Do other states regularly have multi-day outages that impacts hundreds of thousands of people? I know California has at times with wildfires, but other than that? Are these issues below the line for being considered "systemic"? I'm actually asking, not refuting using question marks.
Yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_i...
Sandy was relatively weak when it hit the East Coast. Most Texans wouldn't blink an eye at a category 1 with 80 MPH winds. That's the same wind speeds as the storm that hit Texas a few weeks ago and knocked power out.
And yes, other states have this problem as well. See https://poweroutage.us/about/majorevents.
I've seen the headlines, I was asking for clarification on what made those different. I do think "storm preparedness" is not a category that should be excluded from consideration given their occurrence is also systemic (and may increase due to climate change), but I'm also open to how these outages differ from more systemic outages. The difference that makes sense to me is that federal regulations - the topic at play here - wouldn't have impacted these situations at all. Makes sense.
No, but perhaps you can have better plans for responding to such events, different staffing practices, temporary measures of some sort, etc.
No they aren’t. They’re often repeated, but they aren’t true.
Texas had a catastrophic “grid failure” in 2021. It hasn’t had any actual issues since. There have been no power outages due to “grid failure” since that one event. The past couple winters and summers have seen several situations where the grid operators have issued warnings, but these warnings are completely normal and are part of the process to inform power producers to not go offline, etc. In software terms, it’s basically the equivalent of “it’s going to be a busy day today, try to avoid doing any deployments to prod unless they’re really necessary”.
Just like the train derailments last year, and the airplane issues this year, the media loves to use the fervor around a single bad event to then create big headlines about every similar event.
Back to the software example, imagine if every big shopping holiday there was an CNN headline of “Amazon told its developers they cannot deploy to prod today. Amazon is worried about an outage!!” And because the layperson doesn’t know any better, they fall for it. But in reality, it was business as usual.