Meanwhile the folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
The first step is making sure you have regulators who are somewhat clued in.
Of course being hooked up to the national grid could be useful as well, so as to allow for energy inputs when your own infrastructure is having problems. Though that would mean dealing with the Feds, which seems to be undesirable:
> Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
* https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-woul...
El Paso Energy is interesting bc it represents the old school community monopoly. I wonder if the JPM buyout will help or hinder its mission.
I bet they don’t. If they did they don’t now.
Playing devil's advocate here: It might not have been malicious or lazy, but actually just good judgement in avoiding unnecessary waste and getting those services deployed sooner for less cost to the customer.
Of course it looks bad now that the situation they didn't expect to happen has happened, but in the long term, were the losses worse than what they saved by not implementing extreme cold weather mitigations?
But they did. And were warned. And they ignored it.
Differences in incentives are why hospitals for example have backup generators. They might be paying 100x as much to get power from a generator for a few hours a year, but losing power would cost them vastly more.
That said, individual consumers are going to have their own personal preferences. For some people saving 10c a month on their monthly electric bill might be worth a once in a decade power outage. Some might even agree to save 1c/month.
Power companies making that choice for their customers isn't fair. As a utility it should be expected that it is well run and stable. It isn't an easy market to have competition in due to the infrastructure meaning we can't have "cheap and unstable" options next to "expensive and stable". Where the state decides the utilities fall on that axis is the question here, I personally think they should be on the more conservative side and provide stability.
The other thing to consider are the huge knock on effects from losing power. I may be ok with getting extra cash in exchange for power outages but when the stop lights are out and restaurant freezers start thawing things get a lot worse.
A lot of people (and businesses too) have been without any power for several days. In the case of Austin, “a lot” appears to be around 40%. Many more have had power only intermittently. That’s got to be a pretty sizable hit to economic output. Not to mention all the busted pipes.
[edit: formatting]
The there are the things we do know, like the Samsung IC shutdown that will cost millions in itself.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-20/texas-bla...
As someone in Texas who just got their power back and no longer has running water, I'm having a real hard time not posting a really vicious retort here.
Pure capitalism without any humanism is really quite gross and frustrating.
The cost of electricity is not a constraint on the size of hospitals. And there are plenty of states who are part of the national grid, with cheaper electricity than Texas.
More than 300 people have ended up in ERs in Houston alone for carbon monoxide inhalation as a result of misguided efforts to avoid freezing to death, I'm not entire sure how to allocate that cost, either.
1989, 2011, 2021. At some point, having been told twice now, and soon to be a third time, you spend the money to avoid the pitchforks.
I'm sure "we saved a few bucks" will be comforting to the families of people who froze to death or died of carbon monoxide poisoning from this entirely avoidable disaster.
Texas runs its own power grid specifically to avoid doing that
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/orleans/rotating-po...
at the direction of MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator.
The company describes itself as similar to an air-traffic controller, monitoring the flow of electricity across 15 states and one Canadian province.
I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy.
This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.