Comment by mschuster91
9 hours ago
> with Texas having their own for some reason.
That reason is that Texas wants to avoid federal regulation [1] - regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. But hey, 702 deaths [2], a small price to pay for freedom of regulations!
> Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time?
They take money and political willpower. Both are in short supply - electricity rates here in Europe are already high (and rates in the US very low), so utilities try to avoid pissing off consumers even more, and political willpower for billions of dollars of investment isn't there either as thanks to decades of austerity and trickle-down ideology there is no tax base to pay for it any more.
> regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter.
They also produce the most renewable power in the country. If you account for externalities prevented by this (fossil fuel induced damage and deaths), who is looking good now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
It got so cold that the oil in the wind turbines froze. If Texas was connected to the rest of the country it would be subject to federal regulations that require winterization and even if the wind turbines weren't frozen it would have been able to import power from other places that weren't frozen over.
Frozen wind turbines was a microscopic part of the problem compared to almost half of the fossil fuel natural gas plants being offline due to severe cold and freeze.
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