On Valentine’s Day, every county in Texas went under a winter storm warning. The next day, the lights began to go out. In the days since, millions of Texans have been without power in freezing temperatures. Millions are now boiling water, and impassable roads and food scarcity are also a worry across the state.

But for a select few on the fringes of the Lone Star State, the winter storm did not precipitate a larger, longer, emergency. For residents in El Paso, at least – in the state’s far western corner – it’s meant a few days of building snowmen, staying indoors and off the roads, and learning that the city is on a different electrical grid than most of the rest of the state.

“I was unaware we were on a different power grid,” says Telma De La Rosa, who has lived in El Paso all her life. She had also, until this week, never heard of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the nonprofit responsible for the isolated grid delivering electricity to about 85% of the state.

In fact, before this week many Texans were unaware they lived in the only state in the contiguous U.S. to have its own electric grid, let alone were pressing to reform it. But as ERCOT announced that the grid will “begin to return to more normal operation conditions” today, the state’s unique electricity infrastructure is under intense scrutiny.

It has not been lost on observers that this is happening in the most energy-rich state in the nation. Many experts point to the current shortage as a lesson on the need for investments to keep power grids functional. That lesson, they say, is particularly relevant in an era of growing weather extremes and lifestyles that are increasingly electrified – from home and work necessities to next-generation cars. 

“Texas has been providing a reliable service at a pretty great price,” says James Coleman, an energy law expert at Southern Methodist University. “But now we see they’ve been cutting corners on some things.”

Laura Skelding/Austin American-Statesman/AP/File

Employees work at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas backup control center in Bastrop, Texas, on Nov. 10, 2011. Managing electricity supplies for much of the state, ERCOT is coming under new scrutiny after massive storm-related power outages in February 2021.

A “unique” grid fails

“Winterization” of energy infrastructure in Texas, specifically, has been a corner that seems to have been cut. As the state froze this week, so did some of its pipelines, instruments in some power plants, coal piles, natural gas wells, and – to much news fanfare – wind turbines. Just as the weather was increasing Texans’ demand for power, it was freezing out big chunks of its power supply.

As a result, ERCOT asked utilities to shed power load to avoid uncontrollable blackouts across the state. But this alternative – rolling blackouts managed by local utilities – hasn’t worked either. Instead of “rolling,” blackouts have been stationary, keeping millions of homes in the dark while sparing others.

Energy infrastructure is a complex beast even when things are working well. For a Texas electrical grid optimized to keep homes cool in the summers, a polar vortex in February was in many ways the worst kind of extreme weather event. The event has exposed flaws in the state’s market-friendly grid system – with blame being apportioned from ERCOT to local utilities to fossil and renewable energy sources.

Being connected to other power grids like the rest of the country – via the Eastern Interconnection and Western Interconnection – would have made a difference “around the edges,” according to Professor Coleman, but given the size of Texas’ economy and population, “it’s not insane for it to have its own power grid.”

Having an isolated grid has even been a benefit, such as helping Texas become the leading wind power state in the country. ERCOT’s “unique environment” means it can avoid “the protracted negotiations and regulatory approvals that often delay transmission projects that cross state lines,” according to a report from the Southern Legislative Council.

What has been more damaging this week has been the fact that ERCOT is more market-driven than other grid systems. On the Texas grid, power plants are only paid if they’re producing energy – known as an energy-only market. (Many other grids are “capacity” markets, where plants are also paid to be on standby.) While that generally keeps prices low because Texans only pay for electricity they’re using, extreme weather can throw that market out of whack.

Wholesale electricity prices in Texas jumped from around $25 to about $9,000 per megawatt-hour earlier this week. (Griddy, a small Houston-based utility, advised its 29,000 customers this week to switch providers to avoid huge bills.)

But the combination of an extremely competitive electricity market and a lack of interstate or federal oversight has meant there’s been little incentive to invest in hardening or upgrading energy infrastructure in the state.

Eli Hartman/Odessa American/AP

Oncor Electric Delivery linemen Brendan Waldon (left), Austin Strickland (center), and Payton Merket (right) share a conversation as they wait for a new work order after repairing a utility pole damaged by snow and ice on Feb. 18, 2021, in Odessa, Texas. They were working on repairing utility poles and restoring electricity to customers after a severe winter storm damaged large parts of the state's power grid.

