The mass power outage is a horrific event causing needless suffering. Just like with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey we need to remove politics from the aftermath and focus more on learning lessons. However, unlike Harvey, this event was foreseeable. Locally we are having conditions similar to the 1989 and 1983 cold snaps, and ERCOT ordered rolling blackouts in February 2011. So, unlike Harvey, some degree of accountability is appropriate. Specifically, this looks like unaccountable bureaucrats failed to act in the interest of the public.
What Happened?
Simply put, demand exceeded supply, and in order to protect the gird ERCOT had to order rolling blackouts. Texas’ energy grid is, by choice, mostly independent with few connections to adjacent grids. This mostly independent status is a double edged. We both have little capacity to share with adjacent grids in time of crisis, and have little capacity to receive help from adjacent grins when we are in crisis.
This mostly independent status also lets us look at adjacent grids for performance comparison. Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) serves a sliver of east Texas, and while they had rolling blackouts, they largely recovered by Tuesday night. El Paso is in the Western Electricity Coordinating Counsel and they had no outages. The panhandle is in the Southwest Power Pool, and they also had rolling blackouts, but downgraded the alert at 12:31 PM CST on Tuesday.
In short, the grid failed not only on an absolute scale, but also compared to the adjacent energy grids.
How did it happen?
We had a systemic failure. The image below is a snapshot of generation facilities and their failures. Note that the failures exist regardless of the generation type.
While many people are trying to blame green energy the green portion of the grid is so small that it isn’t a major player in the current fiasco. The images below show two snapshots from today (February 17, 2021) noting the amount of green and thermal energy production. Green energy is neither the cause nor the solution to our current crisis.
The systemic failure has many causes. A major cause is generation facilities, by choice, do not operate at full capacity in the winter. They are allowed to be in a state where they cannot readily come online in crisis since they are not appropriately winterized for quick operation in time of crisis. Another part of the problem is natural gas pipelines have frozen making supply an issue. Yes, windmills froze over and this lowered generation. All of these are preventable causes and the result of lack of preparation and relaguatory choice. Unaccountable bureaucrats brought us here. Which brings us to the question of who are the decision makers?
The responsible entities
Power grid management has many layers. At the top is the Railroad Commission of Texas (elected) and the Public Utility Commission of Texas (appointed.) According to the Railroad Commission web page:
The Railroad Commission of Texas (Commission) is the state agency with primary regulatory jurisdiction over the oil and natural gas industry, pipeline transporters, natural gas and hazardous liquid pipeline industry, natural gas utilities, the LP-gas industry, and coal and uranium surface mining operations. The Commission exists under provisions of the Texas Constitution and exercises its statutory responsibilities under state and federal laws for regulation and enforcement of the state’s energy industries. The Commission also has regulatory and enforcement responsibilities under federal law including the Surface Coal Mining Control and Reclamation Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Pipeline Safety Acts, Resource Conservation Recovery Act, and Clean Water Act.
While the Commissioners are elected the rest of the Commission is not. Unaccountable bureaucrats.
According to the Public Utility Commission of Texas webpage:
The Public Utility Commission of Texas regulates the state’s electric, telecommunication, and water and sewer utilities, implements respective legislation, and offers customer assistance in resolving consumer complaints…. The PUC continues to perform its traditional regulatory function for electric transmission and distribution utilities across the state. Additionally, while integrated electric utilities outside of the ERCOT power grid remain fully regulated by the PUC, the PUC is increasingly involved in multi-state efforts to implement wholesale electric competitive market structures and transmission planning in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) areas.
It’s noteworthy the PUC itself notes “the ERCOT power grid remain[s] fully regulated by the PUC.” Another layer of unaccountable bureaucrats.
ERCOT
ERCOT is supposed to ensure reliability, but they have a different function. According to their webpage ERCOT, “Manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers.” To use an airport analogy ERCOT would be the air traffic control tower directing traffic and the individual energy generators would be the airplanes. As the control tower, ERCOT, has to operate by the PUC’s rules and dictate to the individual generators via delivery companies like Centerpoint. A third layer of unaccountable bureaucrats.
Lastly we have the individual generators. These are independent electricity generation companies.
