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.
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
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.