Starting at 1am on February 15, I experienced 37 hours of mostly 15 minute rolling blackouts (15 minutes on and 15 minutes off) followed by 32 hours of continuous outage. The rolling blackouts were tolerable, though I think they should have been 30 minutes to allow my heat pump to get fully warmed up, and do other things. The 32 hour outage in subfreezing weather was terrifying, all the more because of not knowing when it would end and how soon I would be able to boil water after my supply of bottled water ran out. Roads were icy, gasoline stations closed, and I had very little gasoline in my car so I could not reliably go anywhere or warm up in the car.
Texas energy suppliers and grid have to be weatherized to handle violent and extreme weather conditions.
Texas energy distributors need to be sure of their ability to administer short rolling blackouts over their entire service area when power availability is reduced, and never be forced to have power reduction blackouts longer than 1 hour, with 30 minutes optimal.
Texas should be connected to national grids to be able to obtain electrical energy elsewhere in an emergency. This would also enable greater development of renewable energy sources in Texas, including wind and solar, which could be sold to other states in normal surplus conditions. Other states may have resources more suited to electrical energy storage such as hydropower storage, which ought also be developed in Texas as much as possible. With these changes we could migrate to nearly 100% renewable energy as quickly as possible. Failure to migrate to renewable energy will make future weather even more violent.
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