More winter weather brewing

With nearly 3.4 million U.S. customers without electricity on Wednesday, another storm front is headed toward the eastern United States. More than two dozen people have died as plunging temperatures and wild weather pounded almost the entire United States this week. More than 100 million people are under some kind of winter weather notice, according to the National Weather Service. Utility services from Minnesota to Texas and Mississippi imposed rolling blackouts to try to meet heating demands.

How did it get so bad? That’s the question officials are wrestling with in Texas, where more than 2.7 million customers still didn’t have power on Wednesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us. With the second storm on the way, the state has requested generators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and opened 35 shelters. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state’s power grid.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about this week’s winter storm.