The idea is that people need that power. If a state with a lot of people has a lot of power generation this will be not enough if per-capita power generation is too low. Of course power can be imported but overall per-capita seems to be more important than the total.

Correct. It is also relevant here because Texas is not connected to the federal electrical grid. That means any amount of excess wind power they produce cannot be harnessed by selling it to other states (or bought, during outages).

But power use per capita does not tell us that with any degree of confidence.

If this metric is adjusted for residential use, I would agree, but if this metric is a simple division of aggregate totals it seems of very little use.

The number of people residing in Texas is not a good indicator for how much energy various organizations operating in Texas are consuming.

I don't like per capita metrics with states because some states are the size of countries in population, and others like the one referenced are more like cities. (North Dakota pop: 700k, Dallas city pop: 1.3 mil).

It's like saying "Well Germany does X, but Luxembourg has better per capita stats!" Ya don't say... perhaps there's a reason! Maybe Germany should be more like Luxembourg

Isn't per capita a more equalizing metric? If you go off raw numbers the data will be skewed even more heavily. Though there are certainly other methods to compare, such as per km^2, that you could use to perform other comparisons, depending.

It's not, because of the scales involved. One is a heavily agrarian/rural state and the other is a combination of rural and major metropolises.

Because of how the states are divided, it becomes a compare "nearly pure rural" to "vibrant mix of major rural, suburban and urban" communities. Some states are just absolutely tiny by population and entirely rural. And it's just not an apples to apples comparison to compare one rural area with one rural/urban area. A better comparison would be just Texas's rural areas to Nebraska, without any of its cities.

When comparing apples to oranges this way, it's a roundabout way of saying "just be rural" or "don't even try to solve urban problems".

It’s a relevant metric when the discussion is about asymmetric supply/demand. The context is that if they are disproportionately high in the demand side, it stresses the grid.

It’s essentially an approximation for normalizing production (supply) based on consumption (demand). It tells us (roughly) how stressed the grid is.

> I don't like per capita metrics because it makes Texas look bad

Ok.

To be a "leader in wind power" you shouldn't just be a populous state with an ordinary per-capita amount of wind power. That wouldn't make you "the leader in wind power", it would make you "the leader in large population".

So this person is taking seriously the idea of being a "leader in wind power", and exploring whether there's any merit to it.