Three weeks shy of five years since a winter storm overwhelmed Texas’ power grid and left millions freezing in the dark, grocery store shelves across the state were barren, schools and businesses closed and ERCOT, the acronym for the once-obscure state grid manager, was again a household name as residents sought for assurance the disaster would not be repeated.
Gov. Greg Abbott, state emergency management officials and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas CEO assured Texans at a news conference in the days before this year’s storm that the grid was prepared to handle increased demand over the weekend as snow, sleet and freezing rain was forecast to fall on large swaths of Texas.
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The state did see localized power outages and a handful of deaths from exposure and accidents. The power grid remained stable throughout the period of intense demand, but with one big caveat: experts say this year’s storm was much less severe than Uri in 2021.
“The grid has held once again, works absolutely flawlessly,” Abbott said during a radio interview Monday. “That is because of everything that we’ve done over the last five years.”
Texas’ 2021 blackouts — which caused hundreds of deaths — were caused when the extreme cold overwhelmed key parts of the power grid as demand for power soared, forcing ERCOT to cut off power to millions of customers for days or risk the entire grid collapsing.
This time, the state’s energy supply comfortably exceeded demand during the storm, aided by a more diverse grid that got a boost from battery storage that did not exist in 2021 in any significant way.
For a brief period Monday morning, 9.5% of the power supplied to the grid came from these batteries, which generated more than 7,000 megawatts of electricity. According to ERCOT, 1 megawatt is enough to serve 250 residential customers during peak hours, meaning the storage release on Monday was powering the equivalent of 1.75 million homes.
Battery storage is just one way the landscape of the ERCOT grid has changed since 2021. After the catastrophe of that winter storm, the Legislature required that power plants and electric infrastructure be hardened against extreme weather and earmarked billions of state dollars to encourage the construction of new natural gas power plants.
Meanwhile, Texas’ energy market continued to expand, led by a building boom of solar farms and battery storage projects.
But Texas officials expect a massive increase in electric demand over the next five years as more artificial intelligence data centers are built and the state’s population continues to grow.
So can Texans really breathe easy the next time a winter storm or summer heat wave blankets the state?
The legacy of Uri
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri plunged most of the state into days of subfreezing temperatures capped by snow and ice, and electricity demand surged to record winter levels — just as large portions of the state’s energy infrastructure began to fail.
According to ERCOT’s post-event review presented to Texas lawmakers, the grid lost about 1,500 megawatts of generation within minutes in the early hours of Feb. 15 as power plants began tripping offline in quick succession, quickly followed by more failures as extreme cold froze equipment and fuel supply problems spread across the system.
ERCOT operators saw system frequency fall below 59.4 hertz, a signal that electricity demand was starting to exceed the supply — which could cause catastrophic damage to components of the grid. ERCOT later concluded that operators had only minutes to act before as much as 17,000 additional megawatts of generation risked tripping offline automatically, a cascade that could have caused a near-total blackout and significantly delayed system restoration.
To stop that chain reaction, ERCOT ordered large-scale power cuts to reduce grid demand.
At the peak of the blackouts, about 20,000 megawatts of electric demand was taken offline in ERCOT, enough to power roughly 1.6 million homes — federal regulators said it was the largest controlled blackout in U.S. history. Those figures do not include Texans who lost power due to electric infrastructure damage caused by the storm, like downed powerlines.
The emergency lasted several days, with blackouts continuing until Feb. 18. More than 4.5 million Texans lost electricity, many for multiple days in subfreezing temperatures. Power outages cascaded into water systems, knocking out pumps and treatment facilities and forcing boil-water notices for more than 14 million people.
The storm caused an estimated $80 billion to $130 billion in economic damage and was linked to 246 deaths, many caused by hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning as residents tried to stay warm using charcoal grills indoors or turning on vehicles in garages.
Some state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, blamed renewable energy for the grid failure in the days following the storm, but studies quickly found that all power sources — including natural gas, nuclear and coal plants, which provide most of the state’s energy — struggled to operate during the storm.
Five members of the ERCOT board, including its chair, resigned after withering criticism by state officials and the public. The chair of the Public Utility Commission also resigned in the weeks following the storm.
