their homes.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly. People are cold. I mean, during the storm, the airport in Dallas reported a 72-year low. It was negative two degrees in Dallas.
SPEAKER_15: So people are under distress and they need heat in their homes, and so they cannot regulate their power the way that ERCOT wants them to.
SPEAKER_03: But it seems to me that the other way to solve this is to have the power plants produce more power. Yeah, for sure. And ERCOT starts trying to do that. They start calling up power plants and saying, hey, if you can turn on, now is the time to do it.
SPEAKER_15: But a lot of power plants just can't come back online. This is the former CEO of ERCOT, Bill Magnus, talking about it back in February 2021. One generator after another reported that they were tripped off, they were not able to operate.
SPEAKER_08: So for the power plants, the problem is that things just start to freeze up. They're built in Texas for warm weather, and they're built outside.
SPEAKER_15: So their equipment is not winterized, and suddenly in this super cold weather, they really literally cannot produce power. Wow. So like every part of this system is failing.
SPEAKER_03: Right. So ERCOT can't get any more power right when demand is surging.
SPEAKER_15: And that means one thing. They've got to start cutting power across the state. So that's what they do. And with people's power getting cut, demand does start to drop. But that doesn't work because it turns out that as the demand is dropping because of these power cuts, the supply on the grid is still dropping faster than the demand. Wow. Power plants are still breaking down all over the place. And at that point, we're getting down to the frequency levels where we're in the danger zone.
SPEAKER_15: Remember that beat of the grid that we talked about, how the system is built to run at that 60 hertz frequency? You see, if the grid falls below 60 hertz for too long, it causes catastrophic grid failure. That's not a planned blackout. It is a total breakdown. That would mean hospitals don't have electricity. Gas stations don't have electricity. The government itself doesn't have electricity at the offices that they're using to try to manage this type of crisis. Wow. I mean, that's just apocalyptic. That's like Mad Max.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's a humanitarian crisis. It's maybe like nothing that we've ever seen before in this country.
SPEAKER_15: So how does it end up unfolding for the people managing the grid that first night?
SPEAKER_03: So that first night, the frequency on the grid drops to 59.4 hertz, which is a key number because at 59.4, the clock starts.
SPEAKER_08: If you stay at 59.4 for nine minutes or more, generation units begin to trip off on their own. So the operators at ERCOT literally have nine minutes to get this thing right?
SPEAKER_03: That's right. The way the grid is set up is that after nine minutes, power plants start disconnecting themselves across the state.
SPEAKER_15: Like, imagine fighter pilots ejecting themselves from the plane before it crashes. That's effectively what power plants are doing, trying to save themselves from frying along with the rest of the grid. So these operators at ERCOT, they have nine minutes to get things right or all those awful things we mentioned start happening. And, you know, what's worse for ERCOT is that as time ticks off, the number continues to drop. So they basically decide that they have to throw the kitchen sink at this thing. So they order this one massive final power cut to the grid. And we're talking about millions of people who lose power because ERCOT is trying to save the energy system. And finally, it works. The grid begins to stabilize. There were only four minutes and 37 seconds before that nine minutes was up. The grid would have totally failed.
SPEAKER_03: And so this is when millions of people start waking up on Monday morning without any power. That's right. Yeah, including me.
SPEAKER_16: Just give a sense of how icy things are now. I want to get this cooler in. I realize I have to get this big, thick layer of ice off of it before I can even get back to the house.
SPEAKER_15: Wow. I tried to document as much as I could at that time. It was like nothing I'd ever lived through before. And so, like, what are you feeling at this point? Like, it's enough of an anomaly.
SPEAKER_03: You don't are you don't aware of all the things that are coming. Like, what are you feeling when you wake up and see your breath in the morning in Texas? Like a lot of people, I was nervous. The weather was only getting colder.
