Texas exists on an energy island. In the 1970s, one company tried to force a change.

Ski masks. The cover of night. The smuggling of resources across borders. These are some of the ingredients that go into the myth of an event memorialized as the “Midnight Connection.” On May 4, 1976, a power company based in Texas sent electricity from a substation in Vernon, Texas, to Altus, Okla. By doing so, they were breaking a deal among power companies in Texas to keep electricity within state borders. On its face, the company’s decision to hook up power between Texas and Oklahoma was a move to protect its business interests. But the legacy of the Midnight Connection has gone far beyond that. The short-lived attempt to bind the Texas grid more closely with the rest of the country raised questions about Texas' electric reliability and oversight that, since the 2021 blackout, seem even more pressing today.

“The battle was exhilarating, and it taught us a great deal about the pros and cons of interconnection,” said Richard Cudahy, who authored what appears to be the definitive article on the subject, titled "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection." In 1935, the U.S. enacted the Public Utility Holding Company Act. It required electric companies that oversaw different utilities to be integrated — that is, to have physical connections with each other so that power could flow between them. This created a big problem for one power company with holdings in Texas. Central and Southwest Corporation owned four utilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. They needed to connect them or the company would be broken up. The problem was this: electric providers in Texas had long maintained an informal agreement not to send power across state lines. The decision was made as a way to avoid federal regulation. If power stayed in Texas, companies and the state regulators they worked with had more control. Central and Southwest Corporation had a choice to make: either break the Texas agreement not to send power over the border or submit to federal law and get broken up into smaller companies. “It was destined for the scrap heap unless it could attain electrical integration, which required joining each of its four constituent utilities, not only in ultimate ownership (as already has been accomplished) but also in the purposeful exchange of electricity," Cudahy wrote.