Texas Rolling Blackouts: the Aftermath

The twin blackouts of electricity and natural gas that hit Texas and the desert Southwest last week are now moving into the next phase of the crisis:  investigation, as reported in today's Wall Street Journal. 

As always, suspicion falls first upon the market:  the electricity markets must be to blame for electricity shortages.  As with the California electricity crisis a decade ago (yes, the Enron debacle was that long ago) regulators are first looking to see whether suppliers withheld plants from the grid and natural gas from the pipelines to artificially induce shortages and increase prices for the few units remaining online.

The markets may well have been manipulated in this instance:  I have no direct knowledge of the situation.  But before we start assembling the firing squad, here are a few other points to ponder:

• It was cold there:  Texas set an all-time winter demand record for electricity.  (Temperatures fell to the single digits in places, in Texas!)
• It was cold there:  stuff doesn't work so well in the cold (or the heat).  I was involved in building a couple of natural gas, combustion turbine plants in Minnesota.  First, it can be hard to start those units in extreme cold.  This being Minnesota, we bought the "winterization" packages that were optional with the turbines.  I wonder how many Texas facilities skipped that box on the order sheet.
• "This is Texas, and down here, you're on your own."  Texas has its own power grid (ERCOT) which is separate from either the Eastern or Western grids.  Being isolated helps to protect you when something happens elsewhere.  But when the trouble is at home, then it's tougher to get help from your neighbors (who, like Mexico, were having their own problems at the time).
• Natural gas dependency.  More, even, than most regions, Texas is heavily dependent on natural gas as the "marginal fuel" for making electricity.  Following the latest fad, Texas utilities have cancelled a whole generation of coal-fired power plants.  I have cautioned Minnesota in moving the same direction, as events in the SW so vividly demonstrate. 
• Resilience engineering.  The Texas power pool thought that it had this huge reserve of power, but when problems in the natural gas system spilled over into the electricity sector, the failures began to cascade.  Complex, interdependent systems need extra attention from engineers to ensure that they can withstand such pressures.  (Hat tip to Instapundit, see Popular Mechanics at this link.)
• Finally, I am curious to know what role, if any, the state's wind power portfolio played.  Texas has the nations largest supply of wind turbines and it would be interesting to know whether the fleet helped or hurt the situation.