[epistasis]

A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off.

Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because of the elimination of SPOF.

Solar and batteries distributed over a wide geographic area work fantastically, and this is a primary way that Texans will plan for their own energy security in the future, when they don't want to use fossil fuel based generators.

[eric-hu]

I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

[epistasis]

I believe those numbers are correct. Perhaps "major" is a subjective position, but an unexpected drop of 20% is quite major, IMHO.

Whereas wind was expected to drop in output, because wind is intermittent, and any primarily renewables based grid will have large overages of generation capacity to account for that. (Just as we currently have large overages in capacity for traditional generators).