Well, one big reason is that Texas cannot be forced to sell electricity to another state since it is not connected. The politics of electricity generation are rather odd in the US.
I heard that its because Texas is one of the few (perhaps only) states that can't just get power from other grids. That, and many other reasons, but if they are set up in such a way that prevents them from leveraging other grids....woof.
IIRC, one of the reasons Texas has a separate grid is to avoid Federal regulation: The source of the US’s power to regulate electricity is the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, which doesn’t apply if nothing crosses state borders.
It is a political issue. Texas refuses to regulate their grid to meet certain standards. They're so unwilling to do it that they purposely keep their grid separated from the rest of the country.
Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.
Yeah, Texas needs energy they don't have. They could have it if they were connected to any other power grid. But they purposefully built their grid to be incompatible with the US's other grids. There are still some interchanges, but those are inefficient (have to convert power from AC to DC and then back to AC at a different frequency) and running well over their capacity right now.
Isn’t the Texas grid largely isolated, with only minimal connections to the two major multi state grids that the other states connect to? I’d guess that also contributes by limiting their options for dealing with excess when demand is low or shortages when demand is high.
I think there's a balance. You want a slight surplus in your local area and connected so you can pump it somewhere else when that somewhere else goes down. Though IIRC Texas has far more problems than just not being connected (also far more than just renewables either, which was a big talking point).
Texas isn't connected to either of the two national power grids (east and west half of lower 48 states, roughly) so that their power system isn't subject to federal regulation.
At least part of the reason is regulatory. The national grid regulator (FERC) gets its foothold through the interstate commerce clause. Since Texas heavily restricts the interstate interconnections it is not regulated federally (or at least less regulated). Of course this doesn’t explain the East/west non-interconnection, I think historically the Rockies do most of that though (as the article mentions). The issue is only partially technical and largely administrative.
You are correct about Texas not wanting the Federal gov't to have much control over their energy grid and that is a large part of the reason that we are not connected to other parts of the national grid.
Back a few decades ago when Clean Air regulations came into play (Texas was not on the national grid at the time) Texas used their control of the Texas grid to allow grandfathering in of most of the dirty coal generation plants with no requirements that they meet federal standards. Texas mined lignite for many of their plants and bought coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin for others. New plants under construction had to meet the new standards but old plants could keep on rocking along spewing their ash and pollutants all over the state and everyone downwind. Supposedly it was allowed because utilities argued that it was too expensive to bring them into compliance.
What a joke. This is the same state where a chicken billionaire walked the floor of the legislature passing envelopes of cash to representatives and at the time said that this was just the way to do business here.
And after last year's winter break-down they crafted a handy way to pass all the costs of electricity related to their failures to do simple maintenance and upgrades on to Texas taxpayers while at the same time lobbying and winning property tax reductions which conveniently enough, finances a large part of the state's operations. People keep voting for the same old losers and then griping when it bites them in the ass.
So many parts of Texas are broken and dysfunctional that it is sad but funny to hear someone say they want to move here for any reason. We used to be great but the clowns are driving the short bus here now and everyone wants to ride since it's cheaper than the last place they lived, maybe.
Well, there's also a cost to connecting the other two major grids, and Texans have collectively decided that this cost is not worth it. Energy sovereignty is a concept we talk about in the context of nation-states, but it's also applicable in the context of States.
Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas, and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
For internal economic reasons, Texas may not want to export electricity. To do so would bring it under federal regulation, and additional taxes.
This reminds me of Andy Grove's article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07.... Most thought-provoking was about foreign dependence: Electricity can be transported only over land. Consequently, it will stay in (or stick to) the continent where it is produced.
"The Texas grid is isolated from the rest of the U.S., so transmission of power from other states was not available to relieve those stuck in the cold."
Not quite true, as I understand it. We are able to buy from the eastern grid, but not from the western one. There is also a link to the Mexican grid.
Not to detract from anything you said but I read that Texas specifically is unique in that they don’t want to connect to the national grid to avoid being regulated by the federal government. It creates other problems like we saw in 2021 as well
Interesting: I assumed Texas wasn't connected to the national grid because they hate the Federal govt (I remember Texas' Rick Perry saying he wanted to abolish the Dept of Energy.) But Michael Lee says it's because they can move faster in building transmission lines for wind energy. No idea if this is true.
reply