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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Why is Texas infrastructure so brittle? It’s a wealthy, prosperous state unencumbered by regulation or legacy stuff that tends to cause issues in other states.

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It is the lack of regulation that is the problem here. The power company is incentized to make higher profits year around by not preparing for a disaster.

PG & E is "heavily regulated" and yet Newsome allowed them to not upgrade power lines which eventually caused massive wild fires

The fact that PG&E, in a much more regulated and liberal California, also has power problems is interesting and valid, but Newsom's only been governor since 2019 (the Camp Fire was 2018), so you can't put that much blame on him, and there are decades of blame to go around.

Part of the issue is that its listed on the stock market

Profit does not rise proportionally with costs as reliability increases (i.e. it costs a lot of money to make it more reliable, but you don't get to charge substantially more). The electric company monopoly does not have incentives to spend money to be more reliable. All the downsides of widespread power outage are externalized onto the customers.

We had a power outage in March for like 4 days, that spanned the entire city of Montreal last year. We were lucky the weather was pretty warm. This type of stuff just happens sometimes.

We also had a 2 weeks long power outage 20 years ago. Again, in Quebec

Huh, odd that profit seeking behavior doesn’t maximize the public well being in the case of natural monopolies.

Seems like this was a problem with last mile delivery, which isn't a uniquely Texas problem. Oregon and California have had plenty of major outages due to wind and cold snaps in the last few years as well.

Not true about California. Outages in storms are highly localized. Some rural areas get power turned off but only when fire risk is extreme. There have been no large cities without power for a week like Houston.

Not a week, but just earlier this year there was a storm in the SF Bay Area where there were many people without power for 3-5 days. Most of the damage was due to last mile transmission failures from debris. And I'm sure that had the storm been in the hurricane strengths, the damage would have been even worse.

Portland too had that major cold snap where power was out due to last mile transmission problems. I know at least one city in the metro area that sped up their plans to bury their power transmission because during that storm large parts of that city were without power for days.

> unencumbered by regulation

There's the answer.

A public utility is a natural monopoly. If given lack of regulation (or, wrong/weak regulation) it will of course seek to maximize profit at all cost, which means very little is spent on grid quality and maintenance (these things eat into profits, thus bad).

Same reason healthcare, higher education and many other necessities of life are horrifically expensive.

Ever increasing profit.

You've answered your own question. The incentives of capitalism "unencumbered by regulation" and the necessities of investing in and maintaining infrastructure are often at odds.

See the crumbling privatised water infrastructure in London/England as another example of this. The companies in charge allowed the infrastructure to crumble all whilst paying out massive shareholder dividends and holding huge amounts of debt. Then they dare to ask for government bailouts and increased utility bill prices. Someone explain how that's even allowed.

As usual, socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits.

It's worse than that. Those massive debts are from loans from a loan company. The parent company of the loan company is also the parent company of Thames water.

It's all a massive scam. It would be better if companies were not able to own other companies.

In the US companies are sometimes considered people, which really perverts what they can do.

We all know...

Houston has always been a wreck. This is just another example.

(I live in Dallas)

Are you judging it to be "brittle" based upon popular headlines or some insider information?

They're likely basing it off the fact that so many people have been without power for so many days.

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