Camilla Swindle, 19, sits in a shopping cart as she and her boyfriend wait in a long line to enter a grocery store in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, Feb.
16, 2021, as people stock up ahead of another expected storm. Huge winter storms have plunged large parts of the central and southern United States into an energy crisis this week as frigid blasts of Arctic weather crippled electric grids and left millions of Americans without power amid dangerously cold temperatures.
In ERCOT's seasonal assessment of power supply and demand, officials expected peak electricity demand to reach 67,398 megawatts, based on peak demands for the winters of 2007 through 2021. They said including 2021 in their average assessment increased the peak demand forecast, but it is still far short of the 77,000 megawatts of demand seen during the 2021 freeze.
Public Utility Commission Chairman Peter Lake has consistently said outages of that magnitude are unlikely to happen again after his agency and ERCOT instituted new weatherization rules aimed at keep generation online in freezing and extreme conditions. Lake and new ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. about winter preparedness.
The Farmer's Almanac, which predicted the 2021 freeze, forecasts this winter will be colder than normal in the Texas and Oklahoma region. The coldest periods should be in early to mid-January and early to -mid February, it said. Precipitation will be below average, but snowfall will be above average in the north, with the best chances for snow in mid- to late January and early February.
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