  Unprecedented winter storms that hit across Texas in February 2021 have
caused at least 69 deaths and 4.5 million customer interruptions due to the
wide-ranging generation capacity outage and record-breaking electricity demand.
While much remains to be investigated on what, how, and why such wide-spread
power outages occurred across Texas, it is imperative for the broader macro
energy community to develop insights for policy making based on a coherent
electric grid model and data set. In this paper, we collaboratively release an
open-source extendable model that is synthetic but nevertheless provides a
realistic representation of the actual energy grid, accompanied by open-source
cross-domain data sets. This simplified synthetic model is calibrated to the
best of our knowledge based on published data resources. Building upon this
open-source synthetic grid model, researchers could quantitatively assess the
impact of various policies on mitigating the impact of such extreme events. As
an example, in this paper we critically assess several corrective measures that
could have mitigated the blackout under such extreme weather conditions. We
uncover the regional disparity of load shedding. The analysis also quantifies
the sensitivity of several corrective measures with respect to mitigating the
severity of the power outage, as measured in Energy-not-Served (ENS). This
approach and methodology are generalizable for other regions experiencing
significant energy portfolio transitions.
