[the_real_sparky]

The costs of outages are much greater than just a few people dying. A lot of effort is put into quantifying the costs of reliability on the electric system, only for you to just hand-wave it all away. At least try to educate yourself at more than a surface level if you’re going to argue about it online.

https://icecalculator.com/home

[roenxi]

You're up against permanent increases in the cost of electricity which would likely be measured in tens of percent. Proposing to take that cost on to mitigate a once-in-a-decade event is unlikely to be cost effective. And that is generously assuming that this is actually a once-a-decade event and not an outlier that caught everyone off guard.

If you want to make an argument that it might be cost effective go ahead; I'd suggest that prices would be going to go up somewhere in the range of 10-33%. ERCOT responding by increasing standards on power producers is the usual brain-dead response that pushes prices up higher than what people would need to pay if they had a choice. Which is going to cause more damage and probably kill more people, it just happens to be deaths that the pro-regulatory types feel comfortable with ignoring because it isn't easy to name names.

You don't need to educate yourself as much as sit down and think through the second order effects of whether the situation is actually broken before asking ERCOT to 'fix' it. They are going to push the situation somewhere where the net damage will be more than it is now.