The Texas Grid Failure

Even for energy veterans, the depth of failures in Texas last week were breathtaking.

As arctic air froze power plants, gas lines, and mechanical instruments, the grid was shut down -- leaving 4 million people without electricity, unknown millions without heat, and three times that many without water.

Texas has been through freezes like this before in 2011, 2014 and 2018. Regulators were warned. So who is to blame for this historic catastrophe?

This week, we’ll talk about what happened in Texas -- reflecting on the responses and projecting the consequences for how we engineer the grid.

Then: did the shale boom fail to create all those promised jobs?

New research shows that the natural gas boom did not bring a massive employment wave to counties in the Marcellus and Utica shales. Wealth yes, but not so many jobs.

• Wall Street Journal: In Frigid Texas, Desperate Families Take Risks to Stay Warm
• Associated Press: Texas governor’s biggest donors: Energy industry that failed
• NBC: The GOP is rapidly becoming the blue-collar party. Here's what that means.
• Inside Climate News: A Decade Into the Fracking Boom, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia Haven’t Gained Much, a Study Says

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