DALLAS — The massive power outages and failure of the grid in Texas could give pause to companies and executives considering relocation to Dallas-Fort Worth and the Lone Star State, some experts in the field predict.
King White, CEO, and founder of Dallas-based Site Selection Group, said the power outages could have more impact on site selection decisions for heavy power users such as manufacturing plants and mission-critical operations such as data centers and call centers.
“We had an out-of-state manufacturing client tour a Texas city this week and there were no hesitations about delaying the tours due to the recent events,” White wrote in an email response to an inquiry from the Dallas Business Journal. “Regardless, state officials need to develop a plan and effectively communicate it to manage expectations.”
By contrast, traditional office users such as corporate headquarters or software engineering operations will not take the widespread outages into as much consideration, White said.
A severe storm swept into Texas Feb. 14, blanketing the Lone Star State in snow and ice and plunging temperatures statewide below freezing for days. The severity of the cold and other factors triggered the collapse of its electrical network and resulted in widespread blackouts.
Bill Magness, president of the nonprofit power grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas, admitted in a news conference last week that the Texas power grid had been "seconds or minutes" away from a complete and catastrophic failure, as power demand surged and generators fell offline after the storm hit.
Colin Grover, a Houston-based vice president of Private Client Services for Lido Advisors, a wealth management consultancy firm focused on the impacts of relocations, said the widespread outages and power grid failure could be a “bump in the road” for the wave of relocations of corporations and wealthy individuals to DFW and Texas from California, New York, and other locales.
“There will be those who think, ‘If it can happen once, it could happen again,’” Grover said in an interview with the Business Journal. “What’s going to happen when the system gets tested again and it doesn’t really get addressed?”
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