Comment by WorkingDead

What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.