Electricity is a lifeline – literally in some cases, like the 246 Texans died during our 02-2021 grid failure. It is vital for our lives and is the bedrock of our economy, education, communications, fuel and water supplies and healthcare.
Absent major overbuild at huge ongoing cost, the non-interconnected isolated Texas electric grid (ERCOT) is a time-bomb risk. Deregulation and avoidance of Federal regulations – as we have with ERCOT being off the national grid – has pros and cons.
Free markets are almost always more efficient, however there is no incentive for producers to overbuild and have excess capacity for unexpected situations such as extreme weather or unexpected disaster.
Interconnecting the Texas grid to the U.S. East and West grids is not a perfect answer, but it does give us capacity to draw from other resources in an emergency and it provides a market to sell into for our producers.
Interconnection for the electrical grid seems a reasonable case of a scale utility question so vital that the benefit of public good may outweigh the burden of the same regulations that all other 47 contiguous U.S. states meet. It may well be to much of a risk in the 21st century not to interconnect our electric grid.
Regardless of which way we go, we will pay the price. What unites us – a full disclosure, full risk assessment and reliable cost effective electrical grid – likely far out weighs our human tendency to over-simplify and be comfortable sticking with the biases we all tend to have.
