[chowells]

I can't believe people are using Texas as a positive example of deregulation after they demonstrated quite enthusiastically how broken their system is. A competent electrical system can handle sustained freezing temperatures without massive blackouts. Texas can't. (No, I can't believe they'll do any better next time. There were no market consequences for incompetence.)

[epistasis]

IMHO it's not useful to look at a huge and complex system and say "it's all good" or "it's all bad." Texas has a great system for choosing which energy to deploy, but not such a great system for ensuring capacity. The aspects of their system that speed the energy interchange are not the same aspects that cause deadly blackouts.

Texas is an energy-only market right now (payments only for kWh delivered), but adding a capacity market could help (payments for ensuring the ability to deliver electricity), and capacity markets are common in other energy markets around the US. And another thing that would have helped even more clearly is cleaning house at the ISO that didn't follow any of the guidelines from the massive outage from nuclear and gas that happened more than a decade ago. But the ISO failing to do what it's supposed to do is the regulators not doing their job. Regulators regulating what they have the power to do is clearly important in any system.

[dingnuts]

if one blackout from a freak storm in thirty years is your litmus test, I'd like to know where you live because I'm willing to bet the track record isn't substantially different -- except maybe in how it was covered.