What to look for at each layer after the fact
To understand what went wrong and how to prevent a repeat we have to look for what went wrong at each layer and what changes need to occur at each layer to prevent a repeat.
Railroad Commission and PUC
To begin with, Jim Wright is newly elected and has not been in office long enough to bear any responsibility for what occurred. He should get a pass by virtue of his short tenure. Chairwoman Craddick has been in office since 2012 – right after the last winter rolling blackout event – and Commissioner Christian has been in office since 2016. According to the Railroad Commission webpage Commissioner Christian also was:
appointed by Governor Greg Abbott to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) as the Official Representative of Texas. The IOGCC is one of the oldest and largest interstate compacts in the nation, formed over 80 years ago when several states joined together to resolve common issues in the industry without federal intervention.
These are statewide elected officials, and with the regulatory oversight responsibility the buck stops with them for the disaster that occurred. What to look for is what happened to the actual infrastructure that brings natural gas to the generation facilities, and how can this be corrected for a future event.
Public Utility Commission
The PUC commissioners are appointed by Governor Abbott to six year terms. They have recently ordered ERCOT to retroactively raise rates in response to scarcity. They also “perform its traditional regulatory function for electric transmission and distribution utilities across the state.” Look for an explanation on why generators were allowed to operate in a manner that did not allow for them to rapidly come on line in a crisis. Also, look for how they justify retroactively raising prices – an artifact of their unaccountability and poor regulatory choices. This is going to cause electric retail companies to go belly up, and will forcibly transfer people to providers of last resort with severely elevated rates. Be on the lookout for if your provider goes out of business or offers you an opportunity to break your contract.
ERCOT
ERCOT is subject to the regulation from the PUC, but also deserves scrutiny. Specifically, how did ERCOT select who was subject to the rolling blackouts? Was it proportionally distributed across the state? While elected officials may try to blame ERCOT, they are a flow management entity. They need scrutiny about how the blackouts were handled, but not for why they occurred.
While the Railroad Commissioners are elected, the rest of the commission, PUC, and ERCOT are all unaccountable bureaucrats. The lack of accountability is a significant reason the disaster happened and needs to be addressed to prevent next time.
Preventing Next Time
This was entirely foreseeable and preventable, but how do we prevent next time? For starters take politics out of the equation. Green energy isn’t the cause or solution. Unlike summertime power usage, wintertime power need surges are not amenable to green energy solutions. In the winter power usage increases at night when the temperature is colder, but people have not gone to bed. This means solar power generation is zero at the time of greatest need. Also, bitter cold is the result of high pressure, and high pressure systems are noteworthy for their lack of wind. Radiational cooling is most effective in calm winds. Wind turbines are not going to be effective.
Cold snaps like this aren’t a surprise. We had many days reliable notice from all the weather models that an Arctic outbreak was going to happen. Better regulation (or a legislative mandate) requiring facilities that have capacity reduced ir shut down for the winter can be made operational in 72 hours. We also need to copy what happens to pipelines farther north and how they prevent freezing pipelines.
Lastly we need to make sure that power is conserved as best as possible. Toyota Center, as well as a significant portion of downtown, still had power on the 16th while the crisis was raging. Local governments need to make sure that residential consumers are prioritized over commercial customers in time of crisis. In Harris County this falls squarely on the County Judge and mayor of Houston. A measure needs to be taken to City Council to ensure that residential customers are prioritized and divert city personnel to make sure this is enforced as necessary.
This is entirely possible; my office is in a Boxer property and Boxer turned off power and water and we are not allowed into our building until Monday. Some businesses are being responsible members of society. The City and County need to step in to ensure that the irresponsible businesses also step up. This needs to be done on an individual business by business level rather than by grid action so gas stations, grocery stores, etc are able to continue operating and warming centers remain open.
The local executives were quick to issue orders because of Covid after a state of emergency was declared. Governor Abbott was proactive and declared an emergency on February 12. Where was Judge Hidalgo’s order or Mayor Turner’s order? This would have prevented things like Toyota Center from wasting scarce electricity. It’s too late now, but in the next energy crisis the local leaders stepping up as soon as the emergency order is issued will go a long way towards limiting electricity waste.
The legislature is in session and can start hearings, but it’s going to take some time to get to the bottom and implement the best solution package. This is something that Abbott should declare up front that he wants addressed in a special session. That way the legislature has undivided attention on enacting the best solution package.
