One of the reasons Texas is having so much trouble keeping power on during this is because the state is mostly on its own electric grid, a regulatory set up it’s maintained so the federal government doesn’t look too deep into its festering pit of corruption and price gouging.

Most states have power sharing agreements that allow them to balance out their energy needs. Sunny California sends electricity to the Northwest in the winter when people there need heat, the Northwest send power south in the summer when everyone need to run ACs

Texas doesn’t do this, in part because connecting to out-of-state power grids would put them under federal scrutiny. One incident in 1976, called “The Midnight Connection,” where the grid briefly connected to a grid in Oklahoma, led to a couple decades worth of legal wrangling

Subsequently Texans pay more for power on average (sometimes a lot more, one 2008 review found the state paid 30% over the national average). And it means the system has no capacity to balance itself out in an emergency.

So basically you’ve got a local price control regime upheld with a fairy tale about independence and freedom from federal scrutiny. Such folksy myths are cute right up until they gain a body count, which this one is currently racking up.

None of which is the fault of individual Texans, who right now are dealing with power outages during a very uncommon weather event they quite understandably don’t maintain the infrastructure to deal with.

A few more thoughts on this: Texas’s power grid is being put through a strain it isn’t really prepared for. Winters are usually mild, but when half your state’s energy comes from natural gas and half your homes are heated with natural gas, a freeze like this sucks the system dry.

Lines depressurize because so much fuel is needed and that causes more power plants to go off line because they can’t keep up the gas pressure needed to operate. So it all cascades. The high demand literally shuts down chunks of the system.

On top of that the natural gas system is literally freezing up. The state ordered winterization upgrades after a cold snap back in 2011 but as none of that shit was mandatory it’s pretty clear nothing was done.

The state has major capacity for wind power but doesn’t depend on it for more than 20% of its energy. It doesn’t produce as much in the winter anyway. Solar generation is actually up a bit. Nuclear is stable. Natural gas though, half the state’s power, is absolutely collapsing.

But still a bunch of Texas politicians are jabbering on about how this is a failure of renewables and about wind turbines freezing up and other shit, which is expected because that’s what they’re paid to do by their major donors.

But “if things get cold enough we’re fucked” was a totally predictable emergency for state government and the people actually in charge of the power grid and they did fuck all about it because there’s no money in actually making sure your citizen don’t freeze to death in the dark

It’s also why I got nothing for disdain for anyone who blames individual Texans for the situation they’re in, as if the states is some monolithic shared consciousness. The fix was in on this shit long before a lot of people affected by it were even born.

Stealing back the handles of power from entrenched interests is a long awful slog, especially when a lot of people depend on those interests for their livelihood. Blaming people for the tyranny they live under is just a smug way to root for tyranny.

I’ve lived in places where weather worse than this is a matter of course, but that just means I know how being ready for that dominates your life and how much work goes into just living normally in it. It’s not something you can just drop on someone and expect them to survive.

So I can understand an individual Texas city not having a supply of sand or salt for the roads they would use once a decade, if ever. I can understand not having a good winter jacket that would cost more than it’s worth and spend most its time as moth food.

But the people who operate the electric systems knew better, and instead of acting on that they made years and years worth of policy decisions that only made the crisis harder and harder to deal with. And now that choice is killing people.