The Texas grid has lost about 35 MW of production capacity during a severe winter storm, and this has caused cascading outages for millions of people across service territories. Texas is the largest energy producing state in the country. This article from GTM lists some of the reasons and some of the history since the last severe storms and outages there 10 years ago. I find GTM’s writing fact based and the right level of sophistication for my understanding and the time I have for issues in other areas.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/texas-energy-system-faces-a-winter-reckoning
I send sympathy to people suffering the hardest, and I understand many people have perished.
I have also seen the fossil fuel industry and their spokespeople using this event as an opportunity to tarnish wind and solar energy generation. While natural gas, coal, and nuclear plant shut-downs have been responsible for twice as much of the outage as wind and solar plants coming off-line, some have still claimed this is an example of why we should not build more renewable energy plants. It turns out not to be true.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/texas-blackouts-fuel-false-claims-renewable-energy-75936319
We should pursue both utility scale and distributed generation of renewable energy sources, which will provide more reliability in the long run, and will reduce our contribution to greenhouse gasses and anthropogenic climate change, which appears to be contributing to greater and more unpredictable weather events, often in areas not accustomed to them, like Texas.
6.3 KW of Sunpower on the roof, on the Jefferson PUD grid in Port Townsend