Remember that northern cities experience brownouts when we get extended hot and muggy Houston type weather in the summer. The grid gets overworked and things shut down but fortunately our pipes don't freeze. Biggest problem is no ice to chill beer or make cocktails on the boat.

Robert Francis O-Rourke is nothing but a blow hard and a moron. He is an opportunist jumping from one tragedy to the next profiting off of every other moron willing to put a microphone in his mouth. Deregulation doesn't mean no regulation it means using common sense to get rid of certain regulations that do nothing but drive up cost and destroy working class jobs so bureaucrats can keep their jobs. Kind of like that job killing moron of a governor Whitmer and others who think shutting down the economy for 10 months now will somehow stop the coronavirus.

I've got a client that does very well doing regulatory compliance for the Texas energy grid, among others. No reason to make this anything more than what it really is. Energy generators need to take steps to improve winterization such that there is not widespread generator failure. Unreliable alternative energy generators like solar and wind should be considered secondary power to supplement primary sources of energy.

I've long said warming is a good thing. If you take the democrats energy policy at it's face and assume for a minute that man can affect the climate by generating CO2 emissions then we should collectively throw their policies into the dust bin of history in an effort to avoid the next ice age. After all, who's to say the 50% reduction in air travel and other travel from the coronavirus didn't create the extreme temperatures? Don't they apply that same standard every time a heatwave hits a northern state (Oh the horror, it's 100 degrees outside during summer). I realize consistency in argument is foreign to partisan democrats, but the irony is not lost on the rest of us. I don't really believe that garbage, but if you believe that garbage then you should own it. It would of been worse if we were all forced into electric cars like Francis and Biden are demanding. More people would of had power cut and frozen to death as the gas powered car was all some people had to stay warm.

More so because of trucks not able to make deliveries and people making runs on gas stations to fill their generators and using their cars to stay warm.

I was pretty lucky and never lost power or had any water problems short of my 2nd floor corner toilet line freezing up for a day, pretty sure the pipe is expandable. My friends family lost power for 2 days and stayed with us even tho he has big propane tanks for the house to run on. He is on well water so when electricity was cut there was no water. Most friends that lost power had problems with pipes freezing. A public announcement telling people that lost power to cut off their water and drain their pipes would of saved a lot of people from damage, but the black out duration was completely unexpected as people were told 15-45min rolling blackouts, which turned into 2 days.

Really sad for the people that had damages and lost lives.

Just partisan politics and the blame game as usual--I think the quote from Trumps former energy Secretary goes a long way toward explaining what happened:

"Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and energy secretary for the Trump administration, proclaimed on Wednesday that Texans would prefer to endure even longer outages “to keep the federal government out of their business” and stop Democrats from implementing regulations to address climate change."

My folk just left Texas after selling their last condo and being without power for 50 some hours--being Northerners the truck was full of gas and the were stocked up on non perishable food and water. Fortunately the backup generators in the complex were able to keep enough heat in the common areas to prevent catastrophic damage. I feel bad for for those that were not so lucky--after they were hit by Harvey it took nearly 2 years to get everything back together--and the damage to the state this time is much more widespread.