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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, the big Texas freeze of a couple of years ago knocked out both pipelined gas and electricity supplies, and over a much wider area than just Texas, on account of the interdependence of both systems.

Of course, once you run out of gasoline or propane, you are once again dependent on the infrastructure.

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It turns out that was ordinary fraud[1] not a flaw in the physical plant. States with functional regulatory bodies don't have this problem. At most you get a situation like Michigan in the winter of 2019 where there was a massive fire at a primary storage facility and they asked everyone to conserve gas if possible.

[1]: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4896585-texas-g...

I see this is developing news, and interesting in its own right, though without a clear resolution yet. Regardless, one only needs the outcome of the event to be aware of the possibility of a common-mode failure disrupting both electrical and pipelined natural gas supplies at the same time.

As long as the flow of money isn’t disrupted, the system works as designed.

The most significant laws Texas enacted after the freeze — HB 3 and 5, SB 1015 and 2627 - mainly establish new funding for gas-fired plant construction, cut funding for renewable construction, and allow energy companies to raise rates on customers more frequently.

Observers will note that gas fired plants had the most unplanned outages, while renewable sources had the fewest. In any case, what matters is that the $9/kWh costs are duly distributed to the customers and tax payers, to the benefit of energy traders.

I recall the spot price of natural gas going through the roof leading up to the crisis. I would be less shocked to find out this was an intentional winding down of capacity for economic reasons.

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