The Texas grid froze 5 years ago. Is it ready for this weekend’s winter storm?
AUSTIN, TEXAS – As a massive winter storm bears down on the United States, Texans are feeling an anxious sense of déjà vu. This weekend’s storm is expected to blanket most of the state in an icy mix of snow and freezing rain reminiscent of the 2021 winter storm that led to a near collapse of the state’s power grid and at least 246 deaths.
Nearly five years ago, the regional grid run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) came within four minutes and 37 seconds of a total blackout. Frozen gas pipelines, stone-cold wind turbines and unprepared power plants all contributed to electricity shortages at the same time millions of residents turned up their heat. The only way ERCOT could prevent a system-wide outage and long-term damage to energy infrastructure was through rolling blackouts — turning off power to large parts of the grid.
This time, state leaders say the grid is fixed.
“The power grid system we have today is completely different,” said Gov. Greg Abbott in a press briefing on Thursday.
Abbott added, “we should anticipate some local isolated power outages because of damage to trees, damage to power lines,” but he said the grid has “abundant power” to avoid blackouts.
ERCOT said in a press release that grid conditions during the storm are expected to be normal.
“We are not anticipating any reliability concerns on the statewide power grid,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told reporters Thursday.
In interviews with Straight Arrow News, experts on Texas’ power grid echoed the expectation that the grid will withstand the storm, but raised a few important caveats. The risk of a power supply shortage could rise depending on the severity of the storm, and vulnerabilities remain in the gas power sector. However, the most likely source of a power outage in Texas and across the country is due to knocked-down power lines at the local level.
What weather impacts are coming this weekend?
The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm warning from eastern New Mexico to western Pennsylvania.
From Friday to Monday, the storm will bring below-freezing temperatures and “widespread heavy snow, sleet, and freezing rain from the Southern Rockies to New England,” the NWS warned.
In the Lone Star State, snow is expected in the Texas Panhandle and North Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Meteorologists predict sleet and freezing rain across most of the rest of the state. Temperatures will not come back above freezing until Monday or Tuesday.
The largest threat to the power grid is ice accumulation; wintry mix piling up on tree limbs can fall on power lines, or the lines themselves can be weighed down by ice.
Does growth in solar and batteries make the grid more prepared?
Matthew Boms, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, said the grid is “far more prepared” than it was in 2021.
He highlighted that in the past five years, 90% of ERCOT’s new electricity generation capacity has come from solar power and batteries. The grid didn’t have a significant supply of batteries in 2021. The utility-scale batteries can store excess power then discharge it when the grid faces shortages.
“You can’t underestimate the contributions of battery storage,” Boms told SAN. “Compared to five years ago, it’s a colossal change in the way that our grid operates.”
The grid now has around 17 gigawatts of battery capacity — a significant portion of ERCOT’s expected, 80-gigawatt peak demand during the coming storm.
Most of the batteries, however, are relatively short in duration, lasting around two hours.
In an extended outage, that may not help much, but Michael Webber, a power grid expert and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said “having one or two hours of support from batteries can be enough to keep other critical systems online.” The batteries can also discharge in a staggered pattern, providing less immediate support to the grid but spreading it over a longer duration.
Are gas power plants ready for winter?
Following the 2021 crisis, the Texas state legislature mandated increased inspections of power plants and some gas supply infrastructure. More than 4,000 inspections have occurred since the legislation passed, including 240 since December 2025, according to ERCOT.
ERCOT’s CEO, Vegas, said the grid now runs with a higher reserve margin of power supply that is ready to come online if another source of electricity trips offline. He also told reporters that 30 power plants have extra fuel stored on site.
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Following a deadly winter storm in 2021, there have been more than 4,000 inspections of the Texas power grid infrastructure.
Webber told SAN there has been an “investment wave” mandated by the legislature to winterize power plants by insulating critical equipment. But, he said the gas supply sector “was not required to do the winterization, so we don’t know what investments they’ve made or not.”
Concerns over the gas sector are shared by Ed Hirs, an economics lecturer and energy fellow at the University of Houston, who told SAN that natural gas supply chains could fail during a prolonged cold spell. He also warned that in Texas, most of the coal plants are over 50 years old and most gas plants are over 30 years old. Regardless of inspections, the power plants have “plausible deniability” and Hirs said unplanned outages, which can cause electricity prices to spike, are likely.
“The ERCOT market model rewards scarcity,” Hirs said. “We don’t have enough dispatchable power, in other words, not enough natural gas, coal and nuclear to get us through a long, cold, wet night.”
What’s changed about ERCOT’s grid operations?
Vegas also highlighted changes to how ERCOT operates the grid, and the December 2025 rollout of a new system called “Real-Time Co-optimization Plus Batteries,” which improves the response time for bringing reserve power online and switching between power plants, batteries and other resources.
The recent launch of the real-time co-optimization system was years in the making, said Kevin Sarkinen, executive vice president at Open Access Technology International, a software company whose platforms help ERCOT and utility companies process information on how much power is flowing around the grid.
Sarkinen told SAN the new system is a “game changer” improving operations so that “emergency energy supply will be optimized in real time to meet the immediate needs of the grid.”
As for the storm, Sarkinen expressed confidence. Utilities and grid operators are “prepared for dealing with the unexpected,” he said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
