In two weeks, Texas will observe the five-year anniversary of Winter Storm Uri — the devastating 2021 freeze that drove electricity demand to unprecedented heights, froze gas lines and plants, and triggered a blackout that darkened nearly half of the state.

The anniversary will come just days after the latest arctic blast hits Texas; this coming weekend, people across the state will likely see lows well below freezing, as well as snow and freezing rain.

It’s meaningful that state leaders expressed confidence this week that “there will be sufficient generation to meet demand this winter,” thanks both to five years of weatherization efforts and burgeoning supplies of renewables, especially batteries.

But as this week’s Energy Capital Podcast shows, the defining grid issue in Texas is not simply whether it will survive the next extreme weather event.

It’s whether Texas can serve skyrocketing load growth without once again facing the systemic risk that Winter Storm Uri exposed.

Former Texas PUC Commissioner Will McAdams joined The Energy Capital Podcast to reflect on what really went wrong five years ago, how Texas legislators and regulators responded, and what has to go right next.

As McAdams notes, Uri was not a single failure — it was a cascading series of failures.

“There were a number of events that occurred that stacked on top of each other. You had generation outages, you had frequency issues, you had other generators tripping offline as they tried to arrest the frequency freefall of the system. And then that led to deep load shed, situations where power was curtailed to the entire energy system. So it was a series of dominoes that ended up falling.”

In the years since, the state has bolstered protections against extreme weather. ERCOT now conducts regular winterization inspections of generators, McAdams said, and the Public Utility Commission has authority to hold generators accountable.

“ERCOT has hired hundreds of inspectors that go out every season to inspect to those standards… the PUC can fine [generators] up to a million dollars per day per incident where they’re out of compliance.”

The state’s booming battery storage industry has also changed the game. In 2021, Texas had less than one gigawatt of batteries on the grid. Today, it has more than ten times that. McAdams said that dispatchable battery capacity can transform the way the system responds to a Uri-like emergency:

“If we had had the batteries that we have today during Winter Storm Uri, those batteries would have instantaneously reacted. They would have arrested the frequency freefall, stabilized the system, and bought time for other generation to respond. That doesn’t mean it solves everything, but it changes the dynamics dramatically.”

That helps ERCOT navigate extreme weather — and accommodate massive load growth.

ERCOT’s large load interconnection queue grew nearly 300% last year, with large industrial and data-center loads seeking service at a scale ERCOT has never managed before. But just as he expressed confidence about the state of the grid heading into next winter storm, McAdams said the state is well-positioned to serve the economic growth that’s coming.

“This feels unprecedented because of the size and speed, but Texas has gone through major load growth before. After World War II, with the buildout of air conditioning, we saw huge increases in demand. And we innovated our way through that. That’s what we’ve always done.”

Five years after Uri, Texas is more prepared than it was in 2021. The grid is bigger, stronger, faster, and safer. That will matter this weekend, helping keep the lights on when the cold temperatures arrive. It will matter even more down the road, as large loads come to Texas.

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Timestamps:

* 00:05 – Intro, Will McAdams

* 01:19 – PUC path, lessons from Uri

* 05:20 – Weatherization rules, what changed

* 07:33 – Demand growth, defining decade

* 09:38 – Building generation, lead times

* 11:45 – Why bills rose, T&D costs

* 16:32 – DERs and new grid tech

* 20:50 – ADER, dispatch at distribution level

* 22:38 – Flexible demand, smart load shifting

* 26:51 – Deferring wires, market incentives

* 30:31 – Batteries, volatility, price impacts

* 32:41 – Transmission vs DERs, politics

* 35:17 – What Will is doing next

* 38:52 – Final thanks and outro

Resources:

Host, Guest & Company

* Matt Boms - LinkedIn

* Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance - LinkedIn

* Will McAdams - Linkedin

* McAdams Energy Group - LinkedIn

* Texas Lobby Strategies

Books, Articles, Reports Discussed

* The Value of Integrating Distributed Energy Resources in Texas - TAEBA

* Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) Pilot Project

* Winter Weather Readiness - ERCOT

Transcript:

Matt Boms (00:00.0)

Hi everyone, I’m really excited to welcome Will McAdams to the podcast today. This is a really exciting chapter in our state’s energy history and I am very excited to be joined by an amazing guest today. So thank you so much, Will, for joining.

Will McAdams (00:22.156)

What a privilege, all right.

Matt Boms (00:24.088)

Will is a former commissioner at the Public Utility Commission of Texas. One of the architects of Texas’s modern grid reforms after Winter Storm Uri. At the PUC, Will helped establish some of the most stringent power plant weatherization standards in the country. He also led the creation of the ADER pilot program, the first program in the U.S. to allow virtual power plants to provide reliability services to a major grid. Will also represented Texas at the Southwest Power Pool.

Matt Boms (00:54.274)

shaped regional energy reliability policy, and he also served in senior roles in the Texas legislature. Will is also an Army veteran, and I want to thank him for his service on the podcast here, and really just for your leadership, Will, in the state of Texas, and just to say thank you on all of us who work in the industry, because we are all following your footsteps, and just thank you for playing such a pivotal role in our energy policy.

Will McAdams (01:17.784)

Glad I could help Matt. Thanks.

Matt Boms (01:19.714)

So I wanted you to take us back in time here. You stepped into a role in probably the most dramatic grid event in Texas history. We’re coming up on the five year anniversary of Winter Storm Yuri. So if you could just reflect on that and what was going through your mind in the first few weeks when you were appointed commissioner.

Will McAdams (01:39.554)

Yeah,

Will McAdams (01:40.034)

the first thing I had to do was try to figure out what happened. And, you know, there was information for public consumption and then there was information that we needed just to figure out the mechanics of the disaster, the crisis, how it unfolded, the sequence, how one step led to another that resulted in such deep and long lasting outages, which resulted in loss of life and property damage and just devastating economic effects for the state.

Will McAdams (02:09.695)

And we did that. So that first week was just a series of calling in, you know, former colleagues, friends that I knew in the industry and just asking them point blank in front of a dry erase board, what happened? And at some brutally honest answers, a lot of it was very fresh for them. A lot of them were picking up the pieces to businesses, to facilities that were damaged by the crisis, power generators that were wrecked.

Will McAdams (02:38.38)

We really had to rebuild the system, rebuild how the system operated together and take a look at how to hold people accountable and how to check that this never happens again.

Matt Boms (02:48.118)

Yeah. And obviously we’ve got a lot of folks now asking questions at the five year anniversary of how are we better prepared now than we were five years ago. And I can’t t...