After a cold snap in 1989, power generators in Texas received recommendations for protecting their plants in winter. A federal report on the next freeze, in 2011, found: “These recommendations were not mandatory, and over the course of time implementation lapsed.” It added: “Many of the generators that experienced outages in 1989 failed again in 2011.”
In February 2021 it happened a third time. An official of ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, said winter guidelines were still voluntary: “There aren’t regulatory penalties at the current time.” The final federal report called the event “the largest manually controlled load shedding event in U.S. history.” Freezing problems caused 44.2 percent of the unplanned outages, reductions and failures to start at power plants.