Surprisingly coal wasn’t effected much either.
I live here in the Permian Basin, temps went down to low single digits and in some place below zero. Right now our biggest problem is down power lines from all the ice, many of us are still without power and water. Wind energy production dropped off almost immediately when the front hit. Gas increased their production of electricity as did coal, nuclear pretty much was constant. Around the 15th or early 16th they started throttling down. From the reports I heard from locals with TXU and ONCOR they were faceing near disaster problems with lines down all over the Basin. We had whole cities without power. The end story is, it doesn’t matter how much power you can produce if you don’t have the ability to get it to the customer. There was several times in January and very early February when wind energy was producing more than gas. They throttle up and down as needed but with a storm like this one wind went dead in the water. Texas is covered with thousands of miles of old power lines and poles, they couldn’t handle weather this extreme. Had it not been for gas generator plants almost doubling their output we would have really had a problem. Now our biggest problem is getting water back up and running due to all the water line failures. Some cities in the Basin have no or very little water right now.