(Texas Scorecard) – Even before the statewide blackout in February 2021, life has not been easy for Miriah Sachs.
She has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic condition that has compromised her bones and joints.
“I actually broke my pelvis when I was pregnant with my last baby. So walking is periodically quite difficult for me,” she told Texas Scorecard. “But it also affects the digestive system and the cardiac system.”
In October 2019, Sachs and her husband, Ben, opened a chiropractic clinic in Nebraska. Then came the March 2020 government shutdown orders in response to Sars-CoV-2, also known as the Chinese coronavirus. That forced them to sell the business. Her husband accepted a job offer as a chiropractor in Texas. Sachs and her family moved to Cypress, just north of Houston. “We’ve never been to Texas. It wasn’t on our radar,” Sachs said. “We had no idea what to expect.”
Fast-forward to early 2021. February approached, and the new Texans got word the strongest winter storm in recent state history was coming. Sachs said people panicked. Originally hailing from Montana, Sachs didn’t understand the worry. Neither did her family, who grew up in the northwest. “What’s one day of a winter storm? [In Montana,] we would have went [sic] to school like that,” she said. “We had kind of known that it was going to be a problem. We just really didn’t comprehend how big it was going to be. We had all of our winter gear and stuff. We’re like, ‘We’ll be fine.’ But it was not [fine].”
The storm hit. The Sachs family lost power at around 5:30 pm. Initially, they didn’t worry. “We set up flashlights, and we went to bed. We thought the power would come back on at some point,” she said.
Their power was off for five days. This left Miriah, Ben Sachs, and their kids, 11 and 5 at the time, vulnerable to freezing temperatures. “We ended up putting Styrofoam in our master bedroom window, and then like all camping in there together,” Miriah Sachs said. “Even with the gas fireplace, we could never get the house above 40 degrees for those five days.” The entire family camped together in the master bedroom. “We’re all in hats and gloves and snow pants, all in one bed and sleeping bags trying to stay warm for five days.”
What happened to the Sachs happened to many Texans. But what was the cause? Brent Bennet of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) said it was a combination of too much unreliable energy in the state’s electric portfolio and not enough reliable energy. “Over the past decade, from 2011 to 2021, [energy] demand had grown quite a bit, to the tune of about 20 percent to 30 percent. We hadn’t built any new gas or coal generation. All the growth from that period of time was in wind and solar for the most part,” he told Texas Scorecard. The winter storm hit wind generation hard. “We had wind turbines that iced over and couldn’t be used. Also, there was just no wind for most of the storm,” Bennett explained. Solar was of no help because the panels were covered in snow. Natural gas, a reliable energy source, was also hit. “The gas problems were a combination of weatherization and fuel supply,” Bennett explained.
Bill Peacock, a public policy specialist, agreed. “The reason we had a blackout was because generators invested $66 billion in building out renewable energy plants in Texas over the course of about 15 years,” he said. “The reason they did that was because they were chasing about $22 billion in subsidies for renewable energy.”
He continued, “If instead, they had invested in natural gas plants and coal plants, we either wouldn’t have had a blackout, or it would have just been 30-minute rolling blackouts, which is how the system is designed to work,” he said. “Nobody runs out of water. Nobody gets cold. Nobody freezes. People don’t die.”
Thankfully, death did not visit the Sachs, but water and freezing temperatures did. The power outages hit them in more ways than one. They weren’t just sitting in the cold and dark without the internet.
Their food needs were impacted. Restaurants were closed. Ben Sachs ventured to the nearest Kroger. All he managed to return with were buns and peanut butter, which the family turned into peanut butter sandwiches. “We ate that for at least four of those days,” Miriah Sachs said.
Her health was impacted. She was used to below-50 temperatures, but the humidity in the Houston area made the cold feel different. “There’s something so much colder about wet cold,” Sachs said. “This wet icy feeling was just absolutely unbearable.” It also triggered her Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. “I was in pain for weeks afterward. It was one of the worst flares that I’ve experienced.” Ben Sachs, a former Boy Scout, tried to build a fire in the yard. He couldn’t. Nothing would burn because of how wet everything was.
Things would soon get wetter. When the power went out on day one, Sachs said the water was cut off in their neighborhood. “I’m a little fuzzy on the details here, but our neighborhood—or our like section of subdivision—we lost power to the water distribution area … There was no water coming to the house,” she recalled. At the time, the Sachs didn’t realize they too should shut off the water valve to their home outside. They only shut off the valve in their garage. In the meantime, ice was collecting in their water heater. It was a setup for an even larger disaster when the water came back on and flushed into the house’s pipes full force. “The pipe broke right next to where it comes out of the water heater,” she recalled. Their water heater is located in their attic. “[Water] came through the attic floor, through the second-floor bathroom, my daughter’s closet, and through the kitchen ceiling … and flooded our whole downstairs.” Since their home was a rental, the Sachs did not have to bear the entire weight of repair costs.
The power outage lasted five days. The consequences of the power outage led to the Sachs going nine days without water, and nine weeks with no kitchen ceiling. They gathered snow to flush their toilets.
Could This Have Been Avoided?