After a 1989 cold snap, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the agency that oversees ERCOT, had recommended improvements in the winterization of electricity generators. “These recommendations were not mandatory, and over the course of time implementation lapsed,” noted a federal report into a 2011 grid failure. “Many of the generators that experienced outages in 1989 failed again in 2011.”

And many of the failures witnessed in 2011 repeated again this week – though it should be noted that some of the failures, like in natural gas production, were out of ERCOT’s control.

In El Paso, meanwhile, the local utility made $4.5 million in winterization investments after the 2011 winter. These improvements came at a cost to customers – as does being part of an interconnected grid system – but for some locals it’s now looking like a price worth paying.

“I hear a lot of people telling me electricity in El Paso is more expensive,” says Jose Enriquez, who worked for the local utility, El Paso Electric, for three years. But for places with cheaper rates, “you may be seeing some of the drawbacks to that now.”

Future-proofing

Mr. Enriquez doesn’t feel an iota of schadenfreude, it needs to be said. He feels heartbroken for fellow Texans forced to find friends, family, or others with power to shelter with, especially given the other disaster that’s been unfolding in the state.

“You’re in a pandemic. You’re supposed to be social distancing. But you have to choose the shorter of the straws,” he says. “I just feel bad.”

This week has seen various calls for accountability from state officials for a disaster that has so far claimed at least 30 lives around the country.

Gov. Greg Abbott has called for ERCOT’s entire leadership to resign, and made reform of the corporation an emergency item for the state legislature. Members of the state’s congressional delegation, in both parties, have sent letters to the corporation demanding answers. In the clearest call for change yet from an elected official, Lyle Larson, a Republican state legislator from San Antonio, has called for the creation of a hybrid market (blending “energy-only” and “capacity” elements) that connects to other grids.

LM Otero/AP

Customers use the light from a cellphone to look in the meat section of a grocery store on Feb. 16, 2021, in Dallas. Even though the store lost power, it was open for cash-only sales.

A full investigation into the grid failures needs to be carried out, experts say, but there’s little doubt that the crisis has revealed a need for urgent change. Market influences need to be relaxed for the sake of improved reliability and resiliency, both in the short and long term.

“There were over 4 million Texans without power in cold homes. ... That’s unacceptable at any cost,” says Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas, Austin, Energy Institute. “We’ve got to do something.”

Connecting to other grids, for example, is at least worth looking at, experts say. Demand is only going to increase as electrification expands, from homes and buildings to cars and public transit. And access to a broader power supply will help ensure reliability with climate changes expected to bring more extreme and unpredictable temperature changes.

“An electricity outage is a much more catastrophic problem than it used to be,” says Professor Coleman.

“What we considered acceptable for outages 15 years ago aren’t acceptable anymore,” he adds. “And what we’re accepting now won’t be acceptable in 15 years.”

For an example of how it could change, officials may only need to look to their state’s far western corner. Since 2011, El Paso Electric infrastructure has been able to withstand -10 degree weather, and a dual oil and gas power station built after that cold snap has helped the utility meet the electricity demands of the past week.

“EPE continues to make investments based on lessons learned from that cold snap 10 years ago,” said George De La Torre, a spokesman for the utility, in an email. “Our diverse mix of generation and fuel [has] helped ensure a safe and resilient electric grid.”

Even after he received the text notification, Mohsen Ibrahim could not believe he would get a COVID-19 vaccine.

“I expect a country to vaccinate its own citizens first. It’s their right,” says Mr. Ibrahim, a 65-year-old Syrian farmer, while waiting for his shot at a health clinic in the Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan.

A wide smile creases his face from beneath the mask.

“But I am so glad Jordan sees it differently.”

At a time when countries wrangle over vaccine orders, deliveries, and distribution within their own borders, the resource-poor kingdom of Jordan is taking a different tack – vaccinating the most vulnerable, no matter their country of origin.

Seeing the common good as dependent on the good of everyone, Jordan is emerging as the antithesis – and perhaps an antidote – to so-called vaccine nationalism.

For months, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, has urged national leaders to embrace a collective response to the pandemic at the global level, saying an equitable distribution of limited vaccine resources was in each country’s national interest. He warned a month ago that the world was on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” by not sharing vaccines more fairly.

Jordanian officials say their refugee outreach is part of Jordan’s wider strategy to seek out and inoculate the most vulnerable across the country – to support the entire population.

