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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I recently watched a documentary about the USA power grid and was surprised to find we have three, East, West, and Texas. How weird is that.
Anyway Texas set out to be independent early 20th century because they did not want to be subject to federal regulations. Unfortunately that leaves them vulnerable. They can't tap into the national grid if there's a deficit, which has happened several times due to extreme weather. Texans just have to go without power and it's always at the worst time. They know they have this vulnerability and are not dealing with it for whatever reason.
Also they can't sell surplus to the national grid because they're not connected to it. I mean nobody can force them to hook up, but if I was a Texan I'd want my state to suck it up for the sake of having redundancy in the system and sparing the catastrophe.
It's happened hasn't it? They had a power outage and poor Texans had to deal with the aftermath. Well at least the Texans that chose not to vote for idiots.
In February 2021 Texas severely failed to meet power demand in subzero temperatures that lasted around two weeks. Many power stations across the state became inoperable due to these extreme temperatures. Major cities were almost completely blacked out for extended periods. People were burning furniture to stay warm and a good number of people froze to death.
When that happens on the East or West grid, they just grab power from unaffected regions. In Texas all they can do is rolling blackouts. They know this is a vulnerability in their grid because it happened in 2011 as well.
For some reason they won't harden their stations against the cold, but they wouldn't have to if they just got on the East or West grid. So basically they'd rather risk the lives of Texans than either spend the money to harden stations or suck up to the Feds and get on the national grid. Seems pretty stupid to me, but you know a person can be stupid, but it takes a government to be really stupid.
Multiple times in the last few years