A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather.
Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike). In a recent appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, summed it up: “We have a deregulated power system in the state and it does not work, because it does not build in the incentives in order to protect people.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-new-deal-texas-blackout.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Except that
Texas’s independence from Federal oversight has not hindered it from rivaling Saudi Arabia in oil production and made it the sixth largest provider of wind produced energy in the world.
And it is connected to its neighbors(and federally regulated) who could not be of much help since they were fighting similar problems and had little excess energy to spare.
The critical point of this week is to realize that the integration of power grids relies on all sources of energy and ridding ourselves completely of Fossil Fuels is a fool’s errand.
Red just plays 3-card donnie to mislead distract and deny
From Enron to ERCOT Texas has skirted and avoided energy regulations for decades, generally to adverse results, but generally for corporate profits.
And the goal is to reduce our use of fossil fuel so that our grand-children and their grand-children can avoid the worst impact of global warming.
and yes I suspect in this transition some sacrifice mights be required or old habits dropped and behavior modified.
To argue false narratives, as Red does, first that "green" was the root of the Texas energy failure and and fuck-up (it wasn't), it was Texas decisions to avoid sensible precautions, and now that ridding ourselves completely of all fossil fuels is a fool's errands.
No one argued that.
Rather we should reduce the use of fossil fuels as soon as we can to slow the destruction of the planet.
It might need some regulations.