Seriously check your outage maps. The rich people in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston have power while their poorer neighbors get screwed.
You think this is an accident? It’s about as accidental as 1am vote drops.
The problem is that the energy is deregulated and sold by 3rd party companies now. They never bought enough in advance to meet this demand.
Windmills are all in North TX several hundred miles from Dallas, San Antonio or Houston. That power is irrelevant.
Now we have plant failures. Some of the gas and coal plants are freezing. Gas doesn’t freeze unless it’s water laden. The water then freezes things. This means these plants are not maintained well like our roads.
This energy crisis is just as preventable as voter fraud. The problem is lots of people keep voting for morons. The morons deregulated energy in TX a long time ago. This is the reliability and service you get when you bid everything to the lowest price.
It was going all right until you whined about "deregulation". Wrong.
The only reason why you have intermittent sources like wind and solar is due to excessive regulation in the first place. Regulation on top of more reliable and dispatchable sources making them costlier.
Go to a third-world country and/or former socialist bloc and check whether state control left them reliable and well-maintained grids. Or save the trip and suck up: it's not.
Regulation won't help. The energy companies WANT TO SELL ENERGY. Not only they pay fines for contract breaches due to the lack of stability and availability, they are not selling their main product when you don't have power.
Every day they don't sell is a ~3% income loss for them before accounting for all the damages incurred with groceries stores and the like.
This right here. Energy Companies need to be held accountable if they're intentionally doing this, but I think it's more likely the Energy Companies are being screwed over by Regulations, and the Rich Folk probably have Private Generators.
Yeah, this idiot is complaining that power companies decided to lower costs by not planning for a literally never happened before cold weather event.
Yes, regulation would have prevented this if the regulators had forced them to prepare for a once in history event, which they wouldn't have, but let's assume they did. What would be the result?
You'd be paying double for all your power at all other times to make sure you have power on the two days in history that shit got this cold.
That's what's known in the industry as a "Bad Deal".
Random thought but... one thing i've noticed is whenever i've lived very close to hospitals the power outages are non existent to minimal during storms where everyone else seems affected.
Hospitals have massive generators. You cant be having the power go out when people are on life support systems, babies in the NICU and nurses and Dr's making Tik Tok videos
love that ending
I lived between two major hospitals. Their power lines are maintained meticulously and the crews go there first .
The problem is deregulation?! Ugh. You sound like you’re running for a Democrat seat on the utility board.
I know what you mean, there are cities that are set up to have separate power grids in some places. it is a common thing
Energy should be deregulated. Takes control away from the government, increases competition, and drives down prices.
I guess I am Rich now. I’m in Fort Worth and a long stretch all the way to my parents and grand parents has never lost power.
Major businesses that are never out of power are currently shut down around here. Friends and family in much higher cost homes are also out.
Deregulation lowered our prices drastically in TX so shut the hell up about your leftist government regulation BS. The problem is we let the government of TX invest in all this BS green energy out in west Texas instead of real plants that actually work.
And we got hit with a once in a lifetime winter surge.
You mean the places with the densest population?
There are plenty of poor in those cities.
Regulation created one type of problem and deregulation created another. Both involved the Government sticking it's nose into industries it did not understand or comprehend.
If anybody thinks deregulation resulted is LESS interference by Government, we need to talk.
"New Normal."
Nope it’s the rich neighborhoods with no power outages. I love in Dallas, have family in San Antonio and friends in Houston. You can look at the cpsenergy.com map for San Antonio. The richest neighborhood is Dominion. They have power and have neighborhoods to the south, east and west with 1000 to 5000+ out. Check the oncor.com energy map for Dallas. Highland Park and Preston Hollow have power with outages all around them.
Just like the privileged rich in Congress power for me, but not for thee.
Grid Basics.
Outages related to plants create outages which can be rotated through switching Transmission circuits and importing or exporting between power companies. Because these outages affect load balance, you can have transfers which do not make sense if you do not understand load balancing like exporting power when a hurricane causes a drastic load loss.
Transmission line damage cuts off power to substations and only marginal switching is available for energy restoration. This causes widespread outages and only at the fringes will there be electricity at some streets and not others close by.
Distribution line damage is by far the most common type of outage. Individual circuits are damaged and usually transformers are set off to protect the circuits from long term damage. This type of damage is often the type you have when power can be restored in hours because the individual circuits can be isolated until the damage is repaired .
Localized outages are caused by damage to the service drops to the home or damage to small segments of a circuit which cannot be isolated before repairs are completed. These are the most frustrating and confusing to those who don't understand the grid. Your neighbor may have power days before your power is restored.
The same reason Nancy Pelosi's properties never lose electricity during blackouts in Nor Cali.
Owns a big ol Generac?
All majority Democrat areas
Partly wrong pede. The city of San Antonio has a 100% monopoly on the power grid. Idk about the other cities. Edit: the dominion is also not the richest neighborhood, its the neighborhood all the athletes and stars move to so it most well know. There are a few neighborhoods around the city people don't even know exist that could buy the dominion out twice over. Shit there are some families around the quarry area that could probably buy half the dominion themselves. Yes the dominion has a lot of money but little compared to where the old money lives.
OP had me until deregulation, GTFO with that nonsense
Texas windmills are not all in North Texas. Just drove through it a few months ago. South Texas has a lot of them.
Rich people don't have access to a different power grid or gas lines. They just have personal tanks, generators, and various other redundancies. Something not limited to rich people, plenty of poor peppers made things like that a priority.
Poor Mormons often practice having a food storage, 72 hour kits, and ready for 2nd coming natural disasters. Everyone on Texas could be better prepared if they wanted to be.
You are right, but amazingly the rich are unaffected by “rolling blackouts.” I’m sure it’s all a coincidence though.
Rich people pay the taxes that maintain this power grid. I don't have this animosity towards them. Even in my own family the difference between the rich and the poor is personal choices. Do they save up or do they go into debt, do they piss away money on vices, do they spend that extra initial cost or buy the cheapest/less efficient options, did they put in the effort to develop a high paying skill or accept some grunt job as their career.
Don't major cities generate some of their own power? They're probably generating for themselves and it's not going out past that. Probably focused on preventing freezing.
The rich people always have power. That's how the world works.