With a total ERCOT system failure, as many as 12 million customers and possibly 20 million Texans could be in the cold, in the dark, in their cars with nowhere to go — for months.The fundamental decision made in the middle of the night on Monday to have outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators we have here, Magness said. If we had waited and not done those outages ... we could have drifted to blackout. That's not just outages, but we could lose all electricity on system, and it could take months or longer to repair that.