A small Texas city west of Austin remains under tight water restrictions amid a significant drought. After days of being at the highest emergency level for water conservation, officials said Monday that those restrictions have only slightly been loosened, limiting water consumption to “indoor use only” until further notice.
Recently we had an exceptionally cold winter staying below freezing for multiple days. Since winter is usually fairly temperate with most days having lows in the 40s (I usually only use the heater at night and have windows open during the day). and only going a degree or two below freezing for a couple of hours, a lot of houses here are not particularly suited to cold weather. We have fairly inefficient resistive electric heat in many houses, and pipes are not particularly well insulated for cold weather.
It got well below freezing for a couple of days, and already several power plants were shut down for maintenance since winter is typically low demand. Anyway, all of this combined to result in the grid being overloaded, doing rolling blackouts, and then peoples pipes froze as well because of that.
Also the Texas power grid is isolated from the other US grids so importing power is not an option.
Since then I have noticed a lot more solar farms, mini natural gas peaker plants/backup generators and other upgrades being put in on backroads when I go for a motorcycle ride.