# Winter Storm Uri In mid-February 2021, **Winter Storm Uri** drove Texas temperatures to century lows and collapsed the state's isolated power grid: **4.5 million+ households** lost power for days, the official death toll reached **246** (excess-mortality analyses ran several times higher — frozen pipes, carbon-monoxide poisoning, hypothermia), and some variable-rate customers received five-figure electric bills. Uri is the cluster's cleanest case of **real-time energy disinformation**: a grid failure rooted in deregulation and un-weatherized natural-gas infrastructure, publicly reassigned within hours to wind turbines and the Green [[New Deal]]. ## The blame pivot ERCOT, Texas's grid operator, runs intentionally isolated from the national interconnections to avoid federal (FERC) oversight — a deliberate deregulatory architecture. The dominant failure mode was **natural gas**: wellheads, pipelines, and plants froze, and gas supply collapsed exactly when demand peaked; un-winterized wind turbines underperformed too, but wind was a minor scheduled contributor in February. None of that survived contact with the narrative: [[Greg Abbott]] went on [[Sean Hannity]]'s show mid-crisis to declare the disaster showed "the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal," a frozen-turbine photo from years earlier in another country went viral as "Texas," and the renewables-did-it story hardened into right-wing canon before the engineering post-mortems landed. The legislative response weatherized the electric side while leaving significant gas-system loopholes, and the structural deregulation politics went largely untouched. ## Cancún [[Ted Cruz]] flew his family to **Cancún** mid-blackout, blamed the trip on his daughters when caught, and returned within a day — the era's defining image of officeholder disaster indifference, the "Cancún Cruz" echo deliberately invoked when Cruz was vacationing in Greece during the [[2025 Texas Hill Country Flood]]. [[Rick Perry]]'s contribution — that Texans would accept longer blackouts "to keep the federal government out of their business" — captured the ideological core: the deregulated-grid politics that produced the failure restated as the reason to refuse its remedy. ## See also - [[2025 Texas Hill Country Flood]] — same state, same officials, next catastrophe - [[Disinformation]] — the wind-turbine blame pivot as case study - [[Greg Abbott]] / [[Ted Cruz]] — the accountability record - [[Hurricane Helene]] — narrative-first disaster politics, perfected