Thread by @ctraywick

WHAT HAPPENED IN TEXAS? Here's our minute-by-minute account of went wrong.

You know the basics: Cold forced generators offline.

But there are some surprises too, such as....

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Frequency -- a measure of electricity flow on the grid -- fell to a dangerously low level in the minutes before the blackouts.

It fell so fast and so low -- and then continued to fluctuate -- that some generators think it may have forced some new plants offline.

Second, there were warning signs a week before the blackouts: Generators warning Ercot that the cold may affect generation, gas traders hearing about wellheads freezing in West Texas...

There was also a cyclical thing happening -- power cuts led to more power cuts.

Ex: Blackouts cut off power to gas compressors, which cut off gas supplies to power plants, which caused the plants to stop producing power.

More on that here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Wind, as we note in the story, was the first resource to fall offline due to cold. But by Sunday night, no new wind was coming off. Coal and gas plants, however, started dropping like flies.

And lastly, once the blackouts started, the Ercot command center in Texas lost its water supply. They had to bring in portable toilets for the dozen or so operators who continued to work round the clock.

ATTN: I deleted the tweet below after receiving some info from one of the plant operators about the timing and scope of the outage. The story has been updated accordingly: bloomberg.com/news/features/…?