SPEAKER_15: And at first you kind of figure the power is going to come back on quickly because that's the way it's always happened before. Right. These are called rolling blackouts. But but they weren't rolling. See, typically if this happens, Texans will see their lights go out for an hour or two and then they'll come back on and the blackout moves to somewhere else. And the idea there is to spread the inconvenience of the power cut around. But again, on Monday, that just isn't happening. As far as the temperature in the house, it dropped down like fast.
SPEAKER_06: This is Carolyn Rivera. She's a retired schoolteacher I spoke with for our series.
SPEAKER_06: It was so cold in here. My bed was like a block of ice and it was like I couldn't put on enough clothes to warm myself up.
SPEAKER_15: We're going to keep circling back to Carolyn, whose experience in this blackout is just awful. But I do want to take a beat here and just say how dangerous it is for people to lose electricity for extended periods of time. There are people who count on power to run medical equipment, like to get dialysis, for example, and losing power means that they're unable to get these kinds of treatments. So, you know, what might just be a discomfort for some people could cost other people their lives, which makes this whole next chunk of tape I'm going to play you kind of infuriating. As you all know, we are in an unprecedented event throughout last night and all day today.
SPEAKER_15: This is DeAnn Walker. She was the chair of the Public Utility Commission. The PUC oversees ERCOT and they met here to talk about the energy market.
SPEAKER_05: I believe that there are some current situations within the ERCOT market that are causing what I'll call distortions. It may be the wrong term, but that's what I'm going to call it right now. Distortion seems to be underselling it a bit.
SPEAKER_03: I'd say super underselling it.
SPEAKER_15: You know, we've been in mode shed since about one o'clock this morning and the prices weren't at the scarcity pricing. And I was somewhat surprised about that, sadly to say.
SPEAKER_05: So explain this to me. So what is she talking about here?
SPEAKER_03: What what DeAnn Walker is saying is that she's surprised that the market didn't respond the way it was supposed to. You see, state regulators expected that energy prices would go as high as possible.
SPEAKER_15: Higher prices would mean more power plants start generating more power. And so did that happen? Were more power plants generating more power?
SPEAKER_03: No, because like we said, there were no more power plants left. Power plants weren't working.
SPEAKER_15: But that didn't stop the Public Utility Commission from meeting and really using the only tool they felt like they had. They stepped in and they raised the price of electricity themselves, because that's the market mechanism that's supposed to bring more power to the grid. But really, the failure here has nothing to do with money. Like these are physical plants that are going down so they can throw as much money as they want to.
SPEAKER_03: But it just doesn't matter. No, no. But we created a system where like this was the only lever they felt like they could pull to try to get things back working again.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, it was just like this market orthodoxy took over and they ignored the physical reality of the grid.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. And as we entered the second day and the third day of this blackout, things just got worse.
SPEAKER_15: Electricity wasn't the only problem. Natural gas pipelines were breaking down, too. And in Texas during the winter, the main source of fuel that powers the entire grid is natural gas. So not only is the power that's going out from the power plants, is there a problem there, but the fuel coming into power plants to make all that energy, that's breaking down, too.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. And then if that wasn't bad enough, the water system starts breaking down.
SPEAKER_15: Water running into people's homes starts to freeze. People's pipes are starting to break all across the state. Things just keep compounding and compounding. Imagine being in your home without being able to even use the bathroom properly and not having water.
SPEAKER_06: That was horrifying.
SPEAKER_15: Carolyn's right. The whole experience was horrifying. I mean, driving around Austin during the blackout, I saw water shooting out of broken pipes onto the streets and freezing on the streets. I went to this one apartment complex. There was a busted raw sewage pipe on the second floor. So this raw sewage was just spilling out everywhere, like down the stairway, into the parking lot. It was really wild.
