Thousands still without power in Austin, Texas, days after winter storm
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the Austin, Texas, area are expected to remain without power for another week following last week's winter storm due largely to downed trees and power lines caused by snow and ice.
The outages that caused blackouts for 400K residents during the storm's peak have sparked renewed concerns about Texas' preparedness for extreme weather and its grid capacity, especially in winter.
The underperformance of wind energy during the storm compared to its effectiveness during Winter Storm Elliott in December shows the need for energy systems to be resource adequate in all scenarios and create a market for reliability, NRG Energy's (NYSE:NRG) VP for regulatory affairs said.
The most recent storm froze turbines and caused available wind capacity to drop as low as 1,600 MW out of a total installed capacity of nearly 37 GW, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas fuel mix tracker.
In addition to NRG, potentially relevant companies include Vistra (VST), CenterPoint Energy (CNP), Exelon (EXC), American Electric Power (AEP) and Sempra (SRE).
NRG Energy (NRG) recently stepped up with $2.8B in cash to move into the emerging connected home market with the acquisition of Vivint Smart Home, but "the Street prefers buybacks," Stephen Simpson writes in an analysis posted on Seeking Alpha.