Five years ago, Texas froze. Three storms, including Winter Storm Uri, walloped the state with ice and grid failure that left millions without power. Hundreds of people died. In the months that followed, state officials reckoned with how to prevent another disaster, and the U.S. public got a crash course on ERCOT and the pressures of managing a largely deregulated grid, isolated from the rest of the country.
This week, another storm looms. Winter Storm Fern is forecasted to bring freezing temperatures to much of the U.S. over the weekend, including Texas. Power prices spiked in anticipation of supply constraints. On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright requested that grid operators make backup generation available.
But this time around, ERCOT maintains that Texas will have sufficient power capacity to meet the demand. The expectation is that Fern will be shorter and less severe than Uri — less than three days of freezing temperatures versus the nearly six days that parts of the state endured in 2021.
That said, all eyes are on the state’s utilities and energy regulators, who spent the last half decade addressing the weaknesses that Uri revealed. That’s according to Julie Caruthers Parsley, the CEO of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative, speaking to an audience of electricity sector executives at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston on Thursday.
Caruthers Parsley said that in 2021, the cooperative’s software couldn’t handle ERCOT’s instructions to institute rolling blackouts across a third of its load. Instead, they did it manually, with operators physically flipping switches to turn the power off and on where needed. In the years since, Pedernales has updated and stress-tested the systems they would need if disaster strikes again.
The pressure is even higher on larger utilities, like CenterPoint Energy, which has over 7 million customers and serves Houston. Jason Ryan, the utility’s executive VP, said on the same panel that CenterPoint did more work on resilience in 2025 than it did in the previous seven years combined. At the same time, outage minutes in Houston have gone down, hovering around 100 million minutes in the last year. (The conference was co-hosted by Latitude Media and the Ad Hoc Group; CenterPoint was the utility host sponsor.)
Across the state, batteries have become a key part of resilience. The state has nearly 10 times as much battery capacity on the grid today as it did during Uri. And former Texas PUC commissioner Will McAdams said on the latest episode of The Energy Capital Podcast that dispatchable battery capacity can transform how the energy system reacts to storms like Fern. They can halt the frequency freefall, stabilize the system, and buy time for other generation to respond: “That doesn’t mean it solves everything, but it changes the dynamics dramatically.”
But Ryan said the work is far from done: “We still haven’t, I don’t think, even begun to tap the potential for how technology can help us prepare and respond to these events. I think we’re just starting to figure that out further.” These technologies include artificial intelligence-powered weather forecasting and demand response tools, which have in recent years attracted attention from both investors and even typically cautious and slow-moving utilities.
There are other gaps, as well. Ryan said the large number of energy companies in Texas — and the divide between retail providers, utilities, and other load-serving entities — makes it challenging to communicate to customers the severity of a storm like Fern.
“When there’s a large resilience event and I get asked [why I’m] not communicating with the end use customer, the way our market was set up, I don’t even know who they are,” Ryan said. “The communication can be just as bad from an experience perspective as bad infrastructure.”
This ultimately comes down to the nature of Texas’ deregulated market. As established by the state legislature in 1999, the state separates power generation, transmission, and retail sales in a bid for lower prices. While deregulation has its perks — Texas leads the nation in building renewables, and has a much faster interconnection process than most other parts of the U.S. — the system can complicate resilience efforts.
One counter-example: Entergy’s service area includes parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but operates as a vertically integrated, regulated utility, unlike the majority of Texas. Eli Viamontes, president and CEO of Entergy Texas, argued that the utility’s setup allowed it to communicate better with customers during Uri, and also has benefits like supply chain control.
“Industry knows what it takes to build a resilient system,” he said. The question is, “what are the regulatory mechanisms, what’s the framework that helps sustain a level of investment that is needed for a prolonged period of time?”
There’s a lot of urgency to answer those questions, as extreme weather events become more frequent and destructive due to climate change. There are early efforts to develop a system for balancing costs and benefits — including a report released last July from the Smart Electric Power Alliance and the climate resilience planning platform Rhizome — but it’s early days. There is a $500 billion capital gap in terms of what’s needed to harden generation, transmission, and distribution systems to climate change, that report found.
But utilities need to justify their investments to regulators. So even when a dollar of investment can save many dollars in emergency response, it can still be a challenge.
There’s a tendency to focus on the cost of resiliency, Viamontes said, rather than on the cost of inaction: “the costs of not doing it right.”
“It is a no regrets [call] to invest in a long-term sustainable resiliency program that brings your existing infrastructure up to the latest standards,” he said.
