Us Texans really need to focus on getting the people in charge out of office. I will vote for anybody that will work towards strengthening our infrastructure.
Hell I'd run on an infrastructure platform if I had any idea how. (And of course the means to run.)
But in terms of concrete economic choices, the popularity of services like Griddly seems to indicate that many quite explicitly choose low (instantaneous) cost over reliability/price stability. It's like airline tickets: everyone loves griping about seatroom or whatever but revealed preference is for low-cost offerings.
Put differently, as a non-Texan looking in, I guess I'm asking how hopeful you are that this zeitgeist can be capitalized on once you get down to actual policy and the inherent trade-offs you've got to deal with therein (and also when participants are warm and comfortable).
To be clear I personally would vote for you in a heartbeat, but the cliffs in support between vague positive overarching statements and concrete policy proposals in other areas don't leave me super hopeful.
If the past as shown us anything, it is nothing will change unless we can improve things for everybody. We've gotta make sure everybody gets something of value.
Changes have to be made at a local level to improve peoples lives and those improvements need to be advertised in a way that the people know what policies helped them out. Or what policies are hurting them.
Most people here just want lower taxes and more money in their pockets. Yet, they don't realize that while they pay for their share of the state bills plenty of other people/companies aren't.
Also, this is a regulation failure because the PUCT (or whatever it is called), which is under the purview of the Railroad Commissioner (an elected position), didn't make recommended winterization guidelines mandatory. Without this, the market favors the biggest corner cutting.
The hard part is getting legislation passed that mandates adherence to standards. Texas has prioritized minimal regulation and low taxation and "running on an infrastructure platform" means nothing if you can't get it enacted into law. Right now the TX regulatory climate is fiercely against these kind of measures and, terrible as recent events have been, I don't see it changing any hearts or minds in Austin. It's just not where the state government is at.
Abbot and the Legislature should resign, they did what Terrorists and Covid couldn't...they brought the state to its knees through gross negligence.
Not an excuse, per se, but it makes sense things were stretched. Personally, I live in Illinois, we use nuclear power and have to say I'm very pro-nuclear. Wind can stop, solar causes a lot of environmental damage (mining, producing, shipping, etc). Nuclear has minimal risks and produces a lot of energy for minimal pollution. I'd love to see some deregulation (still keep safety) and investment.
For reference, you can see energy costs yourself
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
And production:
I too am pro nuclear. While nuclear isn't perfect, we have to take steps in the right direction. That means, investing in energy research, building from the best options we have now, and planning to build better things in the future.
Additionally - a lack of regulation heavily failed Texans. There are ways to weatherize wind turbines to operate in the cold properly but Texas long ago stripped these away.
This is a tragedy and many folks in Texas are feeling a lot of pain right now, it's not the time to guilt over politics but it is a good time to realize that moving forward social services do need more a reasonable level of support.
All that is required is to know there is a problem and to judge who is likely to have a workable solution if you seek them out.
Politicians don't know anything about technical issues. A good politician's strength is in knowing when to defer to experts and to judge who is a good expert.
"ERCOT has no idea how to do a controlled shutdown and cold restart."
My God, man, that's like Priority 1 of your job--have a plan to reboot.
What a bunch of morons.
ERCOT owns 0% of the power grid. They are a facilitator, and coordinator. All power generation in Texas is done on privately held equipment, and transmitted on private infrastructure.
ERCOT facilitates a marketplace where power and generation capacity is bought and sold, and they have the ability to tell all providers to shed load or do things with their infrastructure to support the grid.
The onus for implementing is on the utilities themselves. Some, did great. Others, were a dumpster fire.
Read the bloody About page and stop letting the press sell you the narrative that this is government mismanagement. This was just a case where there was not a cohesive distributed amongst all providers plan completely rehearsed.
I find the entire thing funny because you'd think ever since the Midnight Connection nonsense, there'd be a bit more inter-utility coordination, but eh... No accounting for the lack of effort put into becoming hyper-reliable.
I will say, in the towns I know people, the community has been rallying to support each other. I've been rather curious about the stark difference between the small townish response vs responses in the urban centers. Austin Energy has done a terrible job.
A.k.a. "government mismanagement".
If the Electric Reliability Council of Texas can't be assed to rehearse a plan to ensure, you know, the electric reliability in Texas, then it has arguably failed its mission. And likewise, if Texas' PUC and legislature can't be assed to provide the necessary oversight to ensure said "electric reliability council" is actually assed to ensure said "electric reliability", then the state government has likewise arguably failed in its responsibilities to provide that oversight.
