Shoring up the grid: What El Paso can teach the rest of Texas

On Valentine’s Day, every county in Texas went under a winter storm warning. The next day, the lights began to go out. In the days since, millions of Texans have been without power in freezing temperatures. Millions are now boiling water, and impassable roads and food scarcity are also a worry across the state.

But for a select few on the fringes of the Lone Star State, the winter storm did not precipitate a larger, longer, emergency. For residents in El Paso, at least – in the state’s far western corner – it’s meant a few days of building snowmen, staying indoors and off the roads, and learning that the city is on a different electrical grid than most of the rest of the state.

But as ERCOT announced that the grid will “begin to return to more normal operation conditions” today, the state’s unique electricity infrastructure is under intense scrutiny.

“Texas has been providing a reliable service at a pretty great price,” says James Coleman, an energy law expert at Southern Methodist University. “But now we see they’ve been cutting corners on some things”…

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