The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
But also the company decides that they're okay with only getting that carrot 95% of the time because filtering costs money. So 5% of the time it's much worse.
The real power of a stick over a carrot is the incentives can be much bigger. If you're selling widgets, and 1% catching on fire just means you're paid 1% less, you don't care very much. If you're fined 50 times the purchase price for each widget that catches fire, you care a lot.
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
We really need to move from stick to carrot.