[ashtonkem]

My understanding is that the energy markets started reacting to the polar vortex with days or weeks worth of warning, meaning that Griddy shouldn't have been that surprised that something was coming. Therefore it appears like Griddy was asleep at the helm, uninterested in doing anything about it, couldn't negotiate/hedge in time, or just internally confused.

[soylentcola]

Can't you say this for most things, though? People talked about the likelihood of a new contagious respiratory viral pandemic for years. Plans were drawn up, warnings were made, and the response was mostly "uh huh, that would suck for sure". Same could be said about anyone who's ever had their data lost to malware or hardware failure and didn't have a proper backup in place.

On some level I think it's human nature to underestimate some types of risk (and the nature of businesses to optimize for profit based on an understanding of this nature).

[ashtonkem]

There’s a big difference between “there might be a pandemic at some point in the indeterminate future” and “the price of 7 day gas futures is rising rapidly”. There’s also a difference between “Texas’ grid might fail in a future freeze” and “there will be a bad freeze next week”.

It doesn’t make sense to try and draw a parallel between a bad hypothetical that might happen in some indeterminate future and a negative possibility that will either come to pass or fizzle within a very short time horizon.

[readflaggedcomm]

The article says they told their customers to switch away. What it doesn't mention is that this was over a weekend, and many people couldn't manage the switch before the weather hit.