Political Fallout
In a preventable disaster of this magnitude the public is going to want accountability. While it’s not fair, the buck stops with those in charge. Both Abbott and the Railroad Commission are going to suffer some public backlash and need to act to show they share the outrage the public has over this disaster. To that end, Abbott needs to sack the three public utility commissioners. They are unaccountable bureaucrats that all too often side against the public. They bear a significant amount of responsibility for the disaster and sacking the commissioners is a good starting point for Abbott to show he hears the public outrage.
With the Railorad Commission we actually have some degree of control at the ballot box. Commissioner Chirstian was especially well positioned to prevent the pipeline issues given his position on the Railroad Commission as well as his appointment to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. He needs to step up to the plate, accept responsibility for the failure, and explain what is going to happen with both entities he is involved with to make sure we never have a repeat. If he doesn’t, we need to make sure he loses his next primary as both an accountability measure as well as making sure we hold the seat in the future.
I am sitting here again without lights. I am very pissed off and I am going to change the way I vote over this.. completely preventable.
Assuming I heard the news today (safe and warm in California)both the head and the assistant head of the organization that runs the Texas power system live OUTSIDE of Texas. Why should they give a shit what happens there? They are appointed by the governor if I recall the news piece correctly.
You are correct in that the Chair and Vice chair or ERCOT do not live in Texas.
You are incorrect about their appointment by the Governor. ERCOT is a completely private organization which is comprised of the Power Generation companies in Texas. The Governor has nothing to do do with the ERCOT organization or the people who run it.
Coal would not have had the same problems because the fuel source is usually stockpiled on site. The switch from Coal to natural gas to meet Federal clean air standards played a big role in this crisis.
https://deancook.net/2021/02/17/the-environmentalist-empire-is-striking-back-blame-another-energy-source-texas-was-pushed-onto-for-the-failure-of-wind/
“Third, some natural gas plants may not have been able to get adequate supply of gas to be converted into electricity, Cohan said. Unlike a coal plant that has an ready stockpile, natural gas plants don’t store as much on site, meaning any disruption at the supply source will lead to a disruption in turning on the lights.” (Emphasis added.) (https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/texas-weather-power-outage-rolling-blackouts-leave-millions-dark/6764764002/ )
Yes, spot on. Coal would have at a minimum lessened the impact.
One thing to note, though, for future prevention is at least one coal facility flooded in Harvey.
When we are correcting the problems we need to make sure coal is physically protected when stored.
Bob the board selects and votes for their members. As always, rigging the markets end in disaster. The windmills and solar panels are subsidized. Besides government injection of capital there are carbons offsets that tech and industry pay to claim how green they are.
Subsidizing things leads to increases in those getting subsidized. Meanwhile gas, nuclear and coal are regulated out the wazzoo. Thermal energy based plants can’t compete and are forced to close as more ‘renewables’ come on line. People covering their roofs with solar my be denying fossil fuel plants revenue but they are paying dearly for it. Show me the guy that spent $30k for solar panels and I’ll show you a guy that will never see the savings.
Wind and solar contribute about 25% of or power on their best days. In the last four years we have shut down 11mw of thermal energy production (mostly coal). Having 24% of the mix fail starting last Friday in west Texas is the ultimate own goal.
On the plus side, my Generac generator was installed 9 days before the first ice and has run parts of every day except today since. So far.
Look up Chuck Devore, a former Ca. rep. that left for Texas. His analysis appears spot on.
I’m not defending another layer of bureaucracy. But PUC did warn in January 2019 about the shrinking of ERCOT’s grid reserve margin. Did Texas get any bump from the Wind Production Tax Credit? Ha ha. Source: Alex Epstein, http://www.energytalkingpoints.com
Who is responsible for requiring ERCOT to have sufficient reserves?
I don’t know where the line between PUC and Railroad Commission lies, but one of the two should have acted on the information.
The regulatory requirement may not be applicable in the summer since they can’t compel businesses to build new power generation sources, but one or both should have acted to make sure winter capacity would have been available in an energy surge event.
