Some People Are Leaving Texas Over the Unreliable Grid, Power Outages
Ty Joerger, 25, was a Texan through and through.
The multimedia producer was born in Houston, lived in San Antonio as a child, and grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He hadn’t seriously considered living anywhere else.
Two hundred forty-six people died amid the power outages from conditions including hypothermia and carbon-monoxide poisoning, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported.
Joerger — who at the time was living in North Richland Hills, a large suburb of Fort Worth — went without running water for a week, boiling snow for drinking and cooking, he said.
Courtesy of Ty Joerger
Joerger’s disenchantment with his home state was already mounting. He was turned off by its anti-LGBTQ+ climate and recurring mass shootings. What he saw as Texas’ failure to reliably deliver electricity to its millions of residents during cold snaps or heat waves was the last straw: In 2022, he and his partner moved to Seattle, attracted by the prospect of a politically and socially progressive environment with favorable weather.
“I don’t want to deal with 110 degrees outside and having to worry if my air conditioning is going to turn off all of a sudden or if my pets are going to overheat,” Joerger told Business Insider.
With the Farmers’ Almanac forecasting an “unseasonably” cold winter for Texas throughout January and February, some residents worry about the possibility of another grid-threatening event.
Even if the state manages to avoid another “snowmageddon,” concerns persist about another scorching summer. As the climate crisis intensifies weather extremes, Texans have grown frustrated with what they see as government inaction and failing infrastructure — and it’s partially motivating some, including Joerger, to pack up their things and leave.
Texas’ power grid is complex — and struggling
The contiguous US is divided into three energy-grid systems: the Eastern, Western, and Texas interconnections. Texas’ grid operates independently under the management of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT, a nonprofit, membership-based corporation established in 1970, is governed by a board of directors and overseen by both the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature.
As of 2023, it oversaw electricity distribution to more than 26 million customers in Texas, covering about 90% of the state’s electric demand, according to the Texas comptroller. As Texas’ population grows, demand is straining the system.
ERCOT appears to be trying to serve its customers better. In November, The Texas Tribute reported that ERCOT’s budget would increase 40% in 2024, adding almost $119 million to its budget of $287 million. (The funds are set to be generated through fees imposed on businesses supplying electricity to consumers.) The council said it needed the extra funding to comply with new regulations, grow its workforce, and handle legal challenges, the Tribune reported.
“The Texas grid is more complex, dynamic, and diverse than ever before, and the pace of growth and change is accelerating,” ERCOT’s lawyers wrote to state legislators, according to the Tribune.
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ERCOT said in November that there’s a 20% chance of going into emergency operations if a bad winter storm hits.
Ed Hirs, an energy-market expert and lecturer at the University of Houston, told the Tribune that given the grid’s record high demand over the summer — which threatened the entire system once again — and its aging condition, the 20% chance should not be tolerated.
“We should not be accepting this,” he said. “This is not what we pay them for.”
Power unreliability is one factor driving Texans away
Following the 2021 storm, Joerger had hoped that the state would act fast to significantly improve the grid.
By summer 2022, he said, not much had appeared to change from a customer perspective.
“I can’t count the number of days this past summer where ERCOT warned about power usage since they couldn’t handle the output,” Joerger said.
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James McClure, a fifth-generation Texan who lives in Austin, told BI that he’s not sticking around to see if ERCOT improved.
McClure and his wife, originally from “Southern California by way of Indiana,” have been planning to leave Texas for over a year, he said.
“Two almost-collapses of the power grid in the last two years and the Legislature’s inability to do anything about it doesn’t fill me with confidence,” McClure told BI. “The growing number of over-100-degree days in the summer doesn’t help, either.”
After considering states such as North Carolina and Connecticut, the couple recently purchased a home in Wisconsin and plan to move there in 2024.
“I’m happy to trade a lot more chilly days where we can bundle up over the hundred degrees we had in Austin,” he said. “Neither are fun to be out and about, but we can still go for a walk in chilly and bundled-up weather — where we just can’t in too-hot-to-handle weather.”