The country is a long way off from securing enough doses to vaccinate the majority of its 10.5 million population. Yet refugees are among the first to be vaccinated.

Zaatari’s rugged conditions

The first confirmed refugee in the world to receive the COVID-19 vaccination was a Zaatari resident last month.

“We are very grateful for the Jordanian government for targeting refugees, particularly inside the camps, where population density is high and social distancing is difficult,” says UNHCR Jordan spokesperson Mohamed Al-Taher.

Here in the Zaatari refugee camp, population 80,000, life is basic: residents hail donkey-led carriages as taxis, dust storms are a near-daily occurrence, and eight years after being driven out of Syria by war, the vast majority still live in prefabricated trailer homes.

Yet it is precisely these rugged conditions that led officials to make Zaatari home to the first COVID-19 vaccination unit in a refugee camp in the world.

The Jordanian government and The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) opened the vaccination unit in this camp this week after nearly a month of transporting elderly and vulnerable residents to the nearby town of Mafraq for inoculation. It cuts down the transport time from a one-hour round trip to a few minutes.

Like the dozens of vaccination units opening up across the country, a team of Health Ministry nurses and a physician receive patients, browse their medical history, and ask them a series of questions before they administer the shot.

A handful of freshly inoculated Syrians sit in a socially distanced waiting room, sipping water as nurses monitor them before finally placing them on a bus to drop them off at their home.

“Is that it?” Asha Hariri eagerly asks the nurse walking her to the waiting area shortly after receiving her second vaccine dose. “Am I protected now?”

The 70-year-old, who has health challenges, says she had spent a “year in fear” riding out the pandemic in Zaatari. Only after both she and her 72-year-old husband received their second doses this week, she says, did the “fog” begin to lift.

Taylor Luck

U.N. and medical staff stand outside the COVID-19 vaccination unit at the edge of the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp in northern Jordan, Feb. 15, 2021.

Limited resources

As of last week, 120 camp residents had received both doses of the vaccine, a further 80 received their first dose, as part of the initial batch of 2,000 Zaatari residents categorized by Jordan’s Health Ministry as first-tier recipients.

The unit will receive 50 camp residents a day. Dozens of other refugees are being inoculated daily in regular vaccination units in towns and villages across the country, where the vast majority of refugees live.

Although the numbers seem modest, Jordan’s limitations make them remarkable.

Resource-poor and mired in an economic crisis that predates the pandemic, Jordan has yet to receive full shipment of the 3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine it purchased – enough to vaccinate 15% of its population.

And vaccinating its refugee population is no small task; Jordan is home to 660,000 registered Syrian refugees and an estimated 1 million Syrians in total. It also hosts 70,000 Iraqis, and tens of thousands of Yemenis, Sudanese, and Somalis, among others.

The well-being of refugees is not only a moral issue, but a national health challenge.

Warning of a “lost generation,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi has urged the international community to follow Jordan’s suit and include refugees in their vaccination plans. Lebanon has vowed that it, too, will be vaccinating refugees.

Noting Jordan is “proving how it should be done if we are to keep everyone safe,” Mr. Grandi says richer nations must help refugee host countries gain greater access to vaccines to ensure their pandemic recovery.  

A dose of dignity

Despite near-universal mask-wearing, refugee camps like Zaatari are risky because they are crowded. Prefabricated “caravan” trailers measuring 20 feet by 6 feet often house several people from multiple generations in what amounts to a single room.

Self-isolation was a dilemma for Khudewy al-Nabulsi, an artist who shares a caravan with his wife, seven children, and two grandchildren.

Refusing to go out and mix with other camp residents, he spent much of the last year in his trailer, producing paintings and designer greeting cards for customers remotely.

When he didn’t feel his best, Mr. Nabulsi would isolate himself in a corner of the family’s trailer, separated by a curtain, for days at a time.

“I have been waiting so long for this day,” he says, waiting for his turn for his first vaccine dose. “I am not just happy, I am extremely excited – a more normal life is around the corner.”

He described feeling emotional at being among the first in the country to be inoculated.

“Being told as a refugee that your life is worth just as much as a citizen is the highest form of dignity,” Mr. Nabulsi says as his name is called.

“A little mercy”

Mr. Ibrahim, the former farmer, shares two caravans among his seven children and five grandchildren. Just last week, a close friend, a Syrian schoolteacher, died suddenly of COVID-19 complications.