State lawmakers responded by passing legislation aimed at making the grid more resilient.
The Public Utility Commission followed with a rule enacting the weatherization requirements. But the rule allows power plants to request an exception if they document their efforts to comply, explain why they couldn’t and submit a plan to do so later.
An August 2025 report from the State Auditor’s Office found the Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency, was inadequately verifying that Texas natural gas production and delivery systems had properly hardened themselves against cold weather.
At the time, the oil and gas regulator pushed back on the report. A spokesperson for the commission said this month it conducted more than 7,400 weatherization inspections in fiscal year 2025 and has conducted nearly 1,200 such inspections since the beginning of September.
Both the PUCT and ERCOT pointed to a host of improvements to the grid they say should give Texans confidence going forward, including the weatherization efforts, improved emergency response and changes in market pricing to more reliably bring backup power online when grid conditions are tight.
“The proof these reforms have strengthened the grid is in the performance of the grid,” PUCT Chair Thomas Gleeson wrote in a statement. “Just this week, the ERCOT grid weathered a severe winter storm without any systemwide disruption. Since 2021, the ERCOT grid has broken dozens of daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and all-time winter and summer demand records, also without any disruption. Texans can be confident in their electric grid.”
The grid’s growth
Since 2021, Texas has become the nation’s leader in both solar energy and battery storage, providing a new and significant source of power to the Texas grid.
The state’s solar capacity more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, and battery storage more than tripled, according to ERCOT.
During the summers of 2022 and 2023, when extended stretches of triple digit temperatures sent power demand and wholesale electricity prices soaring, developers saw an opportunity in Texas, said Aaron Zubaty, founder and CEO of battery storage company Eolian. Those high prices led to a significant buildout of battery storage in 2024 and 2025, Zubaty said.
Batteries store excess power during times of low demand and release it onto the grid later when it is needed. That new addition to the grid gives operators more time to react in emergency situations, Zubaty said.
“If a similar scenario [as 2021] had unfolded this week, gigawatts of battery storage would have automatically deployed … when a lack of gas supply tripped off thermal power plants,” Zubaty said. “The battery storage fleet could support the system for hours and be deployed in seconds which is essential considering cascades … happen in just minutes and seconds.”
Challenges ahead
Although the grid handled the demand from this week’s cold snap, a bigger test may still lie ahead. ERCOT projects that peak demand could climb from about 87 gigawatts in 2025 to roughly 145 gigawatts by 2031.
Much of that growth is expected to come from large new users like data centers, cryptocurrency mining and other energy-intensive industries rather than population increases.
ERCOT reported in November that 5,302 megawatts of demand has been added to the grid from large data centers since 2022. Recent forecasts show data centers emerging as one of the fastest-growing sources of demand, rising to more than 24,000 megawatts by the end of the decade.
That surge is already reshaping how grid experts think about reliability. Matthew Boms, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, said the system has more tools than it did in 2021, but warned that those tools will be tested as demand accelerates.
“The real stress test is what happens as demand grows faster than infrastructure,” Boms said. “We’re adding large loads very quickly, and the system will have to prove it can keep up.”
Noah Roberts, executive director of the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, a trade group for battery storage companies, called Texas the nation’s “gold standard” in implementing battery storage to the energy grid.
But Boms cautioned that batteries are not designed to carry the system through prolonged emergencies.
“Batteries are incredible for speed,” he said. “They respond in milliseconds. They stabilize the grid. But most grid batteries are designed for a few hours, not for days.”
Others are more cautious about drawing conclusions about the grid’s health from this month’s storm. Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, said the cold snap has been far less severe than Winter Storm Uri, making it difficult to assess whether post-2021 weatherization measures are truly working.
“We don’t really have good data on that,” Palacios said, referring specifically to the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which fuels many power plants. She said it’s difficult to evaluate those changes because Texas does not require public disclosure of which gas facilities have been weatherized or how they have performed in extreme weather.
There is broad agreement that building a much larger, more resilient grid will require major new investments that will likely push up consumers’ electricity rates.
A study by the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute projects that residential electricity rates in the ERCOT market could rise by about 29% by 2030, driven largely by an estimated $96 billion in transmission and distribution investments.