Can you explain this? Last year a tropic storm came through north Georgia and our power was out for twice as long as it was out in Texas but for some reason Texas is now the poster child for unreliable power delivery while unless you live in north Georgia, you're probably not even aware there was an extended outage last October. Are those of us in Georgia beneath your notice?

Texas’ power market is dysfunctional. It has no capacity market, so generators aren’t paid to have a certain amount of generation capacity available. It’s every generator for themselves. This is great during normal times, and drives down the cost of power. “Cheap energy is good!”, says Texas. During times of crisis, you end up with bankruptcies, enormous bills, and people going without power (and in extreme weather conditions, ending up dead, as happens in February in Texas) when they otherwise wouldn’t have to in a functioning electrical system where electrical generation capacity was firm and compensated.

ERCOT also didn’t know it was shedding natural gas compressor station circuits when performing rotating blackouts, causing a cascading failure when natural gas generators were starved of fuel. That’s just plain ol’ incompetence.

Exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

> ERCOT also didn’t know it was shedding natural gas compressor station circuits when performing rotating blackouts, causing a cascading failure when natural gas generators were starved of fuel. That’s just plain ol’ incompetence.

And despite all that incompetence, they were much better at maintaining the power supply than north Georgia. That would seem to imply that the system is even better than the performance gap would indicate.

I always assumed that Maine was the king of power outages.