Everyone here knows Texas has its own grid. Almost nobody knows why, and the version people repeat gets the law wrong. The real story involves an operator throwing a switch in the dark in Vernon, Texas, two Fort Worth utilities physically disconnecting themselves in response, and a ninety-year legal strategy a federal judge once called an “electric Alamo.”
It also ends with something you should go check in your own garage.
The Federal Power Act passed on August 26, 1935. It gave federal regulators authority over the transmission of electricity in interstate commerce — and explicitly not over transmission that stays inside one state.
Texas utilities looked at that sentence and decided to stay on the right side of it. Forever.
Here is the part that makes it hard, and it is the piece most retellings miss. You cannot stay intrastate just by refusing to sell power across a state line. In FPC v. Florida Power & Light (1972), the Supreme Court held that the test is physical: follow the flow of electricity, which the Court called an engineering and scientific rather than a legalistic test. Power entering a shared bus merges. If your electrons join a pool and some of that pool leaves the state, you are in interstate commerce whether you meant to be or not.
Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Cudahy later called the strategy an “electric Alamo,” noting that the companies “memorialized the policy of isolation into a written agreement, binding themselves to intrastate operation.”
A correction to something you will read constantly online: people cite a 1992 statute as an “ERCOT fence” that bars federal regulators from taking jurisdiction. I went and read it. That provision is about ratemaking — it says Texas rate methodology governs compensation. The protection that actually matters is a different sentence, in 16 U.S.C. §824(b)(2), which says complying with certain federal orders does not by itself turn a utility into a federally regulated public utility for other purposes.
The sequence is clean, and people mash it together constantly:
ERCOT exists because of a blackout in New York.
And here is what it is. ERCOT describes itself as a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, and says plainly that it “doesn't own the energy generation facilities or transmission and distribution lines.” It is not a market participant. It is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, with oversight from the Legislature.
In the small hours of May 4, 1976, an operator for West Texas Utilities threw a switch at a substation in Vernon, Texas, sending Texas power across the Red River into Altus, Oklahoma.
It was not an accident. It was litigation strategy. West Texas Utilities and its sister company in Oklahoma were both owned by Central and South West Corporation, which wanted federal jurisdiction — access to the national market. A WTU vice president said so on the record years later: “It was a legal strategy to demonstrate that interstate service would have no effect on the electric operation in Texas.”
The response is the part that should interest anyone in Tarrant County. Houston Lighting & Power and the Texas Electric Service Company — the Fort Worth utility, a direct ancestor of today's Oncor — physically disconnected themselves rather than be swept into federal jurisdiction along with the others. They cut the Texas grid in half to avoid it.
How it played out:
And out of that fight came the architecture Texas still runs on. Regulators concluded that direct current ties were different: power over a DC link is converted, scheduled and controllable rather than merged by physics. No shared bus, no commingling, no jurisdiction.
| Connection | Capacity |
|---|---|
| Two DC ties to the Southwest Power Pool (eastern grid) | 820 MW |
| DC tie and a variable frequency transformer to Mexico | 400 MW |
| Total import capability | about 1,220 MW |
Hold onto that number. It matters in a few paragraphs.
“ERCOT covers 90 percent of Texas” is imprecise. It covers about 90 percent of the electric load and roughly 75 percent of the land area. Those are different numbers and the difference is the point.
Not in ERCOT: El Paso, which is on the Western grid. Longview, Marshall and Texarkana. Beaumont, Port Arthur and The Woodlands. Those are all on the Eastern grid.
Fort Worth is in ERCOT, and so are Tarrant and Johnson counties, so Burleson is in it on both sides of the county line.
Let me correct the version you have heard, because almost everyone repeats it wrong.
At about 1:51 in the morning on February 15, 2021, grid frequency hit 59.302 Hz. ERCOT was below the 59.4 Hz threshold for 4 minutes and 23 seconds. Once frequency drops into that band, a nine-minute countdown starts, after which generators automatically disconnect themselves to protect their own equipment and the grid cascades.
