I'd rather my regulators copied ERCOT than what they are actually doing; I pay a lot for power because of serial gold-plating of infrastructure. Then maybe Australia'd be able to afford to manufacture something in globally significant quantities.
Not "fixing" things can lead to better outcomes for most people.
The reason it hasn’t been fixed is that the ercot market (which is an artificial, legislated thing) is intentionally structured so that the production facilities make unbounded profit during correlated failures.
I say “intentionally” because this keeps happening and the legislature explicitly refuses to fix it. There is no better proof than that.
One simple solution, assuming you don’t like legislating technical fixes, which I don’t like either, is to fine the shit out of them during correlated failures. For example (real legislation would hopefully be better):
100% of money in the market during months with more than a 10% peak outage would go to the game and wildlife service, or some other popular Texas thing, and they could establish criminal liability for intentionally curtailing production during power shortages. So, when this happens, costs go to max, and revenue goes to zero.
Or, they could just legislate basic 1800’s reliability measures.
Or, they could let all the idiots that voted these idiots freeze, but keep the industrial facilities online.
At this point, I don’t care. (Despite the efforts of some red state politicians to detain pregnant women, the US still has open internal borders, after all).
Anyway, I just want to be able to buy PVC the next time a line in my yard gets cut.
Nothing makes me give a shit about grid reliability in far off lands more than, well, a literal pool of it.
That would be much cheaper, and has the added benefits like prepares the community for all sorts of disasters.
This means people dying. To move people to a community hall you need enough transportation, clear roads, working communication, and many other things that are indirectly relying on power being available or the disaster plans working properly. (Which they sometimes won't) Also this would have to work for everyone at risk - not for the number of deaths we know about, but likely 100x that.
You can't ignore the effects of that once-a-decade failure and hope things will work fine.
Wikipedia tells me that something like 250 to 1,000 people died in the Texas power outage which was basically the worst conditions the state has ever seen. Assuming that the at-risk population was 100x that we're still talking numbers that can be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board which seems to roughly be the gap from Texas to California.
Raising power prices 33% will also kill people, they won't be able to heat their homes every year. I know people who have that problem right now, it is horrible. Even raising prices by ~10% to go from Texas to US national average will probably kill people. Someone will have to make hard choices between eating and heating if the prices go up 10% in real terms. Cheap power saves lives.
No, grids fail locally quite often and that's easier to manage. A large scale outage where you need to move thousands of people, and know who/where they are in the first place, with plans not fully tested for a decade at a time however is going to fail in many ways, especially when communication is also impacted. Maintaining the plans, training, supplies, etc long term is also not trivial.
Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
> be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board
There an assumption that it will be effective at scale. And that the price increase would be required. (I've seen quite a few sources saying proper maintenance would be cheaper than dealing with the fallout)
> Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
Actually it can. Coping without power for a few days is 100% something that a local community can do. There isn't a need for state-wide coordination although that'd probably help.
I mean, end of the day you're worried about a couple of hundred lives once a decade (and, for scale, hundreds of thousands of people die in Texas each year already - probably quite a few of which could be saved if power was cheaper!). The regulation is obviously not worth it, there are cheaper ways to look after cold people.
If you want to make an argument that it might be cost effective go ahead; I'd suggest that prices would be going to go up somewhere in the range of 10-33%. ERCOT responding by increasing standards on power producers is the usual brain-dead response that pushes prices up higher than what people would need to pay if they had a choice. Which is going to cause more damage and probably kill more people, it just happens to be deaths that the pro-regulatory types feel comfortable with ignoring because it isn't easy to name names.
You don't need to educate yourself as much as sit down and think through the second order effects of whether the situation is actually broken before asking ERCOT to 'fix' it. They are going to push the situation somewhere where the net damage will be more than it is now.