Texas on its knees for an unprecedented wave of frost that left without electricity (and heating) more than 4 million residents and paralyzed almost all activities. A frozen dead in Houston where the two airports have been closed, even the production of energy, the life blood of the region, has been blocked: the refineries, the extraction of crude oil and gas, the oil pipelines, the power plants and even half of the wind turbines that guarantee 23% of the energy of domestic users.
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An emergency that started over the weekend and that it will not end for a few more days: another storm is expected today snow in cities like San Antonio and Dallas for days covered by an unusual blanket. Temperatures, which range from a maximum of 2 degrees below zero to a minimum of -22, will not return to normal seasonal levels until Friday or Saturday.
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Forty below zero in Minnesota, minus 35 in Michigan: Exceptional temperatures but the northern states of the American Mid-West are accustomed to intense cold when the Arctic anticyclone descends towards Canada and the United States. This time, however, the blade of polar frost that ripped through North America was much more powerful and fell much lower, even sweeping away Normally “lukewarm” states like Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas, reaching as far as the northern part of Mexico (even here almost five million inhabitants were left without electricity but for most of them the blackout lasted only a few hours).
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Sub-zero temperatures even in subtropical New Orleans where the thermometer rarely drops below 10 degrees Celsius in winter. Yesterday for Mardi Gras, the region’s main tourist attraction, already plagued by the coronavirus emergency, parades with mountain clothing: clear skies and no snow, but according to meteorologists this 2021 could be the coldest Shrove Tuesday in history, beating the 1899 record (maximum 3 degrees, minimum minus 5). As mentioned, this extreme climatic situation caused a real heart attack in the energy system of the great Southern state with 4.1 million Texans left without electricity and, therefore, without heating.
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A classic perfect storm: the demand for energy has skyrocketed, sending plants into a tailspin. Worse still, just as energy demand spiked sharply, supply plummeted because the freeze wave temporarily rendered some pipelines unusable and blocked the operation of several power plants. The very low temperatures also suggested blocking the giant blades of the towers that generate wind energy. The extreme weather conditions have also blocked the refineries. The impact on the price of oil was immediate, rising to 60 dollars a barrel: the highest price since the pandemic began.
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The wholesale price of megawatts / hour traded by power companies on Monday recorded an incredible increase: from 50 to 9,000 dollars. The operators of the networks were thus forced to deactivate utilities for a total of 16,500 megawatts (about one third of the total) to avoid a sudden general blackout. At the request of the governor, Greg Abbott, President Biden declared a state of emergency throughout Texas
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February 16, 2021 (change February 16, 2021 | 21:23)
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