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Comment by silverquiet | Hacker News Reader

Lifelong Texan here. I believe Tesla already moved engineering to Austin and then back to California. Texas has problems and politics I personally find atrocious, but there are some advantages too. Building homes is doable here (often done by crews of questionable immigration status; for sure Spanish is the primary language used) to the point that prices in Austin have actually seen declines recently.

And ERCOT seems to be doing ok these days - they keep quiet about it for political reasons I'm sure, but Texas has tons of renewables and is using batteries now to level supply out as needed. And the plans are to keep adding renewables and batteries.

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> often done by crews of questionable immigration status; for sure Spanish is the primary language used

Put directly, it seems like housing is subsidized by the use of underpaid, disenfranchised, often exploited undocumented immigrant labor

Not particularly unique to Texas.

Nor to the construction trade, but it does seem really prevalent in South Texas for obvious reasons both recent and historical.

> And ERCOT seems to be doing ok these days

Didn't Houston just had issues with electricity just some weeks ago?

The issue in Houston has nothing to do with ERCOT.

It has more to do with Centerpoint, who is the electricity provider for the city and responsible for maintaining lines. The power is there, but it can't reach homes due to the number of trees that fell on lines due to Hurricane Beryl's wind.

Please correct me if I misunderstood but I thought ERCOT is the long-haul transmission provider and they then hand off to distribution grid operators at the city/community level. The issues after the hurricane are certainly with the local distribution operators but during the winter blackout a few years back that was on ERCOT not managing supply to the Texas grid properly (as well as some other shenanigans). My concern is that if cities like Austin grow too fast in terms of electrical demand for manufacturing then ERCOT will have its hands full routing enough juice to the load demand points unless they add more generation stations closer to the demand -- and ERCOT leadership hasn't inspired confidence in recent years.

I think Houston is still having significant issues. I had cousins who were affected for days. But that was because of problems with local distribution due to the hurricane, not the overall Texas grid. ERCOT does publish system dashboards if you ever want to take a look at it - I do watch sometimes during very hot or cold days because reserves can get low, but I have not experienced systemic issues since the big freeze in 2021.

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