Texans asked to turn up thermostats after heat knocks six power plants offline
cnn.com
cnn.com
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/fort-worth-tx-the-first-city...
https://fortune.com/2022/02/10/texas-world-capital-bitcoin-m...
[1] Even though Norway has plentiful power at the moment, this is a limited resource - melting glaciers provide the flow. Once the glaciers are gone, Norway will need another power production method to keep up. I think they have a while until the glaciers are gone, but we seem to be chronically underestimating the rate of the planet's ice melting.
You can always generate electricity on site from other fuels in an emergency.
You can't generate gasoline on site.
You can grow corn (or any high sugar crop) and convert it to ethanol using fermentation and distillation.
Making fuel isn't really that difficult. Making it cheaper than the oil industry can refine it from crude, that is nearly impossible.
Mid-90's aren't even hot for Texas, so this looks like a short term capacity planning issue. This was certainly avoidable.
However, Texas structured the energy market so that there aren't any strong incentives to keep the grid online. Instead, producers make a killing by price gouging during these events.
One way to address this is to exclude from Texas property taxes the entire square footage of the insulating envelope of any building with 4"+ insulated envelope thickness, and locally recycle polystyrene into Styrofoam insulating blocks sold back to the public at cost to keep them out of the landfills. My personal preference is foamed glass made with a blowing agent that is cradle-to-grave net neutral on CO2 release and acidification, but that hasn't been invented yet so I'm still researching a way to manufacture foamed glass that can capture and entrain 100% of the released CO2 in the production line.
Offer further property tax incentives for blower door-confirmed tests of airtightness, in a graduated scale for more property tax discount for more airtightness, calibrated against state-projected tax giveaways to energy companies so every X00,000 homes that get the discount is covered by avoided tax giveaways in the same amount as the discount gave away. The savings come from the property tax giveaway is one that returns dividends for ~30 years, whereas most corporate tax giveaways are ~10-15 years.
Passive house to Net Zero is possible with a 15-20% increase in cost (or equivalent reduction in scope), with a concomitant 70-95% reduction in energy costs. But there are no incentives to construct that way. If property taxes were structured so such houses get increasingly more tax discounts the more years they sit (back-loaded discount) and return energy dividends and keep passing efficiency tests every 3 years such that over a 30-year span the house reaches net 80% property tax savings, with a phase out and grandfathering as the number of Texas residential properties under the program reach 50%, it would drastically alter the demand for such houses.