As a Texan, I can concur.

That said, the failure and piss-poor government response to it makes me almost viscerally angry. Texas has promoted itself as an energy leader, from traditional oil and gas production, to large (and growing) production of renewables, we shouldn't be having these failures.

The issue for me isn't the failure of the power grid, extraordinary events happen - its that:

One - it's happened before (twice before).

Two - we should have had a governmental response to adequately winterize the grid.

Three - the deregulated power system in Texas creates perverse incentives to building more capacity in - and power usage in Texas is growing faster than either base load or peaking capacity is.

These are all governmental and regulatory failures, and ones that were both foreseeable and preventable.

They are in fact doing rolling "brownouts" as of a few days ago. I put it in quotes because the friend who told us about it had been without for a couple hours at that point.

This is not being done by ERCOT that manages power distribution in Texas. Your friend had a local power failure, probably caused by a downed power line.

Rolling blackouts would be documented here if they were happening: https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages

More info: https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/do-you-know-the-difference-b...

California has regular brownouts in late summer, right here in Bay Area. Third worldian, the CA gov + PGE has no plans to fix.

And they just increased the price of electricity by 20%.

I want to leave this place, for a better standard of living.