[_delirium]

There's definitely an opinion in Texas that ERCOT is more reliable than the other two US grid managers, so it's popular to remain independent for that reason as well (besides the political reasons). Both the Eastern [1] and Western [2] Interconnections have had major grid-management incidents that took down large portions of the grid in cascading failures, and some analysts think further incidents are likely [3], while the Texas grid has never gone down.

There is some support for expanding the capacity of the asynchronous DC interconnects, though, which would let Texas import & export more electricity to the other two grids without tying itself to them directly. It already does a modest amount of that, but the current DC links don't have very high capacity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

[2] https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/bla...

[3] https://www.vox.com/2014/4/14/5604992/us-power-grid-vulnerab...