On February 10, a winter storm formed north of the Gulf coast, dropping significant amounts of sleet and ice on many states in the Deep South and the Ohio Valley, including Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, as well as states on the East Coast. Snow covering grounds of the Texas Capitol on February 15, 2021 This weather phenomenon resulted in record low temperatures throughout Texas, with temperatures in Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio falling below temperatures in Anchorage, Alaska. This outbreak was due to the polar jet stream dipping particularly far south into the U.S., stretching from Washington to Texas, and running back north along the East Coast, allowing a polar vortex to bring very cold air across the country, and spawning multiple storms along the jet stream track as a result. In mid-February 2021, a series of severe winter storms swept across the United States. On August 16, 2011, a 357-page report was released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in response to the February 2011 power outage in Texas. At the time the blackouts and failures in the power grid were likened to those that occurred in December 1989, after which similar recommendations were made to the state government and ERCOT, which were similarly ignored. Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems. Many roads around Houston were impassable, and boil-water advisories were issued in several areas. In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state. 2.1 Immediate weather and power plant failures.During the crisis, some energy firms made billions in profits, while others went bankrupt, due to some firms being able to pass extremely high wholesale prices ($9,000/MWh, typically $50/MWh) on to consumers, while others could not, as well as this price being held at the $9,000 cap by ERCOT for allegedly two days longer than necessary creating $16 billion in unnecessary charges. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the Texas power grid was "seconds or minutes away from" complete failure when partial grid shutdowns were implemented. Damages due to the cold wave and winter storm were estimated to be at least $195 billion, likely the most expensive disaster in the state's history. federal regulators ten years earlier that had warned Texas that its power plants would fail in sufficiently cold conditions. The crisis drew much attention to the state's lack of preparedness for such storms, and to a report from U.S. Deregulation of its electricity market beginning in the 1990s resulted in competition in wholesale electricity prices, but also cost cutting for contingency preparation. Texas's power grid has long been separate from the two major national grids to avoid federal oversight, though it is still connected to the other national grids and Mexico's the limited number of ties made it difficult for the state to import electricity from other states during the crisis. However, data showed that failure to winterize power sources, like wind turbines and natural gas infrastructure, had caused the grid failure. State officials including Republican governor Greg Abbott initially blamed the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. The storms triggered the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas state history, leading to shortages of water, food, and heat. In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major power crisis, which came about during three severe winter storms sweeping across the United States on February 10–11, 13–17, and 15–20.
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