[dumbotron]

> Some of their stats resemble third world countries.

Have you walked through the TL?

Comparing California and Texas can be interesting because the states are both dominated by a single party, so you see how both ideologies can go wrong. With Texas being like a developing country, I'm reminded of the winter power outage. They love free markets. It's not worth it to harden the electric grid for an event that rare that only lasts a few days. Picking on California, its K-12 education is in the bottom quartile.

[zbrozek]

I live in the SFBA and have far worse uptime and far higher prices than Texas. The smugness from Californians wrt/grid does not make any sense to me. I would trade for Texas electrical grid performance in less than a heartbeat.

There was a five hour long outage on Monday while the weather was perfectly lovely. And more than a week cumulative outage in March when the weather was merely a little wet.

[dumbotron]

I'm not being smug about CA's grid. It has rolling blackout on hot days. Its problem is it doesn't let anyone build power plants.

[zbrozek]

Sorry, I didn't really mean to direct the comment at yours, but rather intended to build upon it. I meet a lot of folks around here who point to the Texas grid failure and snicker about how much better California is at regulating the grid. Yet I routinely put up with outages longer than Austin's under less-severe conditions.

[theironhammer]

Is SFBA's power private? Is LA's power still publicly owned? Do they have power outages (ie Brownouts etc)?

[zbrozek]

Most of the SF Bay Area gets its power from PG&E, which is an investor-owned utility. Palo Alto and Santa Clara are exceptions; they have municipal power companies.