What if a polar vortex blacks out the Texas grid?
A polar-vortex ERCOT collapse spikes Texas spot power and Henry Hub as gas wells and wellheads freeze off, feeding through to ammonia/fertilizer costs at the margin. Direct analogue: Winter Storm Uri (Feb 2021), when ERCOT prices hit the $9,000/MWh cap and gas spiked, bankrupting Brazos and Griddy. Forward angle: post-Uri weatherization helps, but ERCOT's energy-only market and surging datacenter/crypto load mean scarcity pricing can still gap violently — the local power/gas spike, not the tiny EUR leg, is the trade.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A deep-freeze polar vortex collapses ERCOT generation, triggering days-long Texas blackouts and emergency power-price caps. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · European energy ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.