Was there a pathway where the Sachs family could have avoided all of this? According to Jason Isaac, who is also with TPPF, there was a way to avoid going days without power. He and Brent Bennett work together on TPPF’s project, Life: Powered. “Our estimates show, and our research shows, that if everything available was online on the thermal fleet, natural gas wasn’t tripping offline because of massive increases in demands, or the fact that ERCOT turned the power off in the Permian Basin …, there still would have been outages,” he said. “It would have been rolling outages, and it would have been temporary for hours, not days.”
Bennett explained that if you were to go back in time and fix all the weatherization issues, if there had been wind during the storm and no frozen natural gas issues, there still would have been roughly 24 hours of no power. “That still shows you that we had a significant capacity shortage during the storm,” Bennett said. “We’ve had, just in the last few years, dramatic increases in winter demand and no corresponding increase in gas or coal capacity.”
Increasing Unreliability
Can the Sachs family have faith that Texas has improved itself since 2021? Not according to Bennett. “Even as we fix all the weatherization problems, the capacity problem has gotten worse,” he said. “If that storm were to happen again, we might not see quite as bad of outages, but we would get more than you would expect. The problem is far from fixed.”
Data from the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) show that lessons weren’t learned as late as January 2024. At that time, more than 42,000 megawatts of new power generation were announced for the next few years. More than 37,000 of that new power generation is from wind, solar, and power storage. The rest is natural gas at close to 3,800 megawatts.
Isaac agreed this information shows what we haven’t learned since February 2021. Over time, we’ve lost reliable energy. “Peak thermal generation was in 2016. Since then, we’ve lost three gigawatts. We’re actually shedding reliable electric generation,” he said. “We’ve grown 23 gigawatts of wind, 20 gigawatts of solar. That’s 43 gigawatts of unreliable variable sources.”
Miriah Sachs isn’t cheering about that. “I’m not a big fan of solar or wind. And that does seem to be where they’re focusing, doesn’t it?” she said.
How do we turn the tide towards reliable energy? “The first thing we can do is eliminate all subsidies for renewable energy in the State of Texas,” Peacock said.
But what about clean air and clean water? This is often the repeated phrase of unreliable energy pushers, framing wind and solar as “green” or “clean” energy and that it’s needed because of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Isaac called this climate Kool-Aid.
“There’s more and more science, and more and more research, coming out [and] showing that man’s contributions of CO2 emissions over the last 200 years have had no impact on temperature, have had no impact on a changing climate,” he said. “Actually, the CO2 emissions are increasing because of the warming. It’s not the other way around. That’s purely driven by the sun. I hope people start to wake up and realize that decarbonization is the climate cult’s Kool-Aid.”
And for those worried about coal being dirty, Isaac said new technology has fixed that. “We can produce and utilize coal; we do it better than anywhere else in[sic] the planet because of our pollution control technology. It’s absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, you’ve had people on the natural gas side that have demonized coal for CO2 emissions, which is just absolutely absurd,” he said. “We need more coal. We need more natural gas. We need more nuclear.”
With the memory of the February 2021 blackouts fresh in her mind, Sachs wants a power grid she can rely on. “I find it really infuriating, actually, to be told that I can’t keep my house cool, or I’m going to lose power in the super hot parts of the summer. Why can we not sustain that?” she asked. “Texas should be known for innovation and energy. We actually live like five miles from the energy corridor. We can do better, and we should.”
Concern about hot weather is justified, but Life: Powered found that when it comes to energy reliability issues, winter is the new summer. “We’re losing reliable thermal generation, our peak winter demand has grown significantly, and all we’re doing is putting things on the grid that don’t work,” Isaac said.
“Winter demand is growing rapidly in Texas, even faster than summer demand, as newer homes are usually equipped with heat pumps that are efficient in mild weather but become electricity hogs when the temperature drops below freezing,” Brent Bennett wrote in January 2024. “Given that most of what is being built right now in ERCOT is solar, which contributes almost nothing during winter peaks, it is likely that we will see an all-time net load record set in the winter sometime soon. At that point, winter will supersede summer for having the highest risk of electric grid outages, even if all the winterization and other measures taken after Winter Storm Uri work perfectly. And given that winter demand is rising faster than summer demand, we can say that winter is officially becoming the new summer.”
After what Texas went through in 2021, after what her family went through, Sachs wants change to happen. “If we don’t learn from our mistakes, what are we doing?” she asked. “What our family went through was not fun. But we had resources and knowledge in order to sustain ourselves through that. Not everyone does. We really ought to do better. There are so many citizens who are much more vulnerable than my family.”
Texas may not have learned anything from February 2021. The Sachs did. “We keep firewood now … We’ve got some emergency food storage, and we have a way to cook now and dry wood. That kind of stuff,” she said. However, there are limits to how much they can prepare on their own. “We would love to have a generator or something, but that’s not in our budget.”
If Texas’ overreliance on unreliable energy continues, it could drive people away. That’s what Miriah Sachs witnessed during the 2021 storm. “One of our direct neighbors—he came here after Katrina—he was like, ‘I’m gonna move back … This is awful.’”
Part two of this series will examine how one proposal to Texas’ power problem isn’t a solution at all.
