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A winter storm in Texas brought record low temperatures, snow and rolling blackouts across the state. Millions of Texans are still without power, and some people have questioned why a state that produces the most power in the US is unable to keep the lights on. Misinformation about the blackout has also started to spread online, falsely putting the blame on wind and solar energy. 

Roughly 3 million people in Texas have had to deal with outages since Monday as power generators and natural gas pipes froze, crippling the state’s production capabilities. This led the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, to administer rolling blackouts to avoid a grid failure. 

Here’s what you need to know about the power outages in Texas.

What happened?

This past weekend, a winter storm made its way into Texas, bringing freezing cold to the state. As temperatures began to dip into the teens Monday morning, power plant generators across the state started to freeze and went offline, leading to a significant decrease in energy production. At the same time, demand for power increased as people turned up the thermostat. 

Almost 50% of power generated by Texas comes from natural gas, with the other half divided among coal, wind, nuclear and solar. Because of the cold, however, gas can’t even make its way from the ground through the pipes. ERCOT says 46,000 megawatts were offline as of Wednesday. One megawatt is enough to power roughly 200 homes a year. There are 70 to 80 power plants offline as of Wednesday, out of 680 across the state. Thermal energy — natural gas, coal and nuclear — made up 28,000 of those megawatts while wind and solar made up the other 16,000. 

“The ability for gas generators to produce, particularly at full output, was affected by the freezing impact on the natural gas supply,” Bill Magness, ERCOT president and CEO, said during a livestream Wednesday.  “So getting those resources back is the central solution to getting people their power back.”

The significant drop in power generated led to rolling blackouts across the state as ERCOT tried to keep a balance between the supply and demand in order to prevent a “catastrophic” blackout. This made the outage last much longer than ERCOT anticipated. 

Texas has its own independent power grid and isn’t connected to the Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection grids covering the rest of the country. The state is unable to have power diverted to maintain its supply. 

Some people are blaming wind and solar. What’s the deal?

Confusion over the cause of the blackouts began spreading on social media Tuesday, especially from state government officials. 

“The reason for blackouts is complex, but in summary: Texas took too many lessons from Cali, over-subsidized renewables, & pushed out baseload energy like natural gas,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, tweeted Tuesday. 

A similar sentiment came from fellow GOP Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson who said on Facebook on Tuesday, “Our reliance on renewable energy needs to be revisited IMMEDIATELY.”

But on Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, pointed to freezing natural gas as part of the problem. 

“The reason why power is not available for your viewers is because the power generators froze up and their equipment was incapable of generating power. Then on top of that, the natural gas that flows into those power generators, that is frozen up also,” Abbott told Houston’s ABC-13. 

On Tuesday night, though, Abbott went on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News and gave a different explanation of what happened. 

“Our wind and solar got shut down, and they are collectively 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis,” he told Hannity. “As a result, it shows fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas.” 

According to ERCOT officials, however, the majority of power lost came from thermal energy, which is primarily made up of natural gas, and not wind or solar energy. 

“As of 9 a.m.,” ERCOT said in a press release Wednesday, “approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.” 

When will power come back on? 

ERCOT doesn’t have a specific time when it will be operating at full power, but it’s working on restoring power. However, there’s more to it than just flicking a switch on.

“Now the challenge has been, we get service restored, and then if the grid gets unstable again because of the issues with the weather and keeping the supply and demand imbalance, we’ve had to pull those back, unfortunately,” Magness said Wednesday.

As more electricity returns to homes, there could be continued rolling blackouts for days until expected warmer weather arrives this weekend.