Chapter 5: Four Dark (and cold!) Days In Texas
- Sean M. Walsh
- Dec 14, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 20
The recent catastrophic Texas-wide power outage underscores the importance of pushing innovation in electricity production for data centers immediately.
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson
Key Points:
1. The Texas grid, which is the largest in the US, recently came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of total collapse — a catastrophic failure that could have taken months to restore and left the entire state without power for weeks.
2. U.S. power outages have doubled over the past decade. Grid outages are growing more frequent, and pose substantial risks to American economic prosperity, and social stability.
3. In order to prosper in the highly electrified years to come, American companies need to work harder to transcend the numerous risks posed by the legacy grid.
Key Stats:
$195-$259 Billion - estimated loss from 2021 Texas grid failure (potentially the most expensive disaster in US history).
61,800MW - total power generation lost across 1,045 generating units in Texas disaster.
11,000,000 - number of Texans who lost electricity, 69% of residents (approaching 1,000 fatalities).
$28 Billion - extra fees paid by Texas electricity customers in 3 years following outage.
600% - approximate increase in large-scale US grid power outages since 2000.
800 hours/year - estimated US power outages by 2030, compared to single digits in 2024.
Texas Seconds Away From Total Grid Collapse
Anthony Mecke had drifted to sleep in the break room when a loud knock roused him at 1:23 a.m.
"We just got the call," a coworker said.
Mecke, the manager of systems operation training at CPS Energy — the city-owned electricity provider serving San Antonio — hustled into the company's cavernous control room, housed in a tornado-proof building on the city's East Side. What he witnessed unsettled him. It was Monday, February 15, 2021. Winter Storm Uri had brought unusually frigid temperatures to the entire middle swath of the United States, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande.
The grid was collapsing.
At 1:43 a.m., the frequency of the Texas grid was dropping to dangerous levels. By 1:51 a.m., it had fallen below 59.4 hertz — a threshold that, if maintained for nine minutes or more, would trigger a cascading failure of the entire system. Within minutes, the frequency dropped to about 59.3 hertz. If it had stayed below that critical threshold for another four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the lights would have been out for months.
That's not hyperbole. According to Bill Magness, then ERCOT's president and CEO, a complete blackout would have left the system "out for an indeterminate amount of time." Industry experts estimated recovery could have taken weeks — possibly months.
To understand the scale of this near-catastrophe, consider the size of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT is the largest independent grid in the United States, serving more than 26 million Texans — nearly 90 percent of the state's population. It operates the wholesale electricity market for more than 1,800 active participants who generate, transmit, buy, sell, and distribute power.
During Winter Storm Uri, this massive system experienced its worst failure in history:
• 61,800 megawatts of generation lost across more than 1,000 generating units experiencing over 4,100 separate outages
• Peak demand exceeded 67.2 gigawatts — higher than ERCOT had ever planned for in extreme winter conditions
• 11 million Texans left without power for up to three days
• 17 million Texans placed under boil-water advisories as water treatment facilities lost power
• 69 percent of all Texans lost electricity at some point during February 14-20
The 20,000 megawatts of rolling blackouts ERCOT ordered represented the largest manually controlled load-shedding event in American history. But those "rolling" blackouts turned into extended outages lasting days because so much generation capacity had been knocked offline by the cold.
The Texas Outage Represents a National Problem
Winter Storm Uri wasn't an isolated incident. It was the most dramatic example of a pattern that has been accelerating for years.
According to Climate Central's analysis of U.S. Department of Energy data, weather-related power outages have doubled over the past decade. The United States experienced approximately twice as many weather-related outages during 2014-2023 as it did during 2000-2009. And 80 percent of all major U.S. power outages from 2000 to 2023 were caused by weather events — primarily severe storms (58%), winter weather (23%), and tropical cyclones (14%).
Texas has been ground zero for this dysfunction, experiencing more weather-related outages than any other state during this period. But the problem extends nationwide. The average weather-related outage duration more than doubled from 109 minutes per year (2013-2015) to 297 minutes per year (2020-2022).
The costs of the Texas collapse alone are staggering:
• $195-295 billion in total economic damage — potentially the most expensive disaster in American history.
• $16 billion in overcharges by ERCOT during the storm, when wholesale prices were locked at $9,000 per megawatt-hour.
• 200 to 700 deaths attributed to the blackout — from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and medical conditions exacerbated by loss of heat and power.
• $37.7 billion in collective electric bills that Texans are paying in the aftermath.