SPEAKER_03: How did you end up faring for those four or five days? I mean, when did you get your power back? We were pretty lucky. We lost power on our house for a few days. But KUT, it's the station where I work,
SPEAKER_15: they put me and my family up at a hotel near the station because I was trying to report on all this, too. So they put us up after the first night we spent at home in the cold and then we got to move to a hotel. And that was on what they call a critical circuit. There's this kind of huge point of contention, actually, that came up in this crisis. And you'd see people post a lot of angry videos online about this, too, because some parts of every community never lost power. And that all depended on what kind of a circuit they were on, where they were getting their electricity from. And so you'd see things like, you know, all of the businesses in like downtown Austin, a lot of the high rise office buildings and stuff. Electricity stayed up and running there the whole time. And you'd see people comment about this. Also during the live streams of the public officials like ERCOT and the PUC, people would just become livid. They'd look at these people sitting comfortably in their well heated office buildings, sitting there cozy, you know, while millions of other people were just freezing, you know, just trying to figure out what was going to come next. So these critical circuit areas downtown where there's fancy offices and such, they fared better than the places that are less affluent. Is that right?
SPEAKER_15: That was the impression a lot of people got. And I should say there's a lot of research going on right now about how much grids locally in different parts of the state might really be set up like that. But, you know, the bottom line is people with less means, you know, were the ones who came out of this the worst. They had less resources to get out of this whole catastrophe, you know, intact.
SPEAKER_03: You had played some tape from Carolyn Rivera where the pipes broke in her house. And I mean, she sounded like it was extremely stressful, extremely difficult for her. How did she fare? How did she end up?
SPEAKER_15: So Carolyn's from a neighborhood in East Houston that's, you know, low income. It's a place that had already been really devastated by Hurricane Harvey, you know, some years earlier. And people there were still recovering from that hurricane when this blackout hit. And, you know, and so Carolyn and a lot of her neighbors, their homes are on the older side. They might lack proper insulation. And it was in homes like these where the pipes were most likely to burst. Carolyn said, and she's on a fixed income, I should say. She brings in about $1,500 a month. She said her repairs from the storm totaled more than $3,000.
SPEAKER_06: You just don't have that kind of money laying around to pay that type of expense for repair.
SPEAKER_15: So for a while after the storm, the state didn't allow electric companies to cut people's power. There was this moratorium on cutoffs. But by the time I talked to Carolyn a few months after the blackout, it had been lifted. So people in her situation, people in her community were facing disconnections again, but this time not because of the blackout, but because of the bills stemming from the blackout. She was worried she couldn't pay her bill. And that risk, the risk of being disconnected, was forcing her to start rationing her own electricity. During the day, I turned my air way up to like 83. And then when I go to bed at night, then I'll drop it down a little lower so I can rest because of the fear of getting an electric bill that I'm not able to pay.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_15: It's like in the winter, she froze. And now in the summer, she'd bake. And I asked her what she thought about everything about the blackout, about the disconnections. And this is what she told me. My thoughts were this. I was disappointed and hurt, but not surprised. They have already demonstrated how they feel about poor people. You understand what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_15: For all the talk about markets and efficiency and profits and risk, the thing that really matters, helping the people that the system failed, that has yet to really enter the conversation here in Texas.
SPEAKER_06: They knew this area wasn't going to get any power if there was a major outage. They knew that. They knew it. They knew it. They do not care.
SPEAKER_03: When we come back, the blame came and whether the Texas grid can survive another major storm. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_03: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. I'm back with Mose Buchel, who reported all about last year's blackout in Texas. You just told us the whole story, but I have a bunch of questions for you. I guess the first and foremost is how are things now? I know a few weeks back there was another scare with the Texas grid. How are people feeling these days? People are still really freaked out, honestly. Like you mentioned, this whole past winter we've kind of fallen into this pattern where whenever a cold front comes through, it's almost like people are reliving the trauma of what happened last year. You see people going to grocery stores and clearing out the shelves sometimes, preparing for another possible blackout. There's also just not a lot of confidence that enough has been done to fix this thing.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, we really didn't get into this in the main part of our story, the question of accountability. Has anyone been held responsible for the grid failure? I noticed like when you were announcing different people when they were speaking, you use the word former a lot, the former head of things. Yeah. So like, is that part of the accountability? Yeah. Yeah. Up to a certain level, everybody in charge of the electric system of Texas was gone within a few weeks of this happening. All the public utility commissioners and also Bill Magnus, he was the head of ERCOT. I think it's safe to say that ERCOT was initially sort of the focus of that anger.
SPEAKER_03: I totally get that people could be or even should be mad at ERCOT, but how much could they realistically do? Because like their hands were sort of tied by this system that this group of politicians created back in the 1990s.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. I mean, especially when it came to ERCOT, there were other people that would come forward and say like, these are just kind of the technocrats, you know, these are the people that are running the machine that someone else built. In fact, Bill Magnus, the former head of ERCOT, said exactly as much when justifying their decision to cut power the first night of the blackout. The fundamental decision that was made to have the outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators that we have here. If we had waited, not done outages, not reduced demand, Texas would be in an indeterminately long situation without power, even more extensively than we are with these outages.
SPEAKER_08: So there is the former ERCOT CEO basically saying we did our job, you know, that the grid didn't fully melt down. So for us, like that's a win.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. Yeah. They succeeded in fulfilling their mandate. That's basically it.
SPEAKER_15: Right. Yeah. And in doing that, you know, millions of people, well, you know what happened. Yeah. So as ERCOT is passing the buck, who does it land to next?
SPEAKER_03: So this really was it was like this string of finger pointing going on in Austin for months after this thing happened. So first you had the power generators, another obvious party that's responsible for this.
SPEAKER_15: These are the companies that own the power plants that failed to produce the electricity. And so there's a lot of focus on them. What are you guys going to do to make sure this never happens again? But almost right out of the gate, the first thing you heard from the power plants was that it's not all our fault because we didn't have the fuel to run like like the power generators are literally saying and and this is backed up by data. It's not just them saying this. The natural gas supply dropped so hard, so fast that they could not run their plants to produce electricity. So their argument then is like, we could be as ready for a storm as as ever, but if we don't have fuel to run, it's never going to help anything. So they point their fingers to the natural gas suppliers. And so after that, like, does the natural gas company, you know, like, flame somebody else?
SPEAKER_15: They absolutely did. I mean, the line from the natural gas industry was that their power had been cut by ERCOT. And so they couldn't produce natural gas to bring to the power generators because they were victims of the blackout, essentially. That was their line anyway.
SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, was there any truth to that? That sounds horrifying. That's like a circular firing squad. That's horrible. Yeah, there is truth to it, but it's not the whole story.
SPEAKER_15: The problem with that kind of rationalization is that a lot of the natural gas supply dropped not because of power cuts. And in fact, a lot of the natural gas supply in the state of Texas started dropping well before the blackouts were enacting. We saw natural gas supply get really scarce, even in the lead up to this storm. So it can't all be blamed on ERCOT. I mean, and one of the aspects of accountability is like, who's going to pay for it? Because you mentioned that the Texas Public Utility Commission raised the price of electricity to its maximum.
SPEAKER_03: That was like $9,000 per megawatt hour. And then, as I understand it, the people are on the hook for that, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, there's a lot of reporting around this after the blackout.
SPEAKER_15: And initially, what you might have heard a lot about are these like super high electric bills, thousands of dollars of bills. And that did affect some people in the state who had certain plans, you know, electric plans. But the reality is for most Texans, everyone's bill is going to be a little higher for decades to come. This blackout created this kind of massive wealth transfer, essentially, and all of this debt got transferred from power companies that had to pay these huge prices for electricity and also for natural gas. All of that debt is filtering back to the ratepayer now, and it's going to be paid off in small increments month by month over decades. And we're talking, again, billions of dollars. So this is also still a very live issue. People are really pissed off about this. And they feel like they were victimized by this blackout. And now they've got to foot the bill and pay billions to these companies that benefited from this energy scarcity.
SPEAKER_03: So like in the end, if you were to balance all the scales, you know, like the argument for deregulation was that it was supposed to make the whole system cheaper and efficient and that those savings would be felt by the consumer. That's what they always say. But this doesn't sound cheaper. No, I've seen a lot of studies on this and there are, of course, a lot of competing studies.
