With all eyes on the winter storm raging through America last month, a silent hero was working in the background to keep the lights on. And I don’t primarily mean the emergency workers or the teams of electricians, foresters, and engineers that keep the power lines up and ice-free; these guys operate very much in the foreground, the public well aware of their critical work.

Before and during winter storms, the electricity supply becomes strained and household demand spikes—think space heaters, heat pumps requiring more juice, more lights turned on, and the natural gas system requiring more electricity for ordinary functions. In Econ101 lingo, the grid is hit with a simultaneous leftward shift in supply and rightward shift in demand, explaining why electricity prices and natural gas prices shot up in recent days.

Most people think of electricity (or “energy” more broadly) as a static resource, at civilization’s disposal and always available at the literal flick of a switch. That’s true for gasoline in a car tank, liquid and stable when unused. Electricity, rather, is a constant flow where the push of a button either redirects it from elsewhere or informs the generators or reactors to produce more, or idly spinning back-up turbines to re-engage.

Some countries, like my home Iceland, use aluminum smelters as this electrical grid backstop, a rapacious consumer that could use more or less electricity to run the Hall-Héroult process—dissolving aluminum oxide in molten cryolite—faster or slower. Some four-fifths of all electricity generated in the (electrically-isolated) island country is used for metal production, filling the gap between renewable production (dispatchable hydro and constant geothermal) and variable demand, always able to give back power to the grid when necessary.

The Texas grid, for instance, doesn’t have a vast aluminum industry backstopping its industry and millions of households. How, then, does the state and its grid operator ERCOT source the additional gigawatts on a........

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