alt Hacker News"There have been 263 power outages across Texas since 2019, more than any other state, each lasting an average of 160 minutes and impacting an estimated average of 172,000 Texans, according to an analysis by electricity retailer Payless Power (https://paylesspower.com/blog/blackout-tracker/)"
Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.
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What you talked about is not a Texas grid problem, but a local problem. The Texas grid itself is very reliable.
> Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.
Yes, a rare storm knocked out power and people died. It is a big deal and a lot of things changed after the event.
But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.
So about one every 9 days that affects 0.55% of the population. So in a 3 year window a Texan has about a 50% chance of losing power for 2.5 hours. Seems pretty good to me.
Having experienced the Snowpocalypse and mini Snowpocalypse, weeks of 2019 PG&E PSPSes, and the 2000–2001 CALISO-Enron rolling blackouts, it's ridiculous for those in glass houses to throw stones.
Improper deregulation never ends well.
Texas has installed a vast number of solar and battery backup systems since 2019. And it will be a few years, but is going HEAVILY into nuclear (and for the next 3.5, is going to get auto-approval to actually build them. ERCOT is changing fast, don't rehash stale narratives.
That website shows California as currently worse. It looks like Larger states just have more power outages, which is to be expected. Texas also is a weird state that is very large it gets Tornadoes, extreme heat, and hurricanes, while also having several very large metro areas in it. There also isn't anything indicated differences in grid monitoring, are all grids (like large rural grids) monitored to the same levels?