Well, this is exciting. Remember that little winter storm-driven electric catastrophe that the Texas government said killed 151 people and others estimated killed 700 people back in February?
They’re doing something about it!
As a refresher, what went wrong in February was primarily that the supply of natural gas was too low to handle the demand for electricity. Wells froze. Equipment broke. And with most of Texas’s power needs that time of year designed to be met by natural gas, the natural gas failures were the most impactful.
Thankfully, there seems to be an effort to avoid similar catastrophic events in the near future. From the Texas Tribune:
Texas utility regulators on Thursday approved a rule requiring power companies to better prepare for winter weather — based on recommendations that were made, but never acted upon, a decade ago by experts and federal regulators after a 2011 storm caused widespread rolling power outages.
Later in the piece:
“Never before have we had such robust weatherization standards in place with enforcement authority,” Commissioner Lori Cobos said during the Thursday meeting. “I think that is a huge step forward for the industry.”
I don’t know how substantial these regulations are. I don’t know how effective they will be. I share the desire of many to always ask with some rigor whether a governmental regulation is a good or bad idea before throwing it at a problem (in this case, since the government’s chosen to be highly involved in the market in the first place, we’re clearly getting some regulations, and they might as well be good). On the whole, it seems like the concept of doing the thing the people said to do ten years ago when they warned you about this sort of thing is a solid place to start. Hopefully this will save lives in the future.
