But despite the misery, death, economic disruption, and embarrassment that Texas suffered, little has changed. Since last February, the state has appointed new regulators and tweaked some of its statutes. They had been warned repeatedly, by experts and by previous calamities-including a major blackout in 2011-that the grid was uniquely vulnerable to cold weather. But neither could the governor, legislators, and regulators who are supposed to oversee the state’s electric grid claim to be surprised. Nobody yet knew just how widespread the blackouts would become-that they would spread across almost the entire state, leave an unprecedented 11 million Texans freezing in the dark for as long as three days, and result in as many as seven hundred deaths. Read Next 14 Ways to Prepare for the Next Winter Freeze The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, had just told CPS Energy and fifteen of the state’s other electric utility companies to immediately begin turning off power for portions of their service areas. The Texas power grid was, at that moment, like an airplane low on fuel that needed to jettison cargo to stay aloft. Power plants all across the grid were shutting off, incapacitated by frozen equipment and a dearth of natural gas, the primary source of fuel. The state’s electricity reserves, which are tapped to prevent emergencies, were already depleted. He scanned for one particular piece of information. One wall of the control room is covered in enormous computer monitors displaying maps and data. Mecke could track the spiking energy use in real time. The control room at CPS Energy, in San Antonio. During the most severe cold fronts, residents crank up those inefficient units, and some even turn on and open electric ovens and use hair dryers. The overwhelming majority of Texas homes are outfitted with electric heaters that are the technological equivalent of a toaster oven. Across the state, families hunkered down and did anything they could to stay warm.
Abilene and Pflugerville had advised residents to boil their water, the first of thousands of such warnings that would eventually affect 17 million Texans. In Fort Worth, the storm’s icy arrival a few days earlier had led to a 133-vehicle pileup that left 6 dead. A winter storm had brought unusually frigid temperatures to the entire middle swath of the United States, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. But when he hustled from the break room, where he’d sneaked in a power nap after an all-day shift, into the company’s cavernous control room, housed in a tornado-proof building on the city’s East Side, what he witnessed unsettled him. He started at the company not long after high school, working at one point as a cable splicer, a job he performed in hot tunnels beneath the sidewalks of San Antonio.
Mecke, a moonfaced 45-year-old, is the manager of systems operation training at CPS Energy, the city-owned electricity provider that serves San Antonio.
Anthony Mecke had drifted to sleep in the break room when a loud knock roused him at 1:23 a.m.
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