The Texas energy capital is freezing

The extreme cold wave has so far reportedly been responsible for more than 30 deaths. More than 100 million Americans are now under some sort of warning from the cold or stormy weather, after deadly tornadoes were reported in the southeastern United States in recent days. B. At least 3.4 million households are now cut off from electricity, and the vast majority are in Texas – according to the authorities’ latest update tonight, some 2.3 million customers in the country considered the U.S. oil and gas capital are cut off from electricity.

The situation in Texas has only worsened in the past day, following reports that many residents now have no access to water, including due to pipes that have frozen and cracked, or malfunctions in water treatment facilities due to power outages. Authorities in 100 different Texas counties have instructed residents to boil their drinking water following the same water treatment facility malfunctions. According to the Reuters news agency, more than 12 million Texans – about a quarter of the country’s population of 29 million people – do not currently have tap water or the water in them flows only occasionally.

Water supply failures are also affecting hospitals in Houston, the largest city in Texas, and other areas. These reported that they had no water at all. At the University of Abilene, management even allowed students to use water from the campus swimming pool to flush toilets.

Although several days have passed since the outbreak of the crisis on Sunday, authorities have warned that the extensive power outages are expected to continue at least until tomorrow, as the storm progresses in a northeasterly direction. To survive the extreme cold many residents rely on heating with the help of generators that run on gas, or heat up inside their vehicles. Authorities warn that these methods are dangerous and can cause carbon dioxide poisoning. In Houston this week a mother and daughter were found dead inside their car in the parking lot of the house.

Sandra Erickson, who lives in a town near Houston, told CNN that temperatures dropped to such extreme cold that the water pipes in her home exploded – causing the ceiling in three different rooms in her home to collapse. “It’s just like a hurricane disaster,” she said.

Following problems discovered at two water treatment facilities in the city of Waku, the mayor there called on residents to reduce their use of water as much as possible. One Waku city resident, 45-year-old Laura Nevell and a mother of four, said her family has not had electricity since Monday morning. She said that to keep warm they were doing exactly what the authorities had warned him against: sitting in their car from time to time. “We’ve never had such a cold. There’s ice everywhere,” she said. She expressed frustration at the lack of satisfactory explanations regarding the power outages initiated by the authorities. “Tell us what’s going on. There’s silence.”

The responsibility for the widespread power outages is now being placed by Texas Republican leaders, led by Governor Greg Abbott, on the private corporation responsible for about 90 percent of the state’s Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, recognized by the ERCOT acronym. Abbott has already announced that he is demanding an investigation into the conduct of the corporation, which has not adapted its infrastructure to conditions of extreme cold. This is despite a rather critical report in which these shortcomings were raised, following an extreme cold wave that befell Texas about a decade ago.

At a press conference held last night, Abbott was asked if the corporation’s leadership should resign. He did not respond explicitly, but said she had failed. “They have shown that they can not be trusted. They are the experts. They are engineers in the energy industry. The government must rely on these experts so that it can provide a solution in such situations.”

Critics of the Republican leadership in Texas, on the other hand, argue that the responsibility for the crisis lies with it, in part because of the fact that in Texas’ privatized energy market there are no incentives for private companies to invest in adapting their infrastructure to extreme cases like the one currently plaguing the region. To this is added the fact that the Texas power grid is completely disconnected from the federal power grid, in part out of a desire by the authorities there to avoid having to obey federal government regulations, and therefore cannot “borrow” electricity from other areas in a crisis.

Despite this reluctance from the federal government’s electricity infrastructure, Texas is now receiving assistance from the Federal Disaster Management Agency (FEMA), which has sent dozens of generators to it and is preparing to supply it with fuel to boost its power supply as well. President Joe Biden has already approved a declaration of emergency in Texas, one that allows federal funds to be allocated to the state.

Against the background of the criticism towards him, the ERCOT corporation announced that now is not the right time to address the question of responsibility for the crisis, and announced that it is devoting all its energy to returning the infrastructure to full supply. The corporation said it was carrying out the power outages proactively, to prevent a complete collapse of the infrastructure.

Democratic Rep. Mark Weissy, who represents the Fort Worth and Dallas area, said he learned from one of the industry’s top industry executives that due to the heavy load on the system, the infrastructure was “minutes” from complete collapse – and an even more acute crisis. He criticized the corporation and the Republican leadership, saying both were not properly prepared for the extreme cold.

Republican political figures have tried in recent days to take advantage of the crisis as apparent proof of the failure of reliance on green energy. These claimed that the blame for the power outages lay in frozen wind turbines, and a picture was even circulated on social media claiming that a helicopter was seen throwing chemicals at a frozen wind turbine, in order to melt the ice. However, it later turned out that the picture was taken in Sweden a few years ago (and that the “chemical” substance is water).

The fake picture distributed on the networks:

Despite these claims, the ERCOT corporation also admitted that most of the defects were caused by the frozen gas infrastructure, because they were not prepared for the freezing temperatures. According to data released by the corporation, Texas has lost about 40 percent of its power supply, about 45,000 megawatts. Of these, 30,000 came from thermal energy sources – gas, coal and nuclear reactors – and only 16,000 from renewable energy sources such as wind turbines.

The crisis in Texas, which is said to be the U.S. energy capital, now puts some of its Republican leaders in a rather embarrassed position, after they mocked power outages in states under Democratic leadership, such as California. Senator Ted Cruz, for example, yesterday expressed regret over his tweet From August last year, in which he wrote that “California is now incapable of providing even the most basic functions of civilization, such as maintaining reliable electricity.”

Cruz claimed in the same tweet that Joe Biden, who then ran in the election against Donald Trump, “wants to make California’s failed energy policy a national standard.” Immediately afterwards he added mockingly: “Hope you do not like air conditioning!”. Yesterday he said he has “no protection” for those things. “A storm hit Texas and our state was shut down. That’s not good.”

Other political leaders, however, probably think otherwise. A small West Texas mayor yesterday drew widespread criticism following a post he posted on Facebook in which he claimed that it is not the responsibility of the government and the authorities to help residents suffering from the severe cold. In the post, which was riddled with spelling errors, Tim Boyd – the mayor of Colorado City where about 4,000 people live – said that “only the strong survive and the weak become extinct.” He also wrote that he was “tired” of people “asking for alms,” which he claimed was a product of the “socialist government,” as he put it.

Boyd, it should be noted, claimed that in parallel with the publication of this post he also resigned from his post, but the American media stressed that it is not clear when he did so and whether the resignation did take effect at the time he wrote the blatant things. He later deleted the post but did not back down from it. “My statement was just that people who are too lazy to get up and defend themselves but are unable to do so should not receive alms,” he wrote in another post he later published.