Skepticism About Texas Efforts to Improve Grid Resilience Adds to Winter Weather Worries
Any threat of severe winter weather in Texas is now haunted by the specter of Winter Storm Uri in 2021, in which more than 200 people died and many went for days without power and/or water during an extended bout of freezing temperatures. Half a decade later, Uri’s ghost looms over the packed aisles and empty shelves at your neighborhood grocery stores over the last few days.
Stocking up on emergency supplies is a reasonable response to the credible expectations of inclement weather and its effects on human-made systems. No one should be blamed for making sure their emergency kit is ready, the pantry is well-stocked, the phones and chargers are juiced up to 100%, and the car is gassed up (or charged) as icy weather looms.
If the anxiety about winter weather is a more or less rational response to both a credible threat and widely shared experience of just how bad things can be during such weather events, many Texans’ fear of the impact of weather also reflects post-Uri patterns in public opinion about the reliability of the Texas grid, expectations that state government should be acting to make the grid more reliant than it was in 2021, and a lack of confidence in what political leadership of the state had done to prepare for the next crisis.
Texas Politics Project polling since 2021 has consistently suggested that the storm had a lasting impact on public attitudes about the reliability of the grid and the need for state government to prioritize assuaging their damaged confidence that they can count on having light and heat during inclement winter weather.
As recently as last year’s legislative session, majorities of Texans of all political stripes said it was important for lawmakers to improve the reliability of the state’s energy grid. In the April 2025 Texas Politics Project Poll, 82% of Texas voters said it was either extremely important (53%) or very important (29%) for the legislature “to improve the reliability of the state’s energy grid.”
This was the highest level of importance attributed to the priorities evaluated in the poll, and was significantly higher than many other policy areas prioritized by state leadership. While the share ascribing the same degree of importance to lowering property taxes was only slightly smaller (75%), only slighly more than a third, 36%, assigned the same urgency to passing an ESA program – more than 50 percentage points lower than the share prioritzing the grid.
When differentiated by partisanship, Democrats assigned higher levels of importance to improving grid reliability than Republicans and independents, but a majority of all subgroups thought grid reliability should be an important priority for the legislature, as the chart below illustrates.
Texas voters also support spending on electric infrastructure. While the more general question of spending likely reflects not only disaster preparedness but also the widespread discussion of increasing demand amidst the growth of data centers and rising demand due to the development of artificial intelligence, the two are plausibly connected in voters’ assessment. While general support for spending in polling is generally inflated in the absence of trade-offs or prioritizing of competing purposes, in the same April 2025 poll, 54% said the state was spending “too little” on electric infrastructure, while 26% said the state was spending “about the right amount” and only 3% said “too much.”
Context is again helpful here in not taking the specific point too far: half or more of Texans said the state was spending “too little” on six of the twelve items they evaluated. But the grid was clearly on the list of items many Texans are willing to expend resources for improvements.
More Texas voters disapprove of how state leaders have handled grid reliability than approve of those efforts. At the end of the regular session of the 89th legislature, Texans’ expressed dim views of how their elected leaders responded to an issue on which they clearly want effective action. In the June 2025 Texas Politics Project Poll, 27% approved of how state leaders handled “the reliability of the electric grid,” while 39% disapproved; 20% were neutral and 13% had no opinion. The latter two figures likely reflect a combination of the technical nature of the action the legislature took during the session and general inattention to the details of the legislative process in a very crowded news environment. But the net-negative balance in the views of those who made an assessment can’t in any way be thought of as a sign that the public at large found the leadership especially responsive to their concerns. Among those who contiinued to harbor doubts about reliabilty of the grid, the leadership had done little to assuage their worries. (These atttitudes after three sessions of legislative efforts to respond to the issue, and similar skepticism about those efforts, as polling during the 2021 and 2023 sessions also revealed.)
Partisanship plays more of a role in these responses than in the others examined here. Republicans were much more likely to approve of state leaders’ performance on grid reliability: a plurality of Republicans approved, 44%, while 19% disapproved, with 23% neutral and 14% with no opinion. Democrats, but also independents, issued much more negative reviews: only 15% of Democrats and 14% of independents approved, while 57% and 55%, respectively, disapproved.
[To explore more polling results touching on Texas voters’ views related to the grid going back to the immediate aftermath of the 2021 outages, see a pre-loaded search result using the Texas Politics Project search tool.]