Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap.

Today is Wednesday, February 17th.

Retail sales are up, tech stocks are down, and we're focused on the frozen fallout in Texas.

Nearly three million Texans are without power right now, despite freezing or near freezing

temperatures in major metro areas like Dallas, Austin, and Houston. And a lot of those homes

have been without heat for three days, with at least 21 deaths so far attributed to the cold.

Now, the most important thing to know is that these power outages aren't because of Texas's

reliance on wind power or on natural gas, or because of deregulation or bad management

or climate change.

It's because of all of it.

Wind turbines, for example, can work in the cold, but Texas's weren't winterized, so a bunch

of them froze, representing around 13% of the outages.

A much bigger percentage of the outages, though, came because the temperatures made it

very difficult to pump natural gas to the surface, which in turn shut down power plants

that rely on that gas.

And all of that led to rolling blackouts and continued outages.

Now, if other states, other than Texas, had been hit with these problems, they'd likely

solve it by tapping reserve capacity or borrowing power from neighboring states.

But Texas doesn't keep extra capacity on call in an effort to keep

prices low, and it doesn't partner with its neighbors because, well, independence. The bottom line

is that this was a perfect storm, and the question now is if it was a one-off or the sort of

extreme weather that states like Texas must get used to

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