The famous figure — 4 minutes and 37 seconds — is not how long the grid was below the line. It is how much time was left on the clock when operators got frequency back up. Four twenty-three plus four thirty-seven is nine minutes exactly.
So “Texas came within four minutes and thirty-seven seconds of collapse” is fair. “The grid was below the line for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds” is wrong, and it is the version in wide circulation.
Had the countdown run out, millions of customers across the ERCOT region would have gone dark, with restoration measured in weeks to months.
You will see 246 and you will see about 700. Both are honest; they answer different questions.
246 is the Texas Department of State Health Services figure — deaths a medical certifier affirmatively attributed to the storm. Of those, 158 were hypothermia and 19 were carbon monoxide poisoning. Eleven were in Tarrant County.
About 700 is an excess-mortality estimate: everyone who died above the number statistically expected that week. It captures the dialysis patient who missed treatment and the heart patient in a forty-degree living room — deaths certified as natural causes that would not have happened that week.
Confirmed attribution versus excess deaths. Neither is a lie.
From the joint federal report published in November 2021, on the causes of generators going offline or failing to start:
| Cause | Share |
|---|---|
| Freezing | 44.2% |
| Fuel problems | 31.4% |
| Mechanical / electrical | about 21% |
| Fuel type | Share of unplanned outages |
|---|---|
| Natural gas | 58% |
| Wind | 27% |
| Coal | 6% |
| Solar | 2% |
| Nuclear | under 1% |
Read that carefully, because both sides misuse it. Wind's 27 percent is its share of outage events, not a statement that wind caused 27 percent of the crisis. In the critical twenty-four hours, analysis by the University of Texas Energy Institute found gas losing roughly three and a half times as much capacity as wind. Wind did underperform. Gas was the dominant failure by a wide margin.
Now bring back that 1,220 MW. ERCOT shed about 20,000 MW of firm load. Every DC tie running flat out in the right direction would have supplied roughly six percent of what got cut. That is what an energy island means in numbers.
SB 3 (2021) requires generators and transmission utilities in ERCOT to weatherize, requires gas supply chain operators to weatherize, and carries penalties up to $1,000,000 per violation. ERCOT has since completed thousands of weatherization inspections across generation and transmission facilities. Honest caveat: current rules allow exceptions for facilities that document compliance efforts and file future plans, and Texas still has no public disclosure of how weatherized gas facilities actually perform in extreme weather.
The Texas Energy Fund — created in 2023 and approved by voters, now about $7.2 billion — has been slower than advertised. Several selected projects withdrew, citing cost and supply chain. Its first financed plants only began coming online in 2026. Real money finally producing megawatts, five years after Uri and well short of the headline. If you want the current project list, the PUCT publishes it.
Do not repeat this one: plenty of explainers still say Texas is implementing a “performance credit mechanism.” The PUCT shelved it unanimously in December 2024, concluding it would not deliver the promised reliability. What did happen is real-time co-optimization, which went live December 5, 2025 — ERCOT's president called it the most substantial change to the market design since 2010.
Winter Storm Fern hit and ERCOT's own post-event report says it plainly: it “did not need to call for conservation, did not issue an Energy Emergency Alert, and there were no systemwide power outages.”
The reason, in large part, is batteries. Texas battery storage capacity expanded enormously between 2023 and 2025, and on one January morning batteries were supplying a meaningful share of the entire grid — thousands of megawatts that simply did not exist during Uri.
Two honest caveats. Fern was far less severe than Uri, and batteries are built for a few hours, not several days. And the new pressure is demand rather than weather: ERCOT's own forecasts show peak demand rising steeply through the end of this decade, driven heavily by data centers.
