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.