- Texas is the "energy capital" of (USA/World?)
- Texas have its own grid disconnected from West/East grids
https://www.houston.org/why-houston/industries/energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Texas
Someone more knowledgeable feel free to chip in with more data points
So you get rich Republican rednecks who have a strong vested interest in the petroleum industry being willing and able to give them their due, either now or someday.
(Grew up in a red-leaning, increasingly exurban county between Waco and Austin, with roots in deep red East and West Texas, and in the economic class of people with "would pay off a small mortgage"-level hopes in mineral rights)
Texas has 38 House seats. Republicans won 65% of seats and 58% of the popular vote.
California has 52 House seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re.... Democrats won 77% of seats with 63% of the popular vote.
Texas is just a red state. Abbott won by more than 10 points in a statewide election. The cities aren't even that blue. Beto won Harris county by less than 10 points.
Beto was (and is) damaged goods politically; I voted for him but figuratively held my nose doing so.
I don't know how you unwind such a system, but it seems like moving towards thinking of it as a collective resource of the citizens makes some sense, and I'm lead to believe that that's the way it's done in other places like Norway or Alaska.
Texas will get state-funded universal healthcare and Tesla will be able to sell you a car right there in downtown Dallas before mineral rights are seriously reformed. For non-Texans: those first two things have two of the more powerful lobbies in Texas against them, but not the even more widely-distributed power of mineral rights holders.
If you’re interested in knowing more about what your family might own and how this works, happy to take some educated guesses. Just let me know if you’re interested, and I can pose a few general follow up questions to narrow it down. Smart of your great-grandparents though - my west Texan forebearers never retained any mineral rights lmfao.
By the way, for what it’s worth, Texas’s public university systems are in large part funded by state-owned mineral rights in West Texas which includes a little oil field called the Permian Basin. As a result, UT’s endowment is either comparable in size, or perhaps now larger than, Harvard’s famously large endowment (that’s what she said?). Obviously smaller on a per capita basis, but definitely the mineral resources of Texas do fund some public goods.
Final comment - I can still hear a quote from some game on unlocking part of the tech tree (Civ VI? Alpha Centauri?): “The meek shall inherit the earth - but not its mineral rights.”
It very much is on all those axes, even if it does have some hightech/liberal urban centres.
In re: other points, much of the "energy capital" is due to its long history of oil and gas extraction, and the disconnected grid is arguably a bug rather than a feature. Even if they don't want to maintain grid sync, a HVDC link east and/or west would be of significant benefit to cost and stability.
The disconnected grid is to avoid any federal regulation (because a connection across state lines would obviously count as "interstate commerce"), which seems to have real value given the current clusterfuck of a political environment.
Could you explain the practical advantages of this and which federal regulations the state is better off without? What particular details of federal energy regulation are bad?
(Besides, given Wickard vs Fillmore I'm not convinced that disconnection would be enough to avoid incurring commerce clause regulation given a sufficiently motivated supreme court)
Their power is significantly cheaper. I naively assume this is a practical advantage.
> Despite the recommendations issued by the PUCT in its report on the 1989 event, the majority of the problems generators experienced in 2011 resulted from failures of the very same type of equipment that failed in the earlier event. And in many cases, these failures were experienced by the same generators
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-08-05/if-the-tex...
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/pepco-week-long-resto...
> More than 160,000 of their customers in East Texas and Louisiana remain without power as of 4 p.m. Sunday. Some Texans may have to wait for full restoration until June 23 — a week after losing power, the provider said.
Are you expecting Texas to roll out Tornado proof lines?
No, I'm expecting Texas to be just as vulnerable to severe weather damaging lines requiring a week's repairs as DC.
The humidity of this heat dome has been murderous. FWIW, I'm right at the 30 N parallel along the same plane as Cairo.
My smart thermostat went into "eco" mode from the power company (Austin Energy), but I turned that off because I usually keep my inside temp at 77 F (25 C) 24/7/365. "Alexa, it's hot in here." and she nudges the thermostat (instead of playing hip-hop).
How does the power company have access to your thermostat?
Some smart thermostats have links in their apps that search for local incentivized rebate programs. The mechanism of it is likely integration between the power company and the smart mfgr's cloud, especially to prevent blackouts during peak capacity shortfalls.
Edit: I have an ecobee4 (calls it "eco+") but I had a Sensi thermostat on PG&E that called it something else.
Their retail prices are quite a bit higher, for now at least, but that differential may narrow as the states that deregulated their power systems rebuild the reliability gap.
At least they actually got some new units out of it, unlike South Carolina that spent billions and billions and shuttered the project.
Yes, and that's why people were freezing to death in 2021. Texas is worse than all the other "redneck republican southern states": they're all smart enough to be on the grid so they can get power from other states if there's some kind of emergency or disaster. Texas is far more stupid.