“In Texas you pick your provider” is something everyone says, and it is not true for everyone. ERCOT administers retail switching for about 8 million premises in competitive choice areas — the large majority of the region, but not all of it. Roughly 15 percent of Texas electricity consumers are served by cooperatives and municipally owned utilities that never entered the competitive market, and those customers cannot shop at all.
If you are in a competitive area, state rules require every plan's Electricity Facts Label to show the average price per kilowatt-hour at three usage levels: 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh a month.
Here is why that matters. A plan with a bill credit — say, $100 off if you use 2,000 kWh — spreads that credit across a bigger denominator at high usage, so the headline rate looks best at the top tier. A household using 1,000 kWh in a mild month gets a very different number. And if a credit has a usage threshold you miss, you can pay far more per kWh than the advertised rate.
Pull twelve months of bills, work out your own average monthly kilowatt-hours, and read the column that matches you. It is ten minutes and it is the single highest-value thing in this post for most people.
This is the one I most want people to check, because the assumption is nearly universal and it is wrong.
A modern gas furnace needs electricity to run. Not for the flame — for everything around it:
Only an old natural-draft, standing-pilot, gravity system produces and distributes any heat with the power out — and most of those still have an electric blower. In a DFW house the realistic exceptions are a standing-pilot wall or floor furnace, a gas log set, or a furnace wired to a generator or battery.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission's current guidance: run a portable generator outside only, at least 20 feet from the house — a porch or carport is not far enough. An average of nearly 100 Americans die every year from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators. Put battery CO alarms on every level and outside sleeping areas.
And have an electrician install a proper transfer switch. Running a cord from a generator into a wall outlet to feed the panel — backfeeding — pushes power back out onto the utility line where crews are working. If a seller tells you a house is “generator ready,” find out whether that means a listed transfer switch or somebody's extension cord.
From the Texas Department of Insurance:
One question worth asking your agent directly: whether the policy pays to repair the pipe itself or only the damage the water caused. TDI does not address that, and the answer varies.
TDI's own pre-freeze list is free and good: wrap pipes in unheated areas including the garage laundry hookup, pull the hoses off the outdoor faucets, open the cabinets under the sinks, let faucets drip from both hot and cold, drain and shut off the sprinkler system — and if you are leaving town before a freeze, shut the water off at the valve and leave the heat on. Their consumer help line is 800-252-3439.
Uri's damage mostly came from plumbing in unconditioned space, which Texas builders used freely because historically we never had to care. Things worth asking about:
A Texas home inspection is a visual, non-invasive inspection with defined limits. An inspector is not required to trace pipe insulation through the whole house or to assess freeze resilience as such. Treat the list above as questions to ask, and some of them as reasons to have a plumber take a separate look.
Because the grid is not an abstraction here. It is a ninety-year-old legal position that produced a specific physical reality — a state that can import about six percent of what it had to cut in its worst week — and that reality shows up in your house as a furnace that stops when the power does and a set of pipes in an attic that nobody insulated.
The history is genuinely a great story. The gas furnace is the part I want you to go check.
To stay outside federal regulation. The Federal Power Act of 1935 gave federal regulators authority over transmission of electricity in interstate commerce and explicitly not over transmission within a single state. Texas utilities organized to stay on the intrastate side of that line. The reason isolation had to be physical rather than contractual is FPC v. Florida Power & Light (1972), where the Supreme Court held the test is to follow the actual flow of electricity - power entering a shared bus merges, so a utility cannot avoid interstate commerce just by declining to sell across state lines. Only synchronous isolation works. FERC still describes ERCOT as outside its jurisdiction because the grid is located solely within Texas and is not synchronously interconnected to the rest of the country.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, formed in 1970 as the Texas regional council of the national reliability body that itself formed in 1968 after the November 1965 Northeast blackout. ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit that says it does not own the generation facilities or the transmission and distribution lines. It is not a market participant and it is not a regulator - it is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas with oversight from the Legislature. ERCOT schedules power flow, settles the wholesale market and administers retail switching. It cannot set or raise your electricity rate.
