I was without power from around 2 am on Monday the 15th through 11 am on Wednesday the 17th, except for a few minutes around 4:45 am on the 16th. During that time I'm not certain how low inside temperatures got in my condo, but they were certainly below the 40 degrees that I saw when stopping by my home around noon on Wednesday.
I was fortunate that a friend offered his home nearby, which stayed powered the entire time, allowing me somewhere warm to stay Tuesday and Wednesday evenings (I didn't return to my own home until Thursday due to a water outage that's still ongoing, due to burst pipes in my complex). Others were not so fortunate.
Had generation and fuel transmission infrasructure been properly weatherized, by all indications Texas would not have been thrown into a sea of blackouts too severe to roll. Likewise, energy prices would not have spiked to levels that threaten the existence of some utilities, racking up payables that will have to be spread over years to blunt their impact on ratepayers.
We had our chance to fix this ten years ago, almost to the day, after seeing a similar, albeit less severe, episode. Some utilities, such as El Paso's municipal utility, executed remediations (grid interconnection differences aside) that saved them from the rest of the state's fate. In other words, we have some clear indications that last week was mostly, if not entirely preventable. So now it's time to do the preventative work, primarily kicked off by additional regulations at the PUC and Railroad Commission levels, to ensure that we never repeat last week again.
Yes, this will mean that production and transmission costs for natural gas will go up, and as a result so will natural gas based energy generation prices, biasing the market away from natural gas for electricity generation going forward. Knowing what we know now, that's a price worth paying to avoid endangering lives and grinding the Texas economy to a standstill.