1/x A few thoughts on #TexasBlackout : First, it wasn't the damn wind turbines. ERCOT has been very clear about this. There is no controversy here. If anything, wind and solar were among the first generating sources to come back online. qz.com/1973423/were-t…
2/x Was Texas left more vulnerable to an outage like this because of its weird byzantine deregulated electricity market? Maybe, & ERCOT may need to take some capacity market cues from its neighbor PJM, which instituted new rules after 2014 polar vortex
3/x But: "It’s not clear to me that this is the kind of situation that we should expect there to be market-based solutions for," @emilygrubert said. The jury is still out on how much and which kinds of regulation yield the maximum reliability at minimal cost
4/x Plus, the weather was just so bad, across the entire state, that blackouts would have been likely no matter where this happened or in what kind of market
5/x Still, utilities across the board need to do better at planning for extreme weather. “Our existing processes are not really designed to consider the extreme climate scenarios we expect to see,” says @EPRINews Daniel Brooks
6/x But, at a certain point, this is just what climate change looks like, and we can't solve the whole problem through the grid alone. It becomes cost-prohibitive to keep the grid running through every possible contingency.
7/x So we need to make sure we have adequate public heating/cooling spaces with their own power supply, to avert death/illness, esp in minority communities that are often the first to go dark. "We need to think about this from a justice perspective."
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