jar writes:
The Mission water supply is fine. We never lost pressure and the plant is winterized. Even when the power was out all over we never had a water issue. Edinburg (next town over) is under a boil alert still.
You're only 15 miles from the southernmost border Texas has with Mexico. Kind of amazing that the cold reached that far south. Lack of winterization in your part of Texas seems justifiable. You're at roughly the same latitude as Miami.
New England has to prepare for both ends of the weather spectrum. There's always a couple periods during summer when temperatures reach near or past 100 causing demand for electricity to skyrocket as all the air conditioners flip on. And there are usually several winter periods where temperatures drop near or below zero, causing furnaces across the region to blow through natural gas (which is cheap), oil (not so cheap but energy dense) and propane (expensive and not very energy dense but very clean and very portable, and it doesn't have the problem that oil has with the oil tank, which when you switch from oil is considered hazardous waste). Commercial buildings tend to use electricity for heat, but it's fairly efficient per square foot for large buildings because of their low surface to volume ratio.
Articles about the Texas problems frequently mention the very low price of electricity. Ours just dropped a penny a few months ago and is now around $0.17/kWh. Electric cars here cost about 2/3 as much to run in terms of fuel as ICE vehicles, but in Texas it would be 1/3 as much. Our gas prices currently average around $2.50/gallon for regular.
--Percy