[cbsmith]

> ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. It's particularly easy when you have to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load. Retrofitting winterization is more expensive. If you build in support for winterization when you build the capacity in the first place (which is what happens with sane regulatory oversight), it's all quite inexpensive. It'd be one thing if the cold was a once a century surprise, but when you know you're going to have cold events multiple times over the lifetime of your equipment, it's really easy to do this right.