I live in Beaumont, Texas which is about 50 to 150 miles east of Houston, which is a BIG area and about 40 miles west of the Louisiana border. I went through that winter storm and saw the problems almost first hand. Since Beaumont is almost on the Louisiana border our power comes from Entergy which is based in Louisiana. We had very few outages and they were fixed fairly rapidly.
Yes, much of the state is on it's own, separate grid and that is because some here thought they could have cheaper electric bills if there was a more competitive playing field. So in other areas people have their choice of power companies. But someone must maintain the generating and distribution systems, A.K.A. the grid. And perhaps because they were trying too hard to keep prices down, they weren't doing a very good job of it. Small, backup generators that were supposed to keep generating stations and other facilities running or provide the power needed to restart them if there was a general power failure, did not work or ran out of fuel. Nothing could restart until there was a thaw.
Nothing is ever really disconnected from the grid; it is simply a matter of who generates what and who gets to use it and AT WHAT PRICE. There are connections to the out-of-state grid, we just do not normally use them. Due to the same storm, the generating companies out of the effected area, outside of Texas were operating at capacity supplying their year round customers so anything they supplied to the Texas grid was super expensive. I mean like ten times the normal cost. Some people who normally had monthly bills of a couple hundred dollars got hit with bills for several thousand dollars just for the duration of the storm. Can you say, "NOT HAPPY CAMPERS!"
Money was spent for emergency, mobile generators. Everything was supposed to be fixed. We had another emergency a bit later and those very expensive, mobile generators were not used because they were for some other type of situation. They sat unused while Texans again had no power for days to a week or more. Can you say, "
VERY UNHAPPY CAMPERS!"
Somewhere in this time period, even though Beaumont did not really suffer much during these incidents, I decided to buy a whole house generator powered by natural gas. It has already kept my lights lit (and everything else in the house) for a three day outage for another hurricane. My daughter and her family, living north of Houston, were in a motel for over a week before her street finally got power restored. My Louisiana power company's area actually reached withing a block or two of her house (different city) and their customers had power restored very rapidly.
I feel lucky I'm getting my power from a neighboring state. I guess my monthly bill is a bit more, but I am glad to pay it. And I haven't seen one for thousands a month.
Be careful what you ask for,
you might just get it. So, do we really need a power grid? Do you really think my answer is anything but a resounding
YES!
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Texas doesn't connect to the nationwide grid and it likely caused some deaths a couple of years ago when their internal grid crashed during severe weather.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
Check "Outages", "2021"