Residents line up in their vehicles to enter a warming center and shelter after record-breaking winter temperatures, as local media reports most residents are without electricity, in Galveston, Texas, US, Feb 17, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]
Much of the US on Wednesday remained in the grip of subzero temperatures that have caused scores of deaths and national power outages, including more than 3.4 million customers in Texas alone.
At least 30 people have died since the brutal weather crossed the country last week. The latest storm front hitting Texas on Wednesday was preventing companies from restoring power and was expected to move into the Northeast on Thursday.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has reported that more than 100 million Americans are being affected by the extreme winter weather from the south-central US to the East Coast, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. The NWS said more than 150 million Americans are under winter storm warnings.
Tens of thousands of homes were without electricity in Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana, more than 200,000 in four Appalachian states, and nearly that many in the Pacific Northwest, according to poweroutage.us, which collects reports on power outages. But the worst outages were in Texas.
Governor Greg Abbott said Wednesday that "every source of power Texas has, has been compromised", from coal and renewable energy to the state's nuclear power plant.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCT) which manages the state's power grid, said Wednesday that around 700,000 homes had electricity restored overnight, but more than 3.4 million customers were still without power late Wednesday morning.
A man walks to his friend's home in a neighborhood without electricity as snow covers the BlackHawk neighborhood in Pflugerville, Texas, US on Feb 15, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]
The state was hit by more sleet and freezing rain on Wednesday that the NWS said could be "the worst of all the winter events over the past week".
A polar vortex, a weather pattern that usually concentrates only around the North Pole but is increasingly visiting lower-latitude areas, spread across Texas on Monday and Tuesday and also hit Louisiana and Mississippi.
The rare winter storm and freezing temperatures in Texas led to record-breaking demand for electricity that has overwhelmed the state power grid and left millions of people without power and heat for hours or days in freezing temperatures. And there is no certainty over when the power will go back on.
"We know this is hard. We continue to work as quickly and safely as possible to restore power," the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the power flow for some 26 million customers in the state, tweeted Wednesday morning. "We hope to reduce outages over the course of the day."
Unlike other states, Texas operates its own power grid. That means that when things are running smoothly, Texas can't export excess power to neighboring states. In the current crisis, it can't import power either.
"When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas," Dan Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University told CNN. "That has really come back to bite us."
In the coastal city of Galveston, the county government called for refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies it expects to find in freezing, powerless houses.
In Harris County, where Houston is located, officials have received at least 300 calls of carbon monoxide poisoning from portable heaters. In the Houston area, one family succumbed to carbon monoxide from car exhausts in their garage, an 8-year-old girl and her mother passed out and died while on the phone, while another man died after flames spread from a fireplace.
Volunteers help distribute water to local residents at a warming center and shelter after record-breaking winter temperatures, as local media reports most residents are without electricity, in Galveston, Texas, US, Feb 17, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]
Houston officials also issued a boil-water notice for the city's residents Wednesday.
"We have no heat. Before I went to bed, I had to hold a teacup filled with boiled water to warm my hands. Sirens from ambulances and police cars were in the street the whole night," said Shirley Qing, who lives in the Houston area. She had been without electricity for more than 36 hours when she spoke to China Daily on Wednesday.
"What really breaks me down is the lack of water. I started to pick up rainwater and stored it in the bathtub just to flush the toilet. To save water, I took cooking pans and pots outside this morning and washed them with rainwater and snow on the ground. My neighbors' water pipes have all burst," she added.
The Texas power crisis exposes how the US electric infrastructure may not be fully prepared to face the demand for power under extreme weather, experts said.
Texas produces more electricity than any other state, and its electricity generation is almost twice as much as Florida's.
By 2019, Texas accounted for 28 percent of all wind-powered electricity in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. But the state is ill-prepared for extreme winter weather because it tends to have above-average temperatures.
While some wind generators did go offline as turbines iced over, ERCOT said the shortage was driven by a failure of traditional "thermal" sources: coal, nuclear and especially natural gas.
Texas has largely relied on natural gas for power. Natural gas-fired power plants generated 40 percent of Texas's electricity in 2020, according to ERCOT. Wind turbines were second at 23 percent, followed by coal at 18 percent and nuclear at 11 percent.
Energy experts said that gas lines supplying gas-fired plants may have frozen or that supplies to the plants may have been limited as gas was prioritized for homes that rely on gas for heat, according to NBC News.
