4.49/365: gaslighting by the Texas power company, ERCOT

I live in Texas. I know I’ve mentioned that a time or 19. In Texas a corporation with the acronym ERCOT runs the electricity for almost the entire state. From their website: “The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers — representing about 90 percent of the state’s electric load.”

What that means is that electric companies buy the rights to resell the energy from ERCOT to citizens who for the most part, didn’t realize until this week that their power worked this way. I was unaware of it and I consider myself to be pretty damn informed of what’s going on around me.

The other thing that makes Texas different from every other state is that we’re only on our own grid. You see, other states share a grid or grids. When a state or part of state loses power, they can “borrow” power from another state (provide lines aren’t down and that sort of thing). Texas isn’t only the Lone Star State, is the Lone Energy State because when the power goes out, we’re on our own.

ERCOT is also at least 20 years behind on updating the grid.

The weird thing is that this past Sunday, while people were prepping pipes for the freezing temperatures, ERCOT starting gaslighting us on Twitter!

And the worst one:

Unbelievable. So, more than 4.3 million were without power Tuesday morning and realized what ERCOT even was, went to their Twitter, and saw that bullshit. I should correct myself — the people who were fortunate enough to have 5G to access the internet to know what the hell was going on.

What you hear about this state is true. Everything is bigger in Texas. Bigger screw-ups and bigger greedy corporations who decided to make energy profitable at the expense of the life and quality of life of Texans. At least 10 people have died from hypothermia in my county, per Harris County Judge Hidalgo. That’s only one county. And that’s 11 too many. This has to be fixed. If this doesn’t show that deregulation is bad, I don’t know what does.

I’ve hate-tweeted ERCOT and I know that won’t help anything, but it made me feel better momentarily. Blogging about it is a little more permanent. If any readers want to share this post with others who don’t understand what the big deal is about our power down here, please do.