SPEAKER_15: But most of what I've seen shows that on average, your your regular ratepayer, your your residential consumer did not see cheaper electricity after deregulation. There are some people say that the bigger customers, the industrial customers, they got cheaper power. But but your average person at home didn't necessarily see better prices. And then if you add on to the fact of the billions of dollars people will now be paying off because of the blackout. Well, that certainly, again, means that our system in Texas is even more expensive now than it was before the blackout. So, yeah, in terms of in terms of price, it's hard to make an argument for the system that they created when they deregulated. So beyond figuring out who to blame, have there been any reforms that have been put in place last February so that something like this doesn't happen again?
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, there were. Again, you know, lawmakers met. They passed some some laws. One thing that they did was they said power plants have to winterize. Basically, you've got to insulate yourself so you can run in the cold weather. Power plants did do that last fall before this winter. Parts of the natural gas system also are now not supposed to have their power cut in a blackout, which sounds like it could be helpful. But the the natural gas infrastructure has not winterized and, you know, regulators are still working on that. It's something that they they hope to have done next winter. But but that process has been a lot slower and a lot more controversial. Honestly, the fact that the natural gas companies have not had to do that yet. Is there any notion of just getting like a real significant line out to other electrical grids in the United States?
SPEAKER_03: Just like emergencies or something? That has been a big topic of conversation.
SPEAKER_15: And, you know, we've heard a lot of people come out and say that not only should we do that, but that many of them argue that we we can do it in Texas without even giving up our independent control of the grid. Right. We wouldn't necessarily have to have to have tons of federal oversight. So, you know, that's a conversation that's going on. But it's not really clear whether our state leadership wants to go in that direction. I think there's still this idea that this was a historic freeze. Right. This is something that Texas hardly ever sees happen. So so many people are wondering why make an investment to fix the system that really works most of the time.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I guess people can comfort themselves with the idea that the system worked most of the time. But, you know, we're talking about people's electricity. Shouldn't that work all the time? Totally. And another problem with the idea that the system works most of the time is that these storms are happening more often because of climate change.
SPEAKER_15: And here I'm not just talking about cold spells. Right. We have things like hurricanes. I mean, Hurricane Harvey really wrecked Houston and a big part of the state not so long ago. We have massive droughts. You know, we get months and months at a time of triple digit heat. That also has its own effect on the grid. And so it's becoming less and less possible to just say, oh, you know, this is going to happen every few decades and we don't really need a plan around it because that's just not the case anymore.
SPEAKER_03: Well, most I really appreciate you sharing your story with us and then telling it to our audience. And I highly recommend people go listen to the disconnect. It's fascinating. The section of the whole event and really worth checking out no matter where you're from. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_03: Special thanks to Claire McInerney, Jimmy Moss, Andrew Weber, Nadia Hamdan, Audrey McClenchy, Matt Largy, Todd Callahan, Jake Perlman, Stephanie Federico and the whole team behind the disconnect at KUT and KUTX videos in Austin. You can listen to the full series on the website at kut.org or wherever you're listening to this podcast. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
SPEAKER_14: Yes, yes, my creation. It's alive. I shall call it Stitcher Sirius XM.
SPEAKER_12: For every bit of love you give your baby, make sure you give yourself love too. Introducing a new line of Centrum vitamins created to support moms before, during and after pregnancy from the Women's Choice award winning multivitamin brand. Visit centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
SPEAKER_01: With the McDonald's app, you can get your favorite thing delivered to your door so you can eat your favorite thing while you watch your favorite thing at home. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. If participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivering other fees may apply.
SPEAKER_13: Nissan has a car for everyone. Every driver who wants more. Whatever your more is, more fun, more freedom, more action. From sports cars, sedans and EVs to pickups and crossovers. With Nissan's diverse lineup, anyone can find something to fit their more. Get more revs in their sports cars, more guts with all wheel drive and more than enough options to fit your driving style. Nissan can take you where you want to go. Learn more at NissanUSA.com