As nurses start to roll up his right sleeve, Mr. Ibrahim is jovial, joking with the nurses, but then turns philosophical afterward.

“After war and being displaced, we do not think about diseases often,” he says. “We just move on.”

Meanwhile, resentment from Jordanians is hard to find, if you find it at all.

Laith Aamer, a lawyer, is still waiting anxiously for his 70-year-old mother to have her turn to receive the vaccination. He and his family recovered from COVID-19 three weeks ago. But he says he harbors no ill will toward Syrians who got the vaccine before his family.

“When we say may God protect everyone from this virus, we mean everyone,” he says.

“People try to discriminate by nationality, ethnicity, class, or religion, but this pandemic proves that all our fates are tied together, from the very poorest to the very richest. ... We should all offer each other a little mercy.”

Ojok Okello’s quest to build a city in his village began with a hut. 

When he set foot in his father’s home village in northern Uganda for the first time in 2013, his plan was simple. He wanted to build a small mud brick house where he could spend time while getting to know his extended family in Okere.

At that point, Mr. Okello had spent most of his life with his mother, far from Okere. His father, a prominent civil servant, had been killed in 1986 in fighting between the government and a rebel group called the National Resistance Army. Mr. Okello was barely a year old, and his mother, who ran a small restaurant, raised him largely in Lira, a city 50 miles away.

But she always described Okere, an isolated town of about 4,000 people, as remote but deeply welcoming. And so years later, when the war ended, Mr. Okello decided to go back to the home he’d never known.  

By that time, in his mid-20s, he’d seen northern Uganda’s postwar rebuilding from all sides. When he was a child, the World Food Program gave his mother tents and food rations so they could host people displaced by the war with the Lord’s Resistance Army, another rebel group, in their family compound. All around them, signboards seemed to sprout like weeds, advertising projects by international organizations to dig boreholes and build schools. Roads once patrolled by rebels filled with Land Cruisers emblazoned with the logos of U.N. agencies and international charities.

Then as an adult, he’d earned a master’s degree in rural development, where he found himself studying up on the very kinds of aid projects he’d once been surrounded by. International projects often flopped in places like northern Uganda, he’d begun to realize, because they saw locals as recipients, not collaborators.

So when he first arrived in Okere, a place of rutted dirt roads without a clinic or school of its own, he decided he wanted to help rebuild the place. But he was adamant that it had to be done differently.

The Okere project “is about community involvement,” he says. “In any [aid] project, people should not be left out of the equation.”

John Okot

Ojok Okello attends to a client at a small, subsidized market he opened in Okere, when others shut down due to the country's COVID-19 lockdown.

First steps

After that first visit in 2013, Mr. Okello spent several years bouncing between Uganda – where he worked for international NGOs like War Child UK and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation – and England, where he earned a second master’s at the London School of Economics and worked as a consultant for Christian Aid. But the poverty of his dad’s village nagged at him.

So in 2018 he returned, and began asking locals what their most pressing challenges were. At the time, the nearest school was 2 1/2 miles away, and had few teachers or books. So Mr. Okello mustered his savings and in 2019 began building a small kindergarten on a plot of land his extended family had given him.

At first, many in Okere were skeptical. After all, Mr. Okello’s family was from the village, but he himself was an outsider. And from his studies, he too knew what happened when outsiders tried to impose their will on poor communities.

He’d studied, for instance, “integrated rural development,” a World Bank initiative from the 1970s that aimed to provide job opportunities and social services to the rural poor across the globe. But the project was taught as a cautionary tale, what happens when “the target population were excluded [from decision-making] and yet technocratic outsiders were busy making decisions about problems and their solutions,” Mr. Okello says.  

And he’d seen similar dynamics at work in northern Uganda, from both international organizations and the country’s government in Kampala. In one case, he remembered, government agricultural advisers arrived with banana saplings for local farmers at the wrong time of year, when they couldn’t be planted. The saplings wilted, and Mr. Okello was left wondering: Why had no one asked local farmers what they really needed?

“We cannot transform a society if we don’t involve the people whose society we are transforming,” says Shilla Adyero, who runs an education NGO called Lutino Adunu in northern Uganda, and is originally from the region. “We have to give people the chance to say what they need to address their key challenges.” 

John Okot

A patient and nurse at Okere's new health clinic, which provides low-cost services to residents.

