The fact that extensive load shedding and brownouts etc needed to happen was not a result of decisions made during the weather event, but lack of infrastructure investment over decades (that may or may not have been under the control of ERCOT, rather than the legislature and state government regulators, but ERCOT certainly was on board with/lobbying for the conditions of deregulation that led to them).
During the weather event... ERCOT, the grid operator, did their job very competently. Making more capacity come online or reducing consumer demand was not really something that could be done during the weather event. They kept the grid from collapsing -- and it nearly did collapse, it was a close call. That was their job during the event.
I respectfully disagree. Demand might have been twice what supply was, but the way the load shedding was done wasn't smart at all. The rolling blackouts were done on a roughly 18-48 hour basis, i.e. if you lost power you probably lost it for at least 18 hours and I know plenty of people who lost it for much longer, up to 48 hours.
If demand was double what the supply was then it should have been possible to give people power for say 2 hours every 4 hours. Or maybe 6 hours every 12 hours. If demand outstripped supply by a factor of 4 then 3 hours every 12 hours.
But that's not what happened. A lot of houses have gas furnaces but they need electricity to run the fans and the ignition system and such. People died in their houses either from the cold or from running their cars in their garages trying to stay warm. A lot of pipes were burst due to not enough heat in the buildings.
I can think of at least a dozen ways in which the load shedding could have been better managed. I wouldn't agree that it was very competent.
Comparing that to "All my expierincing" first hand. Not even close to the same thing. They would not have been in the stressed situtation in the first place had they enforced the recommended corrections for cold weather protection in the first place. The fact that they had to turn off power generation because pipes were freezing at the generating stations is an absolute joke, and is the prime cause of the stress.
The local weather forecasts remind people to move plants indoors, cover exposed plumbing, etc. Maybe they should also start including a friendly reminder to the local power plants to also cover exposed plumbing, but why would they listen to that when they've ignored government sanctioned reports from investigations into previous failures?
> ERCOT, the grid operator, did their job very competently "Turn off the power so the demand goes away" Check "Issue rolling black outs so that the demand is lowered and manageable, and give people a fighting chance" Nope. These were absolutely not rolling black outs, but static black outs. The method they chose to "save the grid" was just as incompetent as not maintaining their systems in the first place.
