  In February 2021, an unprecedented winter storm swept across the U.S.,
severely affecting the Texas power grid, leading to more than 4.5 million
customers' electricity service interruption. This paper assesses the load
shedding experienced by customers under realistic scenarios in the actual power
grid. It also conducts a preliminary study on using energy storage and load
rationing to mitigate rotating blackout's adverse impact on the grid. It is
estimated that utility-scale battery storage systems with a total installed
capacity of 920 GWh would be required to fully offset the load shedding during
the Texas power outage if energy storage were the only technical option. Our
simulation result suggests that implementing 20 percent load rationing on the
system could potentially reduce this estimated energy storage capacity by 85
percent. This estimate is obtained using the predicted capacity and demand
profile from February 15 to February 18, 2021. Recognizing the fact that it
would be very challenging to practically deploy energy storage of this size,
approaches to provide more granular demand reduction are studied as a means of
leveraging the energy storage to maximize the survivability of consumers.
Preliminary case study suggests the potential of combining load rationing and
proper sizing of energy storage would potentially provide much reliability
improvement for the grid under such extreme weather conditions.