What do you need?

When Mr. Okello began talking to residents, he realized that because of the war, most had never had a chance to go to school. They wanted their kids educated, they said, but they also wanted to learn to read and write themselves. So he began another program, for adult literacy.

From there, he says, he kept taking feedback from people in the village on what they needed. After three people, including an expectant mother, died due to malaria complications in a space of three months, Mr. Okello and his team decided to open a small clinic.  

“In the past we used to trek long distances to get medical services, but that is no more,” says Govile Ogwang, who lives in a nearby village. Okere “is like a child at the moment, and we need to take care of it.”

This fall, after Okere residents said they needed a way to make money, Mr. Okello began to experiment with processing shea nuts, which residents – mostly women – collect and turn into butter for cooking and cosmetics. When local markets closed due to the country’s COVID-19 lockdown, he opened a small, subsidized market for staple goods and started a boxing club.

Mr. Okello began to collectively call his projects “Okere City,” because he imagined it becoming a hub for people in the surrounding region. “My idea of a city is somewhere with opportunities and people go there to get them,” he says.

Farmer Margaret Anyango’s two children are enrolled in Okere’s school. But she herself had never gone beyond grade three, until the adult literacy program opened up.

The project “has given me hope,” she says. “Now I am learning how to read and write because I have plans to study business in the future.”

The path ahead

But Okere City has run into some of the same challenges as other development projects in the region. It needs money. To date, almost all of the project has been funded by Mr. Okello’s savings. Last year, he estimates he spent about 200 million Ugandan shillings ($55,000) on the project.

He’s open to donor support, as long as donors are willing to back what the community says it needs – rather than impose their own agenda. And so far, he’s had some success. Last year, the shea butter project got a grant of $3,000 from an international organization called CivSource Africa, and a number of the local schoolchildren are sponsored by foreign donors.

But the question of funding remains a persistent and nagging one. Often, community-based projects lose momentum when they can’t get enough money to keep their projects going in the long term, says Perry Aritua, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights activist.

“People need to have ownership over their projects, but they also need funding,” she says.  

For now, Mr. Okello says he plans to keep pitching in his own money until he has none left to give.  

“I can say that New York [City] was built by someone. Okere will also be built,” he says. “The most important thing is that foundation has already been laid.” 

Ryan Lenora Brown contributed reporting.

AP

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny smiles as he talks with his lawyers in a Moscow courtroom Feb. 16.

As his popularity has dipped – especially with a rapid rise in food prices – Russian President Vladimir Putin has resorted to a tactic common for today’s autocrats: arbitrary arrests of opponents. Last month, for example, more than 100,000 people attended peaceful rallies against the arrest of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. Over 11,000 were arrested.

Even one of Mr. Putin’s erstwhile supporters in Europe, German leader Angela Merkel, noted this month that Russia is drifting away from democratic rule of law, using the justice system to stifle dissent.

Mr. Navalny himself explained this tactic during a court hearing Feb. 2 in which he was sentenced to nearly three years in prison on bogus charges: “They try to shut people up with these show trials. Lock up this one to scare millions more,” he said.

Having been in jail more than a dozen times as well as poisoned last year, this leading dissident also gave a bit of advice to his fellow Russians. “I urge everyone not to be afraid,” he said in the courtroom. A political system built on “lawlessness and arbitrariness” only shows its weakness. “We are the same citizens. We demand normal justice,” he added.

On Feb. 17, Mr. Navalny won a strong endorsement of his views. In a ruling, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) demanded his release, warning that a failure to do so would be a breach of the country’s legal obligations. Russia is one of 47 members of the Council of Europe and a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.

For decades, Russian citizens that were unhappy with treatment in domestic courts have sought justice before the ECHR. Based in Strasbourg, France, the court interprets the convention. Yet the more Mr. Putin loses support at home and cracks down on dissent, the more he has had to defy rulings by the court.

This latest ruling for Mr. Navalny may be the court’s most important. It clearly exposes the whim of personal rule in Russia. Once exposed, either by protesters in Russia or on the international stage, that type of governance begins to lose its legitimacy.

Mr. Navalny’s popularity has risen mainly because he stands for equality before the law, a universal idea rooted in the dignity and goodness of individual conscience. His cause has now received a bright light of justice from the European court, one that will be hard for Russians to ignore.