Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance, all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
Misleading text in linked article: "We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."
Natural gas wells and pipelines in other parts of the country are designed to handle extreme weather so they don't have these problems. This is entirely a problem caused by Texas' unwillingness to regulate that wells, supply lines, and generators be able to handle extreme cold.
It's not the natural gas itself that's freezing and the article never claimed it was. Things aren't misleading just because you didn't know about it - that's the point of articles in the first place.
It's probably that theirs are cheaper because why pay for more hardened tech if the typical range isn't this?
That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold weather, because we don't normally have super-cold weather. So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It's been ten years since the last time it would have been important, and 12 years before that.
I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat,
[0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should take climate change and more extreme weather events into account, but that is a political problem more-so than an engineering problem.
As far as I can tell weather like this happens once in a while even without climate change, something like once in ~25 years or so (just guessing the number).
Given the serve effects it can have infrastructure should always be build to still be operational.
But if you are a company and there are no regulations you might be very tempted to ignore something which normally happens "just" around 4 times in hundred years. (Again guessed values could be a bit more or a bit less, with climate change likely more then just a bit more in the future).
There was also a freeze in 2011 that didn’t break records, but broke the energy grid.
Further, power plants operate on error margins significantly more narrow than your average consumer automobile. The temperatures, pressures and mechanical stresses are orders of magnitude higher.
People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.
That’s not true. The plant tripped because of a false alarm. The operators said the reactor would be back online shortly after safety checks.
A whole turbine doesn’t freeze. The turbines are in buildings, not outside.
Edit: Apparently, South Texas has its turbines outside. But these didn’t freeze but pressure-sensing lines failed. Source: https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe...