I read the parent comment as grappling with the sort of basic thought I had reading this piece (I read all of it, because it's interesting): OK, NERC doesn't require Texas to winterize to the point of safeguarding against an event like this week. OK, other power suppliers in other states have outages. But none of the other states have giant winter blackouts like Texas had this week, and most of them have worse weather. It's hard to square that with the topic paragraph of this post.
Not exactly true. SPP the grid operator for OK and the area immediately east of Texas did have to go to EEA3 twice and implement rolling blackouts
https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/
>Feb. 15 at approximately 12:10 pm. While still under EEA Level 3 and after exhausting reserves, SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.
>Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.
On the Electricity front, Austin Energy screwed the pooch, because they had too much of their capacity tied up in "essential" service branches. So they had to isolate the few non-essential branches with high downtime to effectively shed load.
You can give Texas crap, but at least let it be accurate crap.
At a press conference, a spokesperson said they had to cut 6.5% of load for 3h21m on Tuesday.
https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693
(Also under the SPP region myself, just in Kansas City)
I'm also in it, and have heard many reports of rolling blackouts earlier this week when it was at Level 3.
SPP press conference https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693
West Texas near El Paso is not on the ERCOT grid and they winterized properly after the last big snow storm so it's absolutely possible to have been prepared for this in Texas.
What the article shows is that:
* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.
* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.
* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.
* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.