| HN Mirror

Texas' power failures were largely due to failures in natural gas production. This drove down natural gas supplies across a huge chunk of the country. It had a lot of knock-on effects in neighboring states where they were pushed near their limits as well, especially neighboring areas. Even Minnesota was affected by Texas gas production shortfalls.

https://apnews.com/article/why-texas-power-grid-failed-2eaa6...

> This isn’t just happening in Texas, of course. Utilities from Minnesota to Mississippi have imposed rolling blackouts to ease the strain on electrical grids buckling under high demand during the past few days.

The amount of energy deficit was like 30GW of power. Oklahoma's entire generation capacity is like 6.7GW. Arkansas has a little over 5GW. Both states were already massively straining to keep the lights on and had rolling blackouts. Even if you decided to redirect all the electricity from both states into Texas you'd still have a shortfall of an additional 20GW of power. So you'd need all the power of like six surrounding states to balance out that deficit.

Moving power from even further out causes a lot of challenges, so even if there was a good bit of spare capacity in places like maybe Illinois or something a lot of it wouldn't have made it down there.

There's a good chance even if Texas was connected, if gas failed the same way there would have still been massive outages. Now, would gas have failed if required to make the NERC's recommendations? That's another question. But just the basic idea of being on the other interconnection, it probably wouldn't have saved Texas from having massive outages.