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Comment by zanon234 | Hacker News Reader

I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.

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Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC + industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.

CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.

Can you be a bit more explicit? Do you have a specific person in mind as a model of this "guy in the desert" that people keep calling a "dumb yokel" but who actually a power-grid savant or whatever? Aside: alongside your hero, there are some extremely kooky people living out in the CA desert.

And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to lack of regulations.

This is ignorant culture war politics and/or anti-Texasism.

I should point out that cold temperatures place a huge demand on the grid because consumers don't want to winterize for the marginal once-a-decade blizzard any more than utilities; around half our homes have relatively inefficient resistance heaters as opposed to furnaces.

We have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg

So no wonder our reserve margins run thinner when we're already having to build at such speed just to keep pace with regular demand.

Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.

ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

> ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. It's particularly easy when you have to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load. Retrofitting winterization is more expensive. If you build in support for winterization when you build the capacity in the first place (which is what happens with sane regulatory oversight), it's all quite inexpensive. It'd be one thing if the cold was a once a century surprise, but when you know you're going to have cold events multiple times over the lifetime of your equipment, it's really easy to do this right.

I don't think their comment was either ignorant or anti-Texan. Essentially all of the conclusions in the FERC report on the February 2021 events were those of regulatory failure. Generating assets did not have winterization plans that state inspectors actually enforced, most of the failed assets failed at temperatures above their design minima, natural gas delivery system were totally deregulated at the state level, ERCOT winter forecast practices were poor, etc.

Considering how much the Texas state government has been illegally trampling its own residents’ rights recently, mostly for the sake of private corruption, and backed by incredibly bad faith anti-social rhetoric, perhaps reflexive anti-Texas-elected-officials-ism is a reasonable baseline position.

The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.

As if that were the choice...

In PG&E land we have extraordinarily expensive (e.g. hitting over 0.60$/kwh) electricity that has outages more often than Texas.

High prices go hand in hand with low reliability because the same incompetence and corruption results in both.

What's some examples of this that Texas doesn't have?

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