"GLOBAL ISSUES, LEADERSHIP CHOICES":

It might seem boring to talk about the weather, but a deep freeze across much of the U.S. is wreaking havoc on the power grid, shutting down oil refineries, causing rolling blackouts, and raising questions about an economy dependent on electricity.

"Energy markets have never seen anything quite like this. In a matter of four days, an intensifying cold blast gripping the central U.S. froze natural gas pipelines, sent electricity prices skyrocketing to record levels and ultimately forced Texas’s grid operator to plunge more than 2 million homes into darkness in the first winter weather-related rolling blackouts since 2011. As electricity outages began spreading through a 14-state grid across the southwest, plenty of blame for the crisis was already being assigned. ... As temperatures continued to fall, gas pipelines began to seize up, wind turbines started to freeze, and oil wells shut in -- just as homes and businesses raised demand for heating to record levels. ... By Friday Feb. 12, traders were panicking and trying to line up additional supplies for the long holiday weekend. That evening, Texas’s chief energy regulators called an emergency meeting to prepare to ration gas supplies across the state. ... Texas’s grid operator and the Southwest Power Pool have both implemented rolling electricity outages. These are controlled blackouts -- designed to last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (but in reality are proving much longer) -- that force electricity demand offline to protect the grids from total collapse. In the past three decades, Texas has only resorted to such a drastic measure four times. ... Half of the wind power capacity on Texas’s grid was knocked offline, and wind accounts for nearly a quarter of the state’s supplies. ... The crisis reinforces the need for policy makers and regulators to think carefully about what a world wholly dependent on electricity for lighting, cooling, heating, cooking and transportation would look like under extreme circumstances. The same risks were on full display last year when California, the largest electric car market in America and one of the biggest in the world, went through rolling blackouts of its own caused by intense heat waves and wildfires."
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-15/how-extreme-cold-turned-into-a-u-s-energy-crisis-quicktake