> Plants are being regularly ordered to go into service, or remain in operation, and skip any scheduled maintenance.

If you don't schedule maintenance then your equipment will schedule it for you, usually at the least convenient time.

So true. Watch it happen right before election.

They don't need to look good though, they only need to maintain control. Doing a good job at things and winning elections based on earned confidence is one way to maintain control but not apparently the one they're going for.

No, not in Texas. They just redraw the maps so that they are guaranteed to stay in power, er, not electric power.

This isn’t particularly unique to Texas. It happens in any lopsided state. You can inverse it an perfectly describe the California political landscape.

Constant rolling power outages, cast blame on corporations, and then tell people it’s actually a good thing that everything is falling apart - with lots of vague assertions about moving to a green future.

Which is why most reasonable people think California is also really freaking stupid. I wish we could instead talk about the other 48ish states in the union that don't have a lot of these problems, or have them in smaller magnitudes

I think you're right. When a party doesn't have to worry about competition, they get complacent. Like any monopoly.

What’s the average lethality of California’s power failures compared to those of Texas?

I don't know the answer but we have had some very tragic fires in California the last few years that can be attributed to the power _company's_ failure to maintain their equipment.

Voting for your party of choice will increase grid capacity?

Acknowledging the failures of their ideologically motivated “independent” power grid that fails more easily under strain would be nice. Or retracting the assertion that power customers paying thousands of dollars to stay alive during a chill or a heat wave is “the system working as intended,” and instead saying “we need to improve this.” Anything like that might be a good start.

it is until it isn't. a statewide blackout during a heatwave mid election season is not a good time to tell people their shitty broken powergrid is actually better then the rest of the country that still has air conditioning and refrigeration.