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Comment by tuukkah | Hacker News Reader

One key point: "the state’s power grid operator, enjoys sovereign immunity"

I think this is _the_ key point. ERCOT not being accountable to anyone except the legislature means that things like this will keep happening.

Legal immunity is pretty sweet. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't demanded this of states along with the other tax breaks and free stuff they expect to get when opening a new headquarters or major dist center.

Is there like just a form you fill out to get this?

Power generation and transmission used to be a collection of state-controlled monopolies in Texas. That ended in the 90s, but obviously there was no way to break up the distribution network.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/the-year-the-texa...

Many heads at ERCOT were fired or resigned after the last outage.

And NERC is basically the same structure as ERCOT.

As a Texas resident I think this is a good thing. The real untouched key point is legislature creates the rules and they never designed it with emergency in mind. I doubt it was nefarious at the time in the late 90s.

So you’re saying sovereign immunity is good because that’s how the legislation was created. Since it wasn’t designed to deal with emergency, it’s okay to not update the position on sovereign immunity?

Nope. I am saying like other Texas government services, they all share immunity. If you want that to change then you change the law that covers it.

In the case of ERCOT I am less interested in lawsuits but how we change the rules going forward. Do we want to introduce language about emergency power. Have we worked out a fix for not killing power to the natural gas wells? The governor appoints member to the org that ERCOT reports to. I don’t like him but enough voters do that we won’t get change there.

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