According to ERCOT, wind energy generation accounts for 23% of the total generating capacity in Texas. That is hardly an insignificant portion. The reason the wind numbers are so low in the real time readout you showed is that the windmills were also not winterized and they froze up also. The difference is that it’s a lot easier to “unfreeze” a large natural gas plant than it is to visit hundreds of windmills in the middle of nowhere to get them started again.
Nevertheless, I largely agree with you on the point that this isn’t a failure of “green energy” but rather a failure of management. And while it’s interesting to ask the question: “What idiot decided that giving control of the Texas Power grid to an industry lobbying group was a good idea?” A better question to ask at this point is: ” How do we reform and streamline the system in order to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again?”
Accountability going forward is an excellent, much to be desired outcome. But, when we talk about accountability looking back, it feels a lot more like a desire for punishment and retribution. If laws were broken, then we should absolutely look to charge individuals with crimes. Otherwise let’s move on and fix the problem.
ERCOT showed forecasted wind power at 10% of demand. During Winter, wind power cannot make up as large a portion of supply as in the Summer, because the wind just doesn’t blow as hard in Winter. During Summer, wind can be 40% or more of Texas power mix. At the beginning of the week, ERCOTS website showed forecast wind power at 5 to 6GW, and the actual capacity ended up at 2.6GW. Thermal plants were 30GW below forecast, including 1.3GW down at the South Texas Project, where Unit 1 tripped when a feedwater pressure sensor froze, bringing down on reactor. I was tracking this a lot, as we only lost power for a couple of hours during the week.
The coal power plants that have shut down recently did so because they couldn’t compete with natural gas on a cost basis, even with lignite mines adjacent to the plants. There was no nefarious regulation that did them in, it was all economics. The 3 Luminant plants closing in East Texas was a good thing, as they were very inefficient and very polluting.
It is nearly impossible to unfreeze a gas power plant quickly, as evidenced by the past week, where it took days to get that done.
ERCOT is not “an industry lobbying group”, it is the grid operator for Texas, tasked with balancing power supply and demand, which is what it did this week. There was lots of demand, and not much supply. ERCOT cannot force power generators to do anything. It has no regulatory powers or ability to levy punishments.
We need to be careful about just shutting down electricity to Downtown buildings. Many of them have the central data centers for businesses, and shutting down power would cause a great deal of problems for those businesses.
I am skeptical that much, if anything , will change. The morons in charge of our State government are incapable of making a decision that might cost a donor even a fraction of a cent in profits. As far as I can tell, the elected officials in Austin don’t give a single crap about the people of this state.
ERCOT is a non-profit association which is mostly composed of the power generation companies which it represents. Please note, in the end, ERCOT represents the power generation companies, because that’s who pays their bills.
You can call them a grid operator, a lobbying group or a canasta club for all of me. The reality is that ERCOT can’t be trusted to do their job, if their job is to ride herd on the companies that pay their salaries. I’m also extremely suspicious of the backgrounds on many of the members of ERCOT management.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of the track record of the State government in regulating the industry. The PUC is a joke, and the Legislature has done a pitiful job of addressing chronic problems.
The 23% is accurate as a general proposition, but not in a winter weather situation for the reasons indicated in the post. I went back and looked at daily values for January and February 2020. Here’s what they showed
(Note, if you look it up on the excel spreadsheet they provide the summary value and the daily average are slightly different.)
January – Wind summary value 25.8%, Daily Average 23.7%, Low daily value 7.3%, six days below 15%
February – Wind summary value 25.7%, Daily Average 28.5%, Low daily value 10.1%, two days below 15%
There’s no reason to disbelieve the 10% forecast before the icing knocked some of the generators offline because that’s consistent with January and February nadirs.
I’m sorry Greg, but the numbers you quote seem to contradict your words. According to your numbers, Last year during January and February we got an average of roughly 25% of our electricity from wind. Yes there were some days where the share dropped – 13% of the days to be exact.
The bigger question is why are the windmills not available in cold weather? Did the utilities just buy cheap windmills? Did they not take the prescribed steps to winterize them?
Look, I don’t have an inherent objection to wind energy, or solar energy, or nuclear energy, or coal, or oil, or natural gas. In my world there’s room for everybody.
