The Texas electricity situation is sad, but it’s not clear that a lot of the finger-pointing is useful. Frozen wind turbines are a narrative being pushed, but the wrong reason. Natural gas plants and infrastructure were not hardened against cold.

Maybe that was incompetent decision. However, you can’t design against everything that can go wrong without having costs go to the moon.

Grids are complex, and once things start to go wrong, they go down.

There was a pair of incidents in Quebec that show that potential problems are fairly open ended.

In the late 1980s, the grid went down due to sunspots. (The poor public relations person who had to give that story to the media was mocked unmercifully.)

What happened was the increased solar activity created a differential in ground voltage between the North (where hydro generation capacity is) and the South (where the demand is) of about 1.5 volts (working from memory). That was enough to trigger safety circuits.

An unplanned grid shutdown creates voltage differentials measured in kilovolts. Equipment tends to melt, and had to be replaced.

Other grids were OK, since they have less of a geographic dispersion.

The next incident was the Ice Storm of 1998. A “once in a century” ice storm led to unplanned levels of ice on power lines, and the pylons toppled. Not easy to replace them all.

What could you do to stop those? Heavily over-engineered pylons all enclosed in Faraday cages going from James Bay to Montreal? That would have *slightly* raised the infrastructure cost.

Bad things happen, and that has to be accepted.