DALLAS- A fundamental flaw in the freewheeling Texas electricity market left millions powerless and freezing in the dark this week during a historic cold snap. The core problem: Power providers can reap rewards by supplying electricity to Texas customers, but they aren’t required to do it and face no penalties for failing to deliver during a lengthy emergency. That led to the fiasco that left millions of people in the nation’s second-most-populous state without power for days. A severe storm paralyzed almost every energy source, from power plants to wind turbines, because their owners hadn’t made the investments needed to produce electricity in subfreezing temperatures.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, facing a political uproar as the state of 29 million people virtually ground to a halt, tacitly acknowledged in a statewide address Thursday that these market incentives weren’t sufficient. He called upon legislators to mandate that power generators prepare for extreme winter storms. The state, he said, should also supply the funding to make it happen.

The system broke down this week when 185 generating units, including gas and coal-fired power plants, tripped offline during the brunt of the storm. Wind turbines in West Texas froze as well, and a nuclear unit near the Gulf of Mexico went down for more than 48 hours. Another problem emerged: Some power plants lost their pipeline supply of gas and couldn’t generate electricity even if they wanted to capture the high prices. Such mechanical problems might have been avoided if operators had chosen to equip their plants like those that operate in traditional cold-weather states.

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