I get the feeling that this was all planned in advance, waiting for the weather to accomplish the goal.......................
The long term outages were planned but they needed the cover of rolling blackouts. You cannot cycle the grid off and on every 15 to 45 minutes the start up surges alone would wreak your.transformers and reactive power capacitors in short order. There was always going to be a group of demand that once shed was staying down for hours if not days. Ercot had to shed 15,000 megawatts to save the grid from undervolt and a frequency collapse. A full collapse would mean a black start which has never been attempted and would take month to months to bring every portion back into resonance and synchronization. If gas had not.gone short peaker turbines could have been brought online to ride through the demsnd peaks regardless of the wind output Texas has more than enough capacity to not even use wind power the limit mondat night was the gas grid was also near collapse and residential has priority for gas service so power plants were curtailed. Add in the losa of unit.one of the STP nuclear and two large coal plants that cooling towers.froze and it was a cascading failure. Ercot has no choice but to shed load or we would all be in madmax type black outs