The same Texas that has statewide power outages every time it gets below freezing (despite knowing for 25+ years it’s a problem) because of their lack of regulation and central planning?
I would not entirely dismiss the way the power market works in Texas. I have not disagreement the 2021 storm should never have happened. At the same time though, I don’t believe other energy markets work very well either. I would prefer a more Texas like approach but with some thoughtfulness around capacity instead of just generation.
> I have not disagreement the 2021 storm should never have happened.
But they still haven’t fixed any of the issues. The exact same thing is going to happen again when (not if) it freezes.
> I would prefer a more Texas like approach but with some thoughtfulness around capacity instead of just generation.
Capacity isn’t the issue. Lack of winterization of pumps is the issue. Because that costs money and private companies have zero incentive to make the investment if government doesn’t force them to.
Winterization is a fix for last time’s failure, not a strategy for the future. A market like Texas can work if it values resilience alongside price efficiency, meaning capacity planning, diversified generation, and yes, some enforced standards. Otherwise you’re just running a lean system that collapses the moment reality strays from the model.
That storm was an issue for other markets as well but they were mostly able to get away with rolling blackouts due to interconnects. Those same markets and similar winterization issues but were under FERC guidelines. Folks love to anchor onto to winterization issue like it did not impact other FERC regions.
>Winterization is a fix for last time’s failure, not a strategy for the future. A market like Texas can work if it values resilience alongside price efficiency, meaning capacity planning, diversified generation, and yes, some enforced standards. Otherwise you’re just running a lean system that collapses the moment reality strays from the model.
What are you even trying to say? A private company isn't going to magically "value resilience" if there's no incentive to do so. They make MORE money when they have outages, why would they prevent that? The solution to the issue, which has worked literally everywhere else, is government regulation.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. "If only capitalism didn't work the way it works it would be perfect".
>That storm was an issue for other markets as well but they were mostly able to get away with rolling blackouts due to interconnects. Those same markets and similar winterization issues but were under FERC guidelines. Folks love to anchor onto to winterization issue like it did not impact other FERC regions.
Citation of which other markets had blackouts due to not winterizing pumps that had been called out repeatedly after identical outages prior in 2010 and 1989? You conveniently left that out, I'm sure it was just an oversight.
Because if I had to bet money, you're talking about the power companies in other states who WERE prepared for the freeze asking homeowners to drop their thermostats a couple degrees because the cold snap was driving demand significantly higher than normal. NOT because of power plant outages due to lack of preparation and component failure - due to lack of regulation.
You’re clearly frustrated here, but let’s keep it in the realm of facts rather than snark. I didn’t “leave out sources” to hide anything, I was speaking from the same public data you can find in FERC/NERC’s joint report on the 2021 event.
SPP did in fact suffer significant generation losses, around 30% at peak, during the February 2021 storm. Causes were mixed: natural gas supply constraints, plant equipment failures, and yes, winterization gaps. Prior to that event, FERC’s winterization guidance was minimal and largely voluntary, so both SPP and ERCOT were operating without strong federal mandates.
The difference in outcomes wasn’t that SPP magically avoided the same issues, it was that SPP is interconnected with MISO and other regional grids. That allowed them to rotate outages in short windows to maintain stability, while ERCOT’s ~50% generation loss, combined with its isolation from other grids, meant load shedding had to be longer and deeper to prevent collapse.
If we’re going to critique Texas’s market, we should separate the “market structure” question from the “operational standard” question. A competitive market like ERCOT’s can work, but without binding requirements on winterization and resource adequacy, you’re just betting the grid on ideal conditions. SPP’s experience shows that interconnection alone doesn’t prevent failures, but it does give operators more options when the weather turns.
Can you drop some of the hyperbole and passive aggressiveness? You don’t even understand my position yet being quite passive aggressiveness for no reason.
I'm done with the discussion until you can provide a link to all the other states under regulation that had outages as as result of frozen pumps that had occurred multiple times over the previous 25+ years.
It's a straightforward ask that you're actively avoiding because it didn't happen and contradicts the story you're fabricating.
Not sure why you are so angry. I am trying to help you understand at least my perspective but you keep being quite aggressive for no reason.
You are framing this as if the only relevant comparison is “multiple frozen pump events over 25+ years,” but that is narrowing the scope to avoid the larger point. The February 2021 FERC/NERC report clearly documents that frozen instrumentation, valves, and pumps occurred in both regulated and unregulated markets during the same storm. SPP, MISO, and even parts of PJM experienced outages tied to equipment freezing, though the scale and duration differed because of interconnection and resource diversity.
What is different in Texas is not that freezing only happens there, but that ERCOT lost roughly 50 percent of its generation and could not import meaningful power to offset it. SPP lost about 30 percent, had similar natural gas and winterization issues, but managed to rotate outages for shorter periods because it could pull from neighboring grids.
If you want the source, the joint FERC, NERC, and regional entity “February 2021 Cold Weather Grid Operations” report is publicly available and breaks this down by region. It does not fit the claim that regulated markets never see cold-weather-driven pump or plant failures. The record shows they do, but their structure gives them more tools to manage the consequences.
My whole original point was that a more market based generation and consumption model should not be overlook but let’s go through some simple facts because I think your narrative is off track.
1) Both Ercot and SPP had winter weather failures during that storm. Pretty similar on the natural gas side, frozen wells, lack of supply, huge spikes in the spot market.
2) SPP which is federally regulated had very similar winterization voluntary guidelines in place. Post event there are now new rules in place for winter.
