Living In Infamy

Texas' power company CEO claimed we're 'ready for the frigid temps' days before blackouts: meeting recordshttps://t.co/vnukNv3jJR

— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 18, 2021

I have no love for ERCOT, but they aren’t the fall guy here. The Republicans who set up ERCOT are the root of this problem. And the problem, in part, is what ERCOT is not. It is not, despite the headline, a power company. It controls the distribution of power, but not the generation of power.

So it can only “suggest” what power generators do to winterize. It can tell distributors to cut off power, but it can’t tell generators to make that power.

The “genius” of Texas deregulation decades ago was to separate power generation from power transmission. ERCOT controls the latter, not the former. Apparently nobody controls the former, and so now the market has “taken care of it.”

The market is a great green god which answers to no one. Blessed be the name of the market. America’s original sin of racism is actually behind that thinking. When I have the time I’ll try to elucidate that point. It’s not original to me, and something I recently learned. I need to track down a link so I can tell you about it.

For now, the wages of sin are still death.