By Ellen Wald

As the Lone Star State faces a near-apocalyptic cold spell not seen in over thirty years, it seems that every talking head and opinionated American has a view on why Texans are freezing without power. Do these people even understand what powers Texas’s grid? Do they know that people are freezing without their electric heat pumps? It seems that most people, outside of Texas, at least, are hoping to use this catastrophe to promote their preconceived personal views on energy, the environment and politics.

But it’s not that simple. The power outages are due to business decisions that were made years ago based on risk assessments. Texas could have been prepared for this extreme cold, but, along the line, decisions were made upon weighing costs versus opportunities. Ultimately, the decisions determined that Texas would not invest in preparations for multiple days of single-digit temperatures. Whether or not those decisions were correct (and are correct for the future) is a difficult discussion for Texans to have.

Texas wind turbines have frozen this week, cutting power supply by about 4 GW. About 25-30 GW of power from thermal plants (natural gas, coal and nuclear) has been offline since Sunday night. ERCOT, which manages the power grid for most of the state, expected these plants to produce about 70GW of electricity. According to plant operators, the issues there are due to freezing problems at the facilities, which aren’t weatherized for such cold conditions. Essentially, the temperatures dropped too low for the Texas facilities.

We know how to build wind turbines, power plants and refineries to operate safely and efficiently in temperatures as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit. Wyoming has plenty of wind turbines, and temperate winters in that state are worse than what Texas is experiencing this year. Siberia has pipelines and oil production, and part of that Russian region is a frozen wasteland in the winter. The difficulty of providing weatherproofing for these in Texas is not the technology or the engineering; the problem is the cost.

Texas has not experienced multiple days of below-zero temperatures often enough to warrant expensive weatherization, or so the calculations went. Of course, that does not make freezing Texans feel any better this week. They currently lack reliable electricity. Many of them lack heat. They are struggling through a weather disaster without the amenities and physical protections expected in modern America. This raises the big questions for Texans and all Americans: Do we expect essentially 100% reliability from our power or energy supplies?  Are we willing to face some disruption for lower costs or to protect the environment? Do we prioritize reliability, or do we prioritize costs or do we prioritize alternative power sources?

Even outside of Texas, responsible state governments and utilities should be considering these questions. Florida, for instance, regularly faces gasoline shortages before, during and after hurricanes. Most of Florida’s gasoline supply is shipped via barges to Tampa and then transported through the only major oil pipeline in the state to Orlando, where trucks pickup for delivery across the rest of the peninsula. This supply chain is particularly vulnerable to storm disruption, and that vulnerability regularly leads to long lines and gasoline shortages. If Florida wants to prepare for the future, it should ask the difficult questions: Should Florida build more pipelines to ensure a more reliable distribution of gasoline across the state during emergencies? Should Florida build its own gasoline reserves strategically located around the state to prevent shortages? Or is Florida willing to face fuel shortages during and after hurricanes because the costs of preparation are too high?

When it comes to the power grid, we must always weigh costs versus opportunity, and that scale will become more important as we tax our grid more. One of the problems in Texas is that so many homes today are heated with electric heat pumps instead of oil or natural gas. In a blackout, those homes lack heat altogether. And as we seemingly transition to more and more electric vehicles, we will only rely on the power grid more. If battery powered cars do take over the roads, the next state-wide blackouts would also mean crippling immobility, perhaps for the government as well as the citizens. As the power grid becomes even more vital to our way of life, maybe Texas will find the costs worthwhile to weather proof its infrastructure, even if the next such storm does not come for another third of a century.

Ellen R. Wald, Ph.D. is a widely cited analyst of the global energy industry. She is the president of Transversal Consulting which provides guidance on energy and geopolitics. Dr. Wald is the author of Saudi, Inc., detailing the history and relevance of the Saudi oil industry and Aramco.

A non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, Dr. Wald earned a Ph.D. in energy history from Boston University and a Bachelor’s degree with honors from Princeton University. Her past academic appointments include positions at Boston University, the University of Cambridge, The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming and the University of Georgia.

She frequently provides analysis for print, television and radio news. Her weekly roundup of timely energy market expectations can be found on Thursday mornings at Investing.com and you can follow her on twitter @EnergzdEconomy