> What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price.
There's a lot to this notion that the state deliberately traded off reliability for lower wholesale prices attractive to large scale industrial consumers. It's not like it's unknown how to make a power system reliable in cold weather, but when it happens every ten or twenty years (1989, 2011, 2021), it can be difficult to justify the expense of that sort of preparation. Of course, the costs of this choice are dramatically socialized across the entire state in these extreme weather events. The refinery might get cheaper power, but part of the cost of that cheapness is borne by the homeowner who loses power due to a lack cold weather capacity in the grid, can't heat their home, and their pipes burst or worse.
But the issues in TX were not confined to just the electric part of the energy infrastructure - natgas supply failed also. Some of this was due to things like wellheads freezing (wells very often produce water in addition to hydrocarbons). Some of it was due to bureaucratic snafus. For environmental reasons, many of the natgas pipeline pumping stations have been switched from running on their own gas supply to electrical power. These pumping stations have the ability to request treatment as critical infrastructure for which the power should never be deliberately cut. To do this requires filing paperwork with the state that many or most did not. The consequence of this is that as the electric utilities shed load to keep the grid up, they often cut off their own fuel supply and made the problem worse.
There's a lot to this notion that the state deliberately traded off reliability for lower wholesale prices attractive to large scale industrial consumers. It's not like it's unknown how to make a power system reliable in cold weather, but when it happens every ten or twenty years (1989, 2011, 2021), it can be difficult to justify the expense of that sort of preparation. Of course, the costs of this choice are dramatically socialized across the entire state in these extreme weather events. The refinery might get cheaper power, but part of the cost of that cheapness is borne by the homeowner who loses power due to a lack cold weather capacity in the grid, can't heat their home, and their pipes burst or worse.
But the issues in TX were not confined to just the electric part of the energy infrastructure - natgas supply failed also. Some of this was due to things like wellheads freezing (wells very often produce water in addition to hydrocarbons). Some of it was due to bureaucratic snafus. For environmental reasons, many of the natgas pipeline pumping stations have been switched from running on their own gas supply to electrical power. These pumping stations have the ability to request treatment as critical infrastructure for which the power should never be deliberately cut. To do this requires filing paperwork with the state that many or most did not. The consequence of this is that as the electric utilities shed load to keep the grid up, they often cut off their own fuel supply and made the problem worse.