North Texans Hope Natural Gas System Works During Monday Night's Cold Snap

Some Atmos Energy customers lost service during last week's frigid temperatures

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With temperatures dipping into the 20’s overnight Monday, some Texans are concerned about losing natural gas and not being able to heat their homes or operate stoves and hot water heaters.

Customers in several cities, including Arlington, Garland and North Richland Hills, lost natural gas service during last week’s frigid temperatures.

Atmos Energy, the natural gas company, warned all customers to conserve amid the isolated outages, apparently caused by extremely high demand dropping pressure in the lines.

Atmos has not detailed the problems that led to the outages or its plan for fixing them.

But overall, energy experts say Texas withstood the wintry blast pretty well.

"There were some minor outages, some minor gas problems, but I guess I would assign a grade of B+ to our experience over the last few days with cold weather,” said retired SMU professor and energy consultant Bud Weinstein. "In terms of the integrity of the grid, I think it's much stronger now. We're continuing to make improvements. In the years ahead we are going to pay more attention to securing that reliability and make sure all of the equipment is winterized."

A lack of winterization was the big issue in February 2021 when millions of Texans lost power for days during a widespread arctic blast.

Weinstein said the state has made major improvements to the grid since then.

But there's one big change he'd still like to see.

"I think there are some broader issues that have to do with the fact we remain an island," Weinstein said. "We don't have any significant interconnects with other parts of the national grid and I think over the long term that's something we need to consider."

Atmos did not respond to an email seeking information on whether the company is still urging customers to conserve and how many people were impacted by last week’s outages.

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