The Electric Grid - Not Designed For This Century
What the Texas catastrophe revealed wasn't just a weather problem. It was an architecture problem.
The American electric grid wasn't designed for the 21st century. As NPR noted, it's "a nearly 100-year-old network of electrical circuits" now facing both increased demand and weather-related stress that it was never engineered to handle. Over 70 percent of the grid is more than 25 years old and will need replacing in the coming decades.
The FERC/NERC final report identified a damning statistic: 75.6 percent of the unplanned generating unit outages were caused by either freezing issues (44.2%) or fuel supply problems (31.4%). And 81 percent of freeze-related outages occurred at temperatures above the unit's stated ambient design temperature — meaning the equipment failed before it even reached its supposed cold-weather limit.
This wasn't Texas's first warning. Similar cold-weather grid failures occurred in 2011, 2014, and 2018. After the 2011 event, FERC and NERC recommended winterization standards. Those recommendations were largely ignored because implementing them was expensive and nobody wanted to pay.
"We can't think about these as black swan events anymore," observed one industry expert after reviewing the pattern. This is the new normal.
Post-Storm Reality
Four years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the Texas grid remains vulnerable.
In November 2024, ERCOT's own resource adequacy report showed that if another Uri-like storm hit Texas, there would be a nearly 80% chance of rolling blackouts. Even a less severe storm like the December 2022 Winter Storm Elliott would carry a 50% chance of outages.
And now there's a new source of demand stress: data centers. Texas is attracting enormous data center development — OpenAI's flagship Stargate campus in Abilene could require up to 1.2 gigawatts of power alone. About 73 percent of new grid connection requests in Texas are from data centers. If all approved projects were built, they would consume the equivalent electricity of 154 million Texas homes — in a state with only 30 million residents.
The collision course between an aging, vulnerable grid and exponentially growing AI power demand is obvious.
Off-Grid Computing Is The Only Apparent Solution
The Texas disaster, and near multi-month catastrophe, clarifies one point above all others for the AI industry: grid dependence is no longer an acceptable risk.
This is why I've spent more than five years developing, proving, and refining a different approach.
I call it a Solar Computing Cluster. In summary, it is a completely off-grid, energy-independent data center for AI, cloud computing, and other computing workloads. These clusters are modular — individual computing cells can be linked together to form superclusters of nearly any size.
They offer equivalent uptime to legacy systems, a claim I've proven since energizing my first commercial-scale prototype over three years ago.
Most importantly, they are independent of the electric grid.
It is difficult to overstate the primary benefit: Solar Computing Clusters can be built and energized quickly, completely sidestepping the now 3-10 year delays inherent in legacy-styled data center projects. This results in literally billions of dollars in revenue captured per 100 MW computing cluster — revenue that would otherwise be lost waiting in interconnection queues or large-scale equipment manufacturing backlogs.
The Choice At Hand
The U.S. electric grid was designed for a different era — centralized coal plants serving stable residential and industrial loads. That architecture served its purpose for a century. But it cannot serve the next one.
Weather-related outages are doubling. Grid interconnection queues stretch years into the future. Transformer lead times have extended to four years. And the demand shock from AI is only beginning — with projections of 100+ gigawatts needed just for computing loads by the end of the decade.
We can continue hoping the legacy system will somehow keep pace. Or we can build around the bottleneck entirely.
The Texas blackout wasn't just a wake-up call. It was a preview. The question is whether we're willing to learn from it before the next one hits.
My work on Solar Computing Clusters offers one solution. Learn more at www.639solar.com.
Sources:
The Texas Grid Failure Was A Warm-Up, Texas Monthly
US Power Outage Trends, Climate Central
Grid Outage Trends, Scott Madden
Cascading Risks: Understanding The 2021 Texas Blackout, Science Direct
After 4 Years, And Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars, The Texas Grid Is Not Fixed, Forbes
ERCOT Blackout 2021, University Of Texas
Reliability Of Power Grid Infrastructure, ResearchGate
The 4 Worst Blackouts In History, @BrandonVar
2021 Texas Power Grid Failure, University Of Michigan
The February 2021 Cold Weather Outages In Texas And The South Central US, FERC
Winter Storm Uri 2021, Texas Comptroller Report
Texas Datacenter Growth Raises Blackout Risk, CNBC
Executive Order - Strengthening The US Electric Grid, President Donald Trump
US Department Of Energy Report On Power Outages, US Dept Of Energy
