Texas Was 4 Minutes From Total Blackout | The 2021 Grid Collapse Explained

In February 2021, the Texas power grid came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of total collapse. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power in record cold, and at least 246 people died. How did the energy capital of America end up freezing in the dark? We go through what happened: Texas's island grid, the 1:20 a.m. emergency, frozen power plants, the gas supply "death spiral", the $9,000 power prices, and the warnings that were ignored. Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:12 The island grid 2:38 The storm arrives 3:48 Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds 6:37 Why everything froze 9:23 Life without power 10:39 Nine thousand dollars 11:42 We were warned 12:33 Is it fixed? Watch next: How Spain and Portugal Lost Power in 5 Seconds (see the channel's videos) Sources FERC, NERC and Regional Entity Staff: February 2021 Cold Weather Outages in Texas and the South Central United States (final report, November 2021) FERC press release: https://ferc.gov/news-events/news/final-re... S&P Global, ERCOT lost almost half of generation capacity in storm: https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insight... Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_p... Charts marked "illustrative" show the shape of an event, not measured data. Narration is an AI-generated voice; the script is researched and written for this channel. Failure Mode: how the systems that run the world work, and how they fail. #texas #blackout #powergrid