  Unprecedented winter storms that hit across Texas in February 2021 have
caused at least 4.5 million customers to experience load shedding due to the
wide-ranging generation capacity outage and record-breaking electricity demand.
While much remains to be investigated on what, how, and why such wide-spread
power outages occurred across Texas, it is imperative for the broader research
community to develop insights based on a coherent electric grid model and data
set. In this paper, we collaboratively release an open-source large-scale
baseline model that is synthetic but nevertheless provides a realistic
representation of the actual energy grid, accompanied by open-source
cross-domain data sets. Leveraging the synthetic grid model, we reproduce the
blackout event and critically assess several corrective measures that could
have mitigated the blackout under such extreme weather conditions. We uncover
the regional disparity of load shedding. The analysis also quantifies the
sensitivity of several corrective measures with respect to mitigating the power
outage, as measured in energy not served (ENS). This approach and methodology
are generalizable for other regions experiencing significant energy portfolio
transitions.
