This week, millions of Texans lost electricity during a historic winter storm that covered the state in snow and ice. The outage serves as a chilling reminder that Hawaii is one of just three states — Texas and Alaska are the others — that must rely on their own power grid, without the possibility of quick help from other states. For the rest of the nation, there are two grids, with one covering the eastern states; the other, western states.

Given that hurricane season presents our greatest outage threat, Hawaiian Electric says it plans for potential problems, but also notes that our electric grids in the islands are not totally storm-proof.