3) SPP was able to fair better because they used a rolling blackout to different regions. Using the interconnect they could get energy from outside their grid and create short 60min blackouts. ERCOT had no luxury because of their lack of real interconnects.
You’re more than welcome to read the review of the event from SPP. They call out well-head freeze offs, frozen cooling towers, intakes, fuel lines, etc. 50% of forced generation was a fuel supply issue.
You’re making it sound like Texas was an outlier here. It was not, SPP had the same exact issues of course with a slightly different fuel mix but they got by better with their interconnects. I don’t know why you are struggling to see that this winter event caught other grids by surprise. I am not defending Texas here but simply pointing out facts compared to your modified narrative.
> I don’t believe other energy markets work very well either.
but is isn't even about that storm, big "oh no" situations happen sooner or later (e.g. see energy outage in Spain) what is important is that you learn from it.
but more important in this argument is the general design, how can it handle flexible loads, how can it share loads between areas, how many ways to handle partial failure does it has etc.
and Texas is kinda not that good in all of that AFIK
the problem is that there are markets where politics fully getting "out of the way", doesn't work as the market dynamics favor things which might be better for the people running the gird, but are bad on a state economical level anyway (but getting in the way here is using tax money to make sure the net is stable, not getting int the way of that to protect personal investments)
it's a bit like freighttrains in many parts of the EU, there operating does in most situation make no profit. But having them is helping the economy as a whole and can (implicitly) safe the state/region etc. money. So it makes sense to place some tax money into making them still viable to operate as that investment in a roundabout way saves more money then spend.
I agree that the ability to adapt, whether to flexible loads, partial failures, or cross-area balancing, is the real test of a grid design. Texas’s isolation means it inherently lacks some of the tools SPP or MISO can use, which makes resilience harder. That is not a “market” problem so much as a structural one. ERCOT’s ruleset was built to optimize for low-cost generation in-state, not multi-region contingency planning.
Where I think a Texas-like market could work better is if you layered competitive generation with enforceable capacity and resiliency standards, along with some interconnection flexibility. Right now, the market rewards generators for selling MWh in good weather, not for being ready in bad weather. That is the economic misalignment.
The EU freight analogy works in the sense that reliability is often a public-good investment. No private actor has the incentive to overbuild or maintain resources for rare events. Texas’s approach does not have to mean politics fully getting out of the way. It could mean using market signals to keep prices efficient while still mandating the backup, winterization, and grid-sharing capabilities that the economy needs.
This just shows how you know only the talking points. The power outages are not due to lack of central planning, it's very explicitly the reverse. If Texas were hooked up to the rest of the country, those outages would not be a thing. It's the purposeful regulation that has caused those problems.
So you're saying when the Texas grid fails, it's because of over overegulation. But the solution to those failures is to tap into the national grid, a grid that follows stricter FERC regulations.
I guess you’re saying that the current status is mandated by the design of the grid. Which is true, but that status would be best described as “deregulated” rather than “purposeful regulation.”
Lack of regulation and oversite around weatherization and redundancy is the main source of our problems. The Texas’ grid is market based and so unregulated that it’s not connected to the national grid so it can avoid federal regulation.
Every single state surrounding Texas was also suffering from power outages due to the winter storm in 2021, despite all of those states being part of the non-Texas interconnections. The outages in those states weren’t as bad, but even if Texas was better connected to them, there’s no guarantee that they would have had any power to share.
I was personally without power for 72 hours in sub zero temps. Every night I went to bed and wondered if my kids would be alive when/if I woke up. You know what that feels like?
I can’t do anything to *guarantee* you’ll never experience it, but I can take steps to decrease the chances or decrease the severity/dueation. I think my kids are worth it. Even if it’s not a *guarantee*.
Now that’s out of the way. I recommend you listen to the podcast. Really. Even if you lived through it. Even if you think you know everything about it. You will learn something I guarantee. It’s well produced and an easy listen. It’s an eye opener too. “The Disconnect”
Your condescending appeal to emotion does nothing to change the facts. My family and I too lived through the winter storm, going multiple days without power. It doesn’t change anything about what I said. The national-vs-local-grid topic is a red herring, as even the non-Texas grids were without power. If you want to actually change things, you need to acknowledge these facts rather than letting yourself be controlled by emotion.
> The national-vs-local-grid topic is a red herring
I used that in passing as a measure to show how violently against regulation texas is. It was a throwaway sentence that apparently missed its mark.
> It doesn’t change anything about what I said
What did you say? I heard "we shouldn't try to make it better if it's not GUARANTEED to make it better." I countered with "it's worth trying." I think that's not your recollection of events. Maybe you're saying that the grid not being connected to the national grid didn't cause it to go down?
I'm saying that the craptastic market-focused enron designed grid system is awful and the lackluster political response afterward is not confidence inspiring. We can and should do better.
> My family and I too lived through the winter storm, going multiple days without power
That sucks. I genuinely hope you don't have to go through another one like it.
> facts
I gave you my source of facts (podcast), besides living through it. I'm not hearing different facts or sources from you. Is there something misleading or wrong about the podcast you want to highlight? Other than you're against connecting to the national grid, what are you advocating for?
> The power outages are not due to lack of central planning
It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand?
There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.
Winterization was a problem but it was also a problem for other regions that are part of FERC. You’re latching onto the wrong problem. FERC has updated guidelines since that storm.
Let’s not be anything like Texas.