Vistra on Monday boosted its loss from February’s winter storm to $1.6 billion, an increase from its previous estimate of as much as $1.3 billion.

The company’s financial hole deepened after receiving 55-day resettlement statements from ERCOT, resulting in a more than $200 million increase in its short position during the storm’s weeklong devastation. Vistra said firm gas contracts were not honored as the storm hit, forcing it to buy gas at prices as high as $700/MMBtu and power at or near the system’s $9,000/MWh price cap.

“We are very disappointed in the financial losses,” Vistra CEO Curt Morgan told financial analysts during a conference call only scheduled late last week. “We believe we were as well positioned as anyone heading into the storm. We consistently generated more megawatts than our market share of total generation [during the event]. You would think this would translate into positive financial results, but what we didn’t expect was a gas system that didn’t function properly.”

Morgan pointed his finger at the state’s oil and gas industry, contradicting a recent industry report that found power outages were to blame for the failures in gas supplies. He said Vistra received force majeure claims with start dates as early as Feb. 12 — two days before the storm hit — and 70% had a start date earlier than Feb. 15. Poor deliverability of gas supplies resulted in more than 2 GW of dual derates.

During that week, Morgan said, Vistra spent more than twice on natural gas than what it spends during a year to fuel is gas generators. He said the company is evaluating legal claims against entities that claimed force majeure for “alleged inability to deliver contracted gas.”

“We simply cannot expect to run a grid where nearly 50% of the supply stock is composed of gas assets without confidence that the gas fuel supply will be available,” Morgan said.

The Irving, Texas-based company reissued its 2021 ongoing operations adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $1.48 billion to $1.88 billion. That essentially halved 2020 expectations of $3.08 billion to $3.48 billion.

Vistra said that absent the gas deliverability and increased gas costs, it believed the adjusted EBITDA impact of the storm would have been a slight positive.

The company uses adjusted EBITDA as a measure of performance because it says that analysis of its business is improved by visibility to both that metric and net income prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

Vistra’s stock price opened at $16.83 and jumped to $17.42 before closing at $17.05. The company’s shares have lost more than a quarter of their value (25.1%) before alerting the market Feb. 26 of its pending losses. (See Vistra Stock Plunges After Market Losses.)