Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.
People probably think otherwise because of availability bias, after that multi day outage that made headlines nationwide a few years ago. (In the same way that people overestimate the danger of plane crashes because they're rare but dramatic.)
1: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...
Anyway, I'm not saying Texas' grid is great. It isn't. But California is well below average in power reliability.
> In the last several years the state has increased generation capacity, greatly increased renewables, and improved grid reliability.
It must have been truly terrible before.
He has just heard from one of his mid level managers that things were blowing up and complained to our leadership which resulted in the meeting.
We were a pretty good company for doing contract work. Admittedly, we rarely made it past the"make it work" part of "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast" but that's the nature of contract development.
Our biggest mistake on that was relying on them to PM their own projects.
They assumed because they knew how to do Big infrastructure projects that they could handle software and technology projects too. Things only started to get better when we basically embedded our own PMs in their teams.
California was very unhappy with their performance and now Houston is unhappy with them as well.
> They have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it.
So in other words, no, they can't.
Wildfires are a particular cause, but it happens all the time for other reasons.
If the power is not on, for any reason, it's an outage. Period.
It doesn’t matter if the power company stops supplying power intentionally for safety reasons. Residents are WITHOUT power.
Definition of power outage from wikipedia: “A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.”
Your comment is akin to saying i’m not in the dark if i intentionally flip my circuit breakers off. I’m in the dark, regardless of the intentions.
The recent “public safety power shutoffs” (which are not rolling blackouts) are also not due to safety reasons, but because PG&E was trying to blackmail the state into bailing them out against lawsuits for the fires they caused. It is a case of “well, shucks, since we can’t absolutely guarantee that our power lines will never start a fire with 100% certainty… I guess we have no choice but to turn off power for some of your constituents, who will be selected in such a way that at least one person in every county will be affected (and thus color the entire map red) but without significantly reducing the number of kWh we deliver (and can charge for) while doing so”.
In both cases, the power company was not unable to deliver power, but chose not to because they believed they could score political points by holding ratepayers hostage.
They're either all terrible stewards of the grid or Texans are all victims of propaganda, because all four of these have had extended outages following most severe weather events of the last decade (hurricanes, I'm willing to give a pass to, some, but we're also talking 'cold weather in winter has a very real potential to cause widespread blackouts').