A most Republican blackout

This is a comprehensive piece on the deadly Texas blackout, which was above all the result of putting ideological priors that are unattractive in themselves above the interests of the state’s citizens:

Energy and policy experts said Texas’ decision not to require equipment upgrades to better withstand extreme winter temperatures, and choice to operate mostly isolated from other grids in the U.S. left power system unprepared for the winter crisis.

Policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.

“Clearly we need to change our regulatory focus to protect the people, not profits,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, a now-retired former director of Public Citizen, an Austin-based consumer advocacy group who advocated for changes after in 2011 when Texas faced a similar energy crisis.

“Instead of taking any regulatory action, we ended up getting guidelines that were unenforceable and largely ignored in [power companies’] rush for profits,” he said.

It is possible to “winterize” natural gas power plants, natural gas production, wind turbines and other energy infrastructure, experts said, through practices like insulating pipelines. These upgrades help prevent major interruptions in other states with regularly cold weather.

In 2011, Texas faced a very similar storm that froze natural gas wells and affected coal plants and wind turbines, leading to power outages across the state. A decade later, Texas power generators have still not made all the investments necessary to prevent plants from tripping offline during extreme cold, experts said.

Woodfin, of ERCOT, acknowledged that there’s no requirement to prepare power infrastructure for such extremely low temperatures. “Those are not mandatory, it’s a voluntary guideline to decide to do those things,” he said. “There are financial incentives to stay online, but there is no regulation at this point.”

One of my beliefs about contemporary American politics is that about 80% of it can be explained through the lens of the Enron scandal. (Conspiracy of Fools is the most comprehensive account, The Smartest Guys in the Room the most analytically sharp, both are essential, and Enron was such a remarkably dense web of scams and bullshit that there’s a surprising amount of non-overlapping material between them.) One is now reminded of Enron’s leaders making fun of California for power outages they personally engineered as arbitrage after California’s leadership was dumb enough to buy the deregulatory bullshit Enron and so many other Reagan/Clinton era notables were pushing.

Anyway, I’m sure after Ted “Father of the Year” Cruz comes back from his fact-finding mission in Cancun they’ll have this fixed in no time.

…This piece by Kelsey McKinney is also very good:

Everyone is scared. My friends tell me they’re worried about their parents and grandparents who don’t have power and can’t be reached because the roads aren’t plowed. They say that (if they’re lucky) their power is off and on, but they have no water, or vice versa. They say that they are worried their friends and coworkers are dead because the last time anyone heard from them was Friday, and they didn’t have power. They say a pipe exploded and the living room is flooded. People are sharing houses, taking in strangers, handing food out on the street in the midst of a viral pandemic. They are attacked on every side by invisible, deadly enemies. 

How did this happen? How does an entire giant state run out of energy? How does a power grid fail so drastically? The answer is simple. Texas partitioned its own energy grid from the rest of the country so it could be free from regulation, and that independence comes with a cost.  In a 2019 story for the Texas Observer, Amal Ahmed wrote that Texas’s energy grid, ERCOT, “has the lowest reserve margins, or extra supply, out of any grid system in the United States this summer. If customers had needed more electricity than predicted, there wouldn’t be much room for error, and ERCOT might have needed to initiate rolling blackouts to prevent a larger, more dangerous power outage.” The state was warned a decade ago that this might happen. And they did nothing. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” an expert told the Houston Chronicle. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.” In other words, a lack of capable governing allowed an important and life-sustaining system to rust. 

No one I’ve talked to in Texas has mentioned the government. They know better than to expect anything from it.