Power outages touched millions of Americans this week, including North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer.

"I actually had a 45-minute blackout," he said on this the 200th episode of Plain Talk.

What can be done to prevent these sort of blackouts in the future? A lot of energy policy gets made at the state level, for a lot of excellent reasons, but from the federal perspective Cramer sees a two-pronged approach.

One, the lavish production tax credit for wind energy, which provides some perverse and truly distortive incentives for energy companies to produce wind energy, needs to end.

Two, both the marketplace and government regulators need to draw a distinction between baseload electrons, of the sort produced by coal or nuclear plants, and intermittent electrons which come from sources like wind.

Also on this episode, Cramer responds to the controversy surrounding Senator Ted Cruz's trip to Mexico amid the Texas blackouts and the passing of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.