Texas power crisis (February 2021)
Massive load shedding ordered by the Texas grid operator during a cold wave, which cut power to millions of homes and drove wholesale prices to their cap.
The Texas grid is almost isolated from the rest of North America, which keeps it outside federal oversight but also leaves it without help in a crisis. In February 2021, a cold wave sent heating demand soaring while gas plants, wellheads and wind turbines without winterization shut down, and the grid operator had to rotate outages to avoid a total collapse. Load shedding meant to last a few hours per neighborhood lasted days for many. Wholesale prices stayed at the cap for several days, bankrupting retailers and an electric cooperative, and showing that price risk can weigh as much as outage risk for a large consumer such as a data center. Insurers mostly paid for water damage from frozen pipes rather than business interruption, which is rarely covered without physical damage.
From February 15 to 18, 2021, Texas grid operator ERCOT shed up to 20,000 megawatts of load; about 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power, wholesale prices sat at 9,000 dollars per megawatt-hour for several days, and the state counted 246 deaths.
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