Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas

That doesn’t suggest that they’d build without the subsidy, but that they want to be able to take advantage of the subsidy right away, if it gets put in place.

No Texas county breaks the top 10 for counties with the shortest life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._counties_with_sho...

10 years less than the national average would get you to 69, and be #5 on the list. For comparison, #50 is only 6y below the national average.

From my understanding part of the problem also is even landlords and businesses benefit from prop 13 and same with people that own multiple properties. Honestly, I think something like Idaho's Homeowners Exemption is better. The owner has to live in it to qualify. https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1051.cfm

Also states like Nevda have done some other interesting things like letting family farms get a Limited Allodial Title for a period in time before stopping. I just think prop 13 was not planned out very well and applies to too many entities, but the idea of not wanting to force people out their homes is certainly a problem other states worry about.

Check figures 2.c on page 18 and 2.o on page 34 in UT's report on this (https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%28...) for a sense of the scope of how unexpected capacity outages break down.

Yes--a lot of wind was offline. But all of the expected wind capacity could have been met and the grid would have still needed to shed quite a bit of load. In fact, all of the expected wind, solar, coal, and nuclear could have been online and the grid would have still had to shed a meaningful amount.

The scale of the natural gas outages was larger than the entire load-shed, afaict.

Texas has more wind power generation than any other state in the US by far. Texas is all aboard the wind train. It's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to win. But that doesn't change reality.

In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind generation. On your average summer day, wind generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the day.

Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is still significant demand while solar generation is dropping.

Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we (humans) can choose to burn more oil and create thermal generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.

It’s not a choice of “free market versus regulation.” It’s a heavily regulated market. The question is only about the design of the regulatory scheme.