The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout
Mose Buchele
March 12, 2025
The Greater Force: A Spaghetti Bowl Story
When the 2021 blackout struck, the finger-pointing began. Electric utilities versus pipeline companies. But finding out exactly what happened is one of the most frustrating parts oil and gas regulation in Texas: getting a clear picture of who did what isn’t really possible. But there’s one man who says he can see exactly what happened. […]
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February 26, 2025
As the Texas Railroad Commission falls from global oil dominance, the energy crisis of the 1970s strikes and one gas company cuts power to millions. What comes next brings plenty of political intrigue, and sets up a divided system of energy regulation in Texas unlike anywhere else in the country.
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February 19, 2025
The Bar Fight That Changed the World
We tell the story of how the National Guard descended on the East Texas oilfield, the chaos that followed, and how a bar fight in Austin helped establish a new system of energy regulation.
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February 12, 2025
Hear the story of a con man and a group of hardscrabble East Texas farmers who uncovered the biggest oilfield in U.S. history — and how that discovery forced an obscure state agency to confront the destructive forces of unrestrained oil drilling.
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January 30, 2025
The Disconnect Season 3: Coming Feb 12
In this season of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout, we explore the history of Texas oil and gas regulation, how the industry — with the help of state officials— became largely self-regulating and what that means for energy reliability in Texas.
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March 10, 2023
In this bonus episode, you’ll hear a panel of experts we brought together to mark two years since the 2021 blackout, where we discuss the future of the Texas grid in the face of climate change and the increasingly extreme weather linked to it.
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October 31, 2022
Nearly two years after the big blackout in Texas, how big of an issue is the power grid in the 2022 race for governor? We talk with Julian Aguilar, a reporter for the Texas Newsroom. The Disconnect Season 2 is a project of The Texas Newsroom, the collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations […]
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September 8, 2022
We’ve already learned how Texas (or at least most of it) is an energy island — mostly cut off from grids in other states. In this episode, we’ll hear about the time when one power company went rogue and threw a transmission line across the Oklahoma border. This is the story of why they tried […]
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About
Millions of Texans lost power during a winter storm in February. Hundreds may have died. And people wondered: “how could this happen in the energy capital of the U.S.?” To understand how we got the electric grid we have in Texas today, you have to understand the electric grid we had up until a little more than 20 years ago — and how a group of power companies, environmentalists, cities and state lawmakers hatched a plan to completely remake it. Did the experiment fail?
Host
Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for KUT’s NPR partnership StateImpact Texas. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
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