1. WSJ: While Houston Has Problems, a Touchdown on Mars

Let's take a moment to think about why Texan power grid failed and the mission to Mars succeeded. WSJ brings to bear some critical pieces of information that are entirely missing from most of the uninformed Twitter tirades.

2. American engineering lands another rover on the red planet. Imagine what it could do for Texas.

3. Journalists covering the Texas electrical system as well as the lobbyists who created it enjoy calling it a “deregulated” power market. But consumers who study the system will quickly realize that we are not witnessing free enterprise at work in the Lone Star State.

4. The first clue lies in the fact that 90% of the state’s electric load is controlled by a nonprofit entity run by a lawyer who answers to both the state Public Utility Commission and the state Legislature.

5. The commission’s rules cover everything from pricing, reliability and interconnection to vegetation management and workforce diversity. Political encouragement of alternative energy sources and overreliance on wind power have led to unnecessary pain for Texans.

6. Between 12 a.m. on Feb. 8 and Feb. 16, wind power plunged 93% while coal increased 47% and gas 450%, according to the EIA.

7. Yet the renewable industry and its media mouthpieces are tarring gas, coal and nuclear because they didn’t operate at 100% of their expected potential during the Arctic blast even though wind turbines failed nearly 100%.

8. The policy point here is that an electricity grid that depends increasingly on subsidized but unreliable wind and solar needs baseload power to weather surges in demand. Natural gas is crucial but it also isn’t as reliable as nuclear and coal power.

9. Politicians and regulators don’t want to admit this because they have been taking nuclear and coal plants offline to please the lords of climate change.

10. But the public pays the price when blackouts occur because climate obeisance has made the grid too fragile. We’ve warned about this for years, and here we are.

11. The rugged can-do Texas culture admired around the world is sadly not expressed in the architecture of its power market, which has for years featured the Enron-promoted model of competition.

12. It is not market competition but rather government-managed competition in which regulators tell various private entities how they will interact with the nonprofit operator of the grid.

13. Sadly for Texas residents, the attorneys, bureaucrats and politicians who created and oversee this system turned out to be all hat and no baseload.

14. But far above Texas today there’s a stirring example of politicians and bureaucrats staying out of the way of engineers at least enough to enable another fascinating achievement.

The End.

See this thread for interesting info on Mars mission. https://twitter.com/bansisharma/status/1362527685885452288?s=20