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No doubt many have died. And they’re not out of the woods yet - not all customers are back on, but the trend is in that direction.

I think a lot of people aren’t aware of the structure here - ERCOT is the reliability coordinator for several utilities in Texas. They don’t generate power, and they don’t own the transmission lines - but they oversee them.

Companies like AEP-Texas, Oncor, And South Texas Cooperative are the transmission owners and the distributors of power to the customer. ERCOT made the order Sunday night/Monday morning to shed load, they did it proportionately based on the amount of power each entity normally uses.

So ERCOT makes the order, and each utility in turn is responsible for shedding the allotted amount of customer load based on that order. It was critical Sunday night, and based on the system frequency I saw in the wee hours, it was just in time to prevent a complete blackout. A complete blackout would have been a disaster, because restoration would have been way, way behind where they are now.

I watched a news conference today - they were quizzed/interrogated by the media about this. It was interesting. A lot of issues will be ironed out after the fact, but as a System Operator myself, I will say that given the circumstances, the operators at ERCOT did just the right thing by ordering load reduction.