AUSTIN — In February 2021 the electricity went out at the home of the Shah family in Northwest Austin while temperatures dipped below freezing for days. They felt lucky to have a gas fireplace that kept working, and stayed warm sitting around it covered in blankets.
Then the family matriarch, 85-year-old Manjula, started showing signs of distress. Her children called an ambulance, but she succumbed to hypothermia at the hospital.
She was one of at least 246 people whose deaths the state says was linked to the winter storms and days-long blackout that gripped the Texas that week.
"The other day I woke up and, of course, started thinking of my mom," Manjula's daughter, Minal Shah, told KUT last week. "You question yourself... What could you have done more? Did I do enough? It leaves its mark on you."
Since the blackout, Shah says her neighborhood is better prepared for emergencies. Many have bought home generators. Still, they get nervous when a winter storm comes in.
"It's just a little anxiety that, you know, hopefully the power doesn't go away this time," she says.
To reassure nervous Texans, state leaders point to the growth in power generation since the blackout. At a speech this month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott touted a public fund that gives incentives to build natural gas power plants that can generate 10,000 megawatts of electricity.
"That's enough to power more than two million homes," said Abbott.
But there's a catch. Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas. Lately, legislators have proposed added energy incentives every legislative session.
"We must add more power this session to better fortify our grid," the Governor added.
ERCOT sees (potential) storm clouds
On Thursday, the state's grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas released its Capacity, Demand and Reserves report, looking at possible grid conditions into the future.
The assessment included one extreme scenario in which massive energy demand growth in the state surpasses available supply as early as 2026.
Energy analysts are skeptical that energy demand would grow as quickly as that scenario suggested.
"I really dont think all of this demand is going to show up," said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at UT Austin who studies the grid. "I dont think it's physically possible for all this demand to show up."
Rhodes says that the new ERCOT forecast is based on recent mandates from the Texas legislature to include more "speculative" demand growth.
For example, he says, if one data center is considering five different locations to open up shop in Texas, "the way that the law was written, we have to consider it like all five of those data centers are coming."
While the new forecast model makes the report less useful for analysts and power companies, he says it may be welcome by lawmakers eager to encourage construction of more gas power plants.
"If you can make it look like the sky is falling, it could be a lot easier to make one's case to do that," says Rhodes.
'Political appetite'
A reliable energy system involves more than building new power plants, and analysts say the state has made some progress in bolstering the system.
After the blackout, lawmakers mandated weatherization standards to help power plants run in the cold, streamlined emergency communications and helped some power plants to maintain back up fuel.
Rhodes also says a boom in solar power has helped meet peak demand, especially in the summer, and a boom in utility scale energy storage has helped year-round, though that has happened largely without support of state lawmakers.
"Texas didn't [build solar farms and battery storage] for an energy transition reason at all," says Rhodes, "We just made it easy to build things here. And so people started building things here."
But critics of current state leadership say there is more to be done.
Conservationists point out that Texas has not improved energy efficiency standards since the 2021 blackout. State lawmakers and regulators generally reject the idea of joining up with neighboring power grids, something federal regulators have suggested for years.
Post-blackout, lawmakers also dismissed proposals to increase oversight of the state's natural gas supply to ensure gas gets to power plants when needed.
"There doesn't seem to be a political appetite to address that aspect of the gas industry here in Texas," says Beth Garza, an Austin based energy consultant, and former Market Monitor for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Ultimately, Rhodes, the UT Austin research scientist, says the truest test for how much the power grid has changed may be another freezing storm of the magnitude that Texas saw in 2021.
With severe cold fronts hitting the state more frequently, that's not something Minal Shah, the woman who lost her mother in 2021, wants to be around for.
So, earlier this week, she boarded a plane for a reunion of old friends.
Shah says they decided against gathering in Austin.
"We couldn't trust the weather," says Shah. "And also we couldn't trust if we would have power or not."
They're spending February in Florida instead.
Mose Buchele is the host of The Disconnect Power Politics and the Texas Blackout.
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