By Jon Chesto on February 19, 2021
All the oil, gas, and wind supplies in Texas simply weren’t enough to keep the lights on. Single-digit temperatures froze up much of the state’s energy infrastructure, leaving millions of homes and businesses without power. A systemic failure with tragic results.
For New Englanders, the natural question is: Could that sort of chaos happen here?
Generally speaking, our electric grid is much better equipped to deal with frigid extremes. We do, after all, endure these kinds of conditions at some point almost every year. Plus, our energy market is quite different from Texas’s, in ways that put our grid in a stronger position for such disruptions.
Our grid also has its weak spots, thanks in part to its reliance on natural gas. Few people know just how close ISO New England came to implementing rolling blackouts — the nonprofit grid operator prefers to call them “controlled outages” — to protect our stressed-out grid during the 2017-2018 winter. While ISO New England continues to take steps to ensure the juice flows smoothly during cold months, it makes no guarantees.
Read more via the Boston Globe >>