I do however, take extreme exception, to some yahoo mismanaging to electrical grid and causing widespread disaster and death. I want to know who was responsible, and I want them to not be part of the system anymore. I’ll leave it up to smarter, wiser people to decide about prosecutions and such. I simply want to insure that moving forward we have reliable management of both the power plants and the distribution.
The piece that you’re missing is the days the wind turbine power dropped are because of the meteorological conditions. The cut-in for power generation is 8 miles per hour (some may say 7, I wouldn’t argue.) You’re not going to get much of that with high pressure overhead.
I think green power is a good idea as it’s a diversity of power sources. But we need to expect that wind power generation is not an answer for wintertime power crunches. The forecast before icing occurred was 10% of the energy generation for the day. That’s 100% believable because the meteorology drops the output, not a want of need or random factors. With the year prior having 10% days after high pressure settled in we should expect that in the future.
In the summer the wind generation can be the difference between blackouts and no blackouts, so it’s good to continue to let them come online if the market will bear them economically.
Greg, I’m not gonna disagree with you, I just think it’s irrelevant. People (especially conservatives) keep wanting to make this about wind vs hydrocarbon based generation, and that’s just not the issue. Both failed miserably.
The problem here is (a) mismanagement, (b) a lack of proper regulation, and (c) a criminal lack of preparedness on the part of the power generating companies.
I know you’re the lawyer (and I’m certainly not) but it seems to me that ERCOT and it’s individual members serve a public need, and are regulated by the State in order to make sure that need is met. I believe that they have something akin to a fiduciary duty to make sure they can meet that need.
I don’t even thing they can claim force majeure. People have been warning them about this for years, they’ve been told to act repeatedly, and, in this specific case, this cold front was forecast well in advance – they had plenty of time to prepare and get extra generating capacity.
Albert I agree with you that the conservatives are incorrect saying this is green energy’s fault. It’s also important to point out that more green energy wouldn’t have saved us either.
What really concerns me, though, is letting the brunt of the blame fall on ERCOT. They do bear responsibility, but part of the reason focus is on them is to take attention away from PUC and Railroad Commission. It’s political expediency that’s serves as an out to not hold PUC and Railroad Commission accountable.
Yeah, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The PUC has consistently dropped the ball. And, let’s not forget the Legislature which has repeatedly refused to take any responsibility at all.
Given the public outrage, I suspect that we will see some pretty drastic corrective measures being proposed. We’ll see if anything substantive happens. Utility companies have lots of money to dump in campaign coffers. . . . .
Since Greg didn’t address your question about why the wind turbines were not available in cold weather–the operators didn’t want to spend the extra money to properly winterize them.
The turbines can operate in freezing temps (as evidenced by the many photos of the Antarctic turbines and Canadian turbines), but ours were just not winterized. Something that can and should be fixed.
I blame the executives of ERCOT. They had been warned years ago to prepare for the disaster we experienced, but instead of doing anything, they spent their time counting the money they were making.
Like DanMan, I too have a gas generator which supplied power to my house. But it does not restore the phone service which was out. Thus I had no connection to the internet and worse, my Lifeline medical alert system could not function.
While I was able to stay warm,, my girlfriend who lives in Pasadena, had to stay in her car. And because I had no phone service, I could not offer her a warm place to stay.
What really pissed me off was to see pictures of Houston’s downtown skyscrapers, with its thousands of empty offices, all lighted up while the rest of the city was in darkness.
The Galveston County District Attorney has started an investigation into whether those responsible for the blackout should be criminally charged in the deaths of people who died as the result of the power outage.. Good for him! Somebody sure as hell needs to be imprisoned.
ERCOT doesn’t generate power. ERVOT manages the flow of power into and out of the grid. ERCOT cannot control power distribution if the generating plants are offline due to freezing up or because there isn’t enough gas to run them. ERCOT has no regulatory powers, and can only suggest that the generators winterize their plants, and has no input into natural gas production at all. The people you want to blame, Howie are the independent power producers that failed to winterize their plants, the natural gas producers who failed to winterize their facilities, and the idiots in Austin who failed to pass any legislation or regulations mandating resilient power plants, because that would annoy the people who donate to their campaigns, and Lord knows we shouldn’t annoy campaign contributors, since they are far more important than the residents of the State of Texas.
