They have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it. California faced the same problem in the past. Rolling blackouts led to the end of a governorship and to the biggest corporate scandal in history.
Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.
Right, but California took aggressive action to stop market manipulation. That was 20+ years ago. In the last several years the state has increased generation capacity, greatly increased renewables, and improved grid reliability.
According to a Department of Energy report, as reported by US News [1], in 2023 California ranked #37 for "the number of minutes of power outages the average customer experiences in a year". Texas was much better at #28.
People probably think otherwise because of availability bias, after that multi day outage that made headlines nationwide a few years ago. (In the same way that people overestimate the danger of plane crashes because they're rare but dramatic.)
The DoE report on California is skewed by rural areas that suffer outages due to wildfires and winter storms. There have been no extended outages that effect large cities on the scale of Houston.
I worked with center point. They hired my company to do a digital transformation on their geospatial, work order and asset management systems. They were terrible. At one point our COO has to sit down with the VP in charge of the project and tell him what was going on. The VP has no clue what we were doing, what his people were supposed to be doing or why there were problems and the project was behind.
He has just heard from one of his mid level managers that things were blowing up and complained to our leadership which resulted in the meeting.
We were a pretty good company for doing contract work. Admittedly, we rarely made it past the"make it work" part of "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast" but that's the nature of contract development.
Our biggest mistake on that was relying on them to PM their own projects.
They assumed because they knew how to do Big infrastructure projects that they could handle software and technology projects too. Things only started to get better when we basically embedded our own PMs in their teams.
Houston, even. Though in an “Uno Reverse”, the current CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E in California and the CFO of Centerpoint also hails from PG&E.
California was very unhappy with their performance and now Houston is unhappy with them as well.
Sure, but it has nothing to do with the abundance of natural resources in Texas, nor is there any irony in the current situation due to it, is the point.
The irony they might be referring to is that Texans, as in, people in Texas, are challenged to maintain electricity distribution for their vast energy resources, whereas many other localities have the opposite problem: a scarcity of energy resources.
this makes no sense - your statement literally made my brain hurt. i’m not joking.
It doesn’t matter if the power company stops supplying power intentionally for safety reasons. Residents are WITHOUT power.
Definition of power outage from wikipedia: “A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.”
Your comment is akin to saying i’m not in the dark if i intentionally flip my circuit breakers off. I’m in the dark, regardless of the intentions.
Except the rolling blackouts that California experienced were not due to safety reasons or infrastructure failures, but because Enron conspired to schedule (planned) plant maintenance at many facilities at the same time, in order to maximize profit (due to a loophole in CA’s then-newly-deregulated electricity market).
The recent “public safety power shutoffs” (which are not rolling blackouts) are also not due to safety reasons, but because PG&E was trying to blackmail the state into bailing them out against lawsuits for the fires they caused. It is a case of “well, shucks, since we can’t absolutely guarantee that our power lines will never start a fire with 100% certainty… I guess we have no choice but to turn off power for some of your constituents, who will be selected in such a way that at least one person in every county will be affected (and thus color the entire map red) but without significantly reducing the number of kWh we deliver (and can charge for) while doing so”.
In both cases, the power company was not unable to deliver power, but chose not to because they believed they could score political points by holding ratepayers hostage.
They're either all terrible stewards of the grid or Texans are all victims of propaganda, because all four of these have had extended outages following most severe weather events of the last decade (hurricanes, I'm willing to give a pass to, some, but we're also talking 'cold weather in winter has a very real potential to cause widespread blackouts').
Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.