If they are the facilitator and coordinators, then that's their damn job--even if the entities being coordinated are private. In addition, ERCOT are the only organization with the levers to pull--so that's where the job lands.
All you've provided a pile of excuses and deflections.
This is what caused the pileup to begin with--everybody going "<plugs ears> LA LA LA, WHAT YOU SAID WILL COST ME MONEY LA LA LA SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM."
Funnily enough, El Paso did just fine--perhaps because they actually had to follow some minimum maintenance standards for their grid. I wonder where those came from ...
So yes. El Paso got an easy time of it. Pretty easy to remidiate things when you can actually move people and equipment around safely. More at 11.
On the other hand...
Most of the population centers in East Texas are still hard frozen pretty much consistently since Sunday, with precipitation to boot, thereby complicating infrastructure response because you can't get people mobilized with equipment as effectively when they are worried about dying doing so. Further, you've got issues with water systems breaking down all over the place as well.
https://www.localconditions.com/weather-dallas-texas/75201/p...
Go ahead, compare and contrast to your heart's content.
So with regards to El Paso, no surprise there, they missed half the bloody party. Good for them. Last I checked, there wasn't enough extra capacity on the national grids either to make up for the shortfalls in Texas either, so while some mitigation may have happened, the same compounding difficulties would have emerged.
I'm not saying ERCOT makes the most sense to anyone out there, I'm saying you need to actually calm down and realize who actually does what. ERCOT monitors, they do not operate.
Their role stops where hands meet controls. They can order utilities to put hands on controls, but for each provider, how they do what they are told is out of scope for ERCOT as long as they meet their obligations. In the game of remediating the entire grid in event of casualty, they provide the line of communication and data stream so that all the providers can work it out amongst themselves. Power providers do not implement controls in some magical ERCOT control room, and train ERCOT personnel how to control the transmission and generation equipment every utility member owns, operates, and maintains. These companies are power companies; electricity generation and transmission is what they do. ERCOT is a glorified message passer and dashboard gazer. This is a theme in Texas. People own things, councils oversee coordination. Members are responsible for working things out between themselves using the council and information they maintain as the coordination point.
You can be as livid as you want about it. No skin off my nose. I'm here living through it, and observing the difference between different service providers in terms of how competent they are handling their issues.
Some do great, others have failed epically. That is the goal Texas set out for with the ERCOT Marketplace. A bunch of providers with heterogenous operating parameters, with the goal of bringing power to the state while staying in-sync enough to get the job done.
Market forces are going to crush some providers. Those who failed are either going to have to dissolve or remediate their operations.
Neither the Eastern or Western grids have been the most reliable when Texas has connected with them in the past, and those times when problems knocked out power for Texans when other States dropped the ball have left a poor taste for the approach in Texas.
If you don't like it, or don't like planning for the occasional hiccup when another human being makes an unfortunate compounding series of mistakes, I don't know what to tell you. Don't move here, though I think you"ll find most other places have the same problems in different spaces.
I can only call it as I see it playing out on the ground. Texas hates/fundamentally distrusts centralized public management. This is their answer to it. They even more dislike non-Texans butting in and telling them how they should do things. It is a cultural thing, and something a lot of people don't seem to understand. So, it is what is.
><plugs ears> LA LA LA, WHAT YOU SAID WILL COST ME MONEY LA LA LA SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM."
I'm saddened you think that's what is going on. It's sad to think that there aren't a very dedicated group of people handling a very dynamic situation to the best of their ability. I've seen people brought together and self-organizing in this crisis, which to me, restores a modicum of faith in the people around me. The uninvolved cheerleaders demonizing or exploiting the crisis for political aims, clicks, something interesting to discuss, and personal aspirations can go sod themselves.
Looking at anything other than what you have to work with does nothing to facilitate real change. You do you, but don't expect someone sitting in the middle of it to buy into hyperbolic rhetoric that denies the fundamental nature of coordinating independent actors.
Now let it happen again in the next few years, and I'll be right there with you pounding the drum of incompetence, but as far as Texas as a state, it's the resident's collective perogative to operate the way they do.
Since this state is so divided between the rural and urban areas, the democrats have to find a way to address the issues of the rural populace in order to heal the us vs them divide.
I really feel for people living in red states who are trying to make everything better for everyone - most people give up and just move elsewhere but you can make change happen.
I'd vote for fixing this first, everything else will follow.
I imagine we'll see an influx of people running on infrastructure in the near future, hopefully some of them will be doing more than "not wasting a good catastrophe".