Closer than most accounts state, and the widely repeated figure is usually described wrong. At about 1:51 a.m. on February 15, 2021, grid frequency fell to 59.302 Hz. ERCOT was below the 59.4 Hz threshold for 4 minutes and 23 seconds. Once frequency enters that band a nine-minute countdown begins, after which generators automatically disconnect to protect themselves and the grid cascades. The famous '4 minutes and 37 seconds' is the time remaining on that countdown when operators recovered frequency, not the duration of the event - 4:23 plus 4:37 is nine minutes. Had it run out, roughly 26 million customers would have lost power with restoration measured in weeks to months.
No. According to the joint federal report, natural gas accounted for 58 percent of unplanned generator outages, derates and failures to start, against 27 percent for wind, 6 percent coal, 2 percent solar and under 1 percent nuclear. In the critical twenty-four hours gas lost roughly three and a half times as much capacity as wind, per University of Texas analysis. Freezing caused 44.2 percent of failures and fuel problems 31.4 percent. A significant feedback loop made it worse: Texas gas production fell by more than half, and 21.5 percent of that decline was caused by the blackouts themselves, because most gas production and processing facilities were not designated critical load and were shed in the rolling outages. Wind did underperform, but thermal generation was the dominant failure.
Almost certainly not, and this assumption is dangerous. A modern gas furnace needs electricity for the circulating blower that moves heated air through the ducts, for the draft inducer fan that pulls air through the combustion chamber, for electronic ignition, and for the control board and thermostat. The Department of Energy identifies electronic ignition as a defining feature of mid- and high-efficiency furnaces, while a continuous pilot light characterizes older low-efficiency units. Only an old natural-draft standing-pilot gravity system can produce and distribute heat without power, and most of those still have electric blowers. Check the data plate on your own furnace - if it requires 115 volts AC, it stops when the power does. Nineteen of the 246 confirmed deaths in February 2021 were carbon monoxide poisoning. Confirm your specific system with a licensed HVAC contractor.
No, and this catches Burleson buyers in particular. ERCOT administers retail switching for about 8 million premises in competitive choice areas - the large majority of the region, but not all of it. Roughly 15 percent of Texas electricity consumers are served by cooperatives and municipally owned utilities that never entered the competitive market. When the Texas Legislature deregulated electricity in 1999 it exempted electric cooperatives and municipally owned systems, because they are owned by their members and customers. United Cooperative Services is headquartered in Burleson and serves all or parts of fourteen counties including Johnson and Tarrant, with more than 110,000 meters, and it has not opted into the competitive market. So whether a Burleson address can shop for electricity depends on the address. Check it at powertochoose.org, or call United Cooperative Services at (817) 447-9292 to confirm.
Usually the resulting water damage, with an important condition. The Texas Department of Insurance says most homeowners policies cover water damage from leaks and broken pipes, but that a policy might not pay for damage caused by frozen pipes if you did not take steps to protect them, such as keeping the heat on. Most policies also pay $500 or more for spoiled food when power fails, often with no deductible - though TDI's condition is that the failure be caused by something the policy covers, which an off-premises outage may not be. A hotel during an outage is generally not covered - TDI's answer is 'probably not,' because loss-of-use coverage usually requires covered physical damage rather than just a blackout. Flood damage is separate and excluded, and flood insurance does not cover burst pipes. Ask your agent specifically whether your policy repairs the pipe itself or only the damage the water caused, and confirm all coverage details with your own carrier.
Looking at a house in Burleson and not sure which utility serves it? Send me the address. I will find out whether it is in a competitive electricity area or on the co-op, and I will flag the freeze-risk items worth asking your inspector about. It takes me a few minutes and it is the kind of thing nobody tells you until February.
Send me an addressChecked September 2026. Where sources disagree I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one. Laws, rates and standards change — verify anything you are relying on with the relevant agency or a licensed professional.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.