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Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

Or just remove subsidies and enforce anti-trust laws to make sure there is real competition.

Go live in Texas and see how that has worked out with their power grid.

The power goes out just as often in California and Oregon, but news outlets cover the Texas outages for political reasons.

California and Oregon grids integrate with the rest of the country. Texas' grid does not, for very political reasons.

The two are qualitatively different, it has nothing to do with news coverage.

Do you think the Texas grid is not regulated?

California has more outages than Texas.

There is a difference between regulation and subsidies.

Texas has much cheaper electricy than California:

https://quickelectricity.com/texas-and-california-energy-sid...

> Texas is the top producer of renewable electricity in the US, followed by California. Both states are rich in renewable sources and actively working to expand their generation capacity.

Edit: Texas is not a free market! It has subsidies & regulations.

Do you think the Texas grid is not regulated?

It is regulated to make long term reliability and capacity planning economically unviable.

California has more outages than Texas.

Mainly due to wild fires which are beyond anyone's control. The outages in Texas are mostly the direct result of political ideology and incompetence.

> The outages in Texas are mostly the direct result of political ideology and incompetence

Do you have any metric that validates what you say? Becuase, a reasonable person can calmly make the opposite argument.

You can protect the grid against wildfires. OTOH, California's utilities also cause wildfires due to incompetence [1]. Texas had a record-low winter storm that caused a major outage.

Also, California's electricity is more than twice as costly as that of Texas.

https://quickelectricity.com/texas-and-california-energy-sid...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/pge-to-pay-55-million-fo...

> Pacific Gas & Electric has agreed to pay more than $55 million to avoid criminal prosecution for two major wildfires started by aging Northern California power lines belonging to the nation’s largest utility, prosecutors announced Monday

Texas had a record-low winter storm that caused a major outage.

Followed by record high summer heat that caused outages too. Texas power grid operates on the verge of collapse --- because of bassackwards "free market" ideology. You don't have to take my word for it, several studies have said the same.

Also, California's electricity is more than twice as costly as that of Texas.

Texas uses tax payer money to subsidize their grid's inadequacy. They pay selected large enterprises to shutdown and stop consuming when their grid starts to fail.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-r...

This is the prevailing "free market" ideology in Texas --- instead of making it economically viable for providers to add more capacity.

That’s false. PG&E is the largest provider in the state and their outages are caused by poor quality controls, lack of line and pole maintenance, vegetation overgrowth, poor resilience to weather conditions, and carelessness, primarily. This -results- in fires at times, and they are in constant litigation. They have a dysfunctional-by-design relation with the cpuc.

Can't. Physical infrastructure should be built once, and owned by the government, who rents out bandwidth capacity to retail ISP providers. Then you get competition in that much more ideal market.

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