ERCOT and the Power Generating Companies are the same thing! ERCT is wholly owned, funded and controlled by the power generating companies. Since ERCOT is simply the facade that the power producers maintain, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to hold ERCOT at least partially responsible.
That’s especially true since the one thing that ERCOT (as a separate entity) is specifically responsible for is managing the flow of power and they did a lousy job of that too.
If the current mix of renewables isn’t the major point in this crisis, “why did Texas taxpayers pay $19.4 billion subsidizing 3 percent of our power generation?” said Texas Rep Mayes Middleton. “Reserves for base generation of power have continued to decrease over the years because of the large subsidies for renewable energy.”
I’m directly quoting what he said this week. Is he correct, or is this just a fantasy narrative?
Power generation reserves have continued to decrease because our demand for power is continually increasing and power companies are not building generation capacity to match. Power companies are building “green” generation because it’s cheaper (because of substantial subsidies), and because it’s a lot easier to permit.
One thing we need to do is to quit subsidizing renewable energy. It can either stand on its own, or not. Another thing we can do is to require power companies to properly winterize generation and transmission facilities. Finally, we can work to streamline the development and permitting process. This will make it easier for companies to add generation capacity.
Representative Middleton is trying to make an economic argument that subsidized green energy lead to an economic situation causing lower thermal energy sources availability in the winter. It’s not total fantasy land, but it is attenuated causation.
In the bigger picture here, our demand for power has grown faster than our supply. As such, the state has provided incentives to companies to build more power generation and that covers our needs most of the time, from the usual cold weather to the dog days of summer. Unfortunately, there will always be the possibility of those rare weather events such as floods, ultra cold snaps, or heat waves and those events combining with logistical problems of one sort or another. The thing is, these power shortages are not being caused by once in a 100+ year weather events, they are too frequent to say that, they are caused by the related industries unwillingness to upgrade their equipment and regulators unwillingness to force them to do so.
Subsidies: Complain about subsidies to wind power all you like but most subsidies in energy go to fossil fuels and always have. Texas took advantage of federal subsidies in wind power by tossing in some help of its own when natural gas prices soared in the early 2000’s, making those enormous wind farms viable at the resulting increased electric rates, but when prices stabilized, the focus became replacing inefficient coal that polluted the heck out of surrounding areas. The economic problem with wind in Texas is that the cost of upgraded, “winterized” windmills is a great deal more, they are about 10% less efficient even in the best of times, their lifespan is shorter and their maintenance costs are a lot higher. Without large federal and state subsidies, requiring wind power to be upgraded in Texas would kill any incentive to keep it.
ERCOT: The group doesn’t produce anything, has no teeth to force needed changes, and are the patsy in this recent drama no matter what a politician tells you. Their job is to keep the grid operating, not to insure every Texan has as much power as desired, and to make sure some fly by night “power company” doesn’t switch you to their plan when you didn’t request it. Contrary to assertions above by folks I generally agree with most times, ERCOT is not tasked with “riding herd” over power generation companies or the pipelines that the Railroad Commissioner is statutorily tasked with, what was hailed as “less government” was no such thing and was never intended to be such.
Otherwise, I’m not sure where the belief that city mayors or county judges have the authority to demand commercial enterprises turn off power in storms comes from, nor how precise the rolling blackouts could be to prioritize residential over them, but a lot of energy is needed by commercial enterprises to keep the generation companies able to provide power in the first place. Cut that and the lights go off all the same.
You take a cheap political shot at Mayor Turner & Judge Hidalgo after building up Abbot with regard to Toyota Center. Statewide all downtown skylines were still light up. They had to be told to shut down because they’re not responsible enough to do it on their own. Remember, it was Turner & Hidalgo who issued a mask up county wide order. Your pal Abbott laughed it off, ridiculed it, said he couldn’t arrest anyone without a mask; so iN typical authoritarian fashion, he over-rode Houston’s order AND THEN CASES SPIKED AS ABBOTT SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THEY WOULD HAVE. It’s the Republican refusal to listen to science that resulted in Abbott’s weak response to masking up, as following 45 was and continues to be the guiding fecklessness of all Republicans
Dee try commenting on the merits.
This isn’t about Covid. This is about the winter storm.
I keep waiting for coherence. . . . . .
Alas, I wait in vain!
Lee, let us know when you have something relevant to say. . . . . .