Texas Rolling Blackouts Are Anything But, Mayor Says

The Dallas-Fort Worth area has seen the coldest temperatures in a generation this week, with a record-setting 2 degrees below zero on Tuesday morning. Michael Evans is the newly elected mayor of Mansfield, Texas, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb with a population of more than 70,000, which, like much of the rest of the state, has seen its share of power outages this week.

Evans says the severe cold isn't fully to blame for those outages.

"Oh, my gosh yes. There have been a lot of power outages," he said Thursday in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. "And, you know, unfortunately, it hasn't been necessarily because of the weather, so to speak. But we're part of what's called ERCOT [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas]. And we have been caught in the middle of something here where there have been individuals who have not had electricity, power for about 3 1/2 days now. And ... it's subzero degrees."

The power outages have been imposed throughout Texas by ERCOT, which manages roughly 75% of the state's power grid, to keep the grid from crashing.