A panel of judges has said that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the 2021 blackout. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.
In February of 2021, a massive cold front descended on Texas, bringing days of ice and snow. The weather increased energy demand and reduced supply by freezing up power generators and the state’s natural gas supply chain. This led to a blackout that left millions of Texans without energy for nearly a week.
The state has said almost 250 people died because of the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.
It is almost like natural monopolies, such as primary power generation and supply, should be under the control of the Government and not private individuals.
Three cheers for privatization of public utilities! /s
As an aside, I am gutted by 250+ people losing their lives because Texan politicians can't get their act together to hold companies responsible. Legislation works ... and politicians can, and should, make the laws.
Remember when conservatives blamed "windmills" for this? All while conservatives in charge of Texas raked in millions of dollars in campaign donations from ERCOT members. Conservatives will gleefully watch your family die for fun or profit.
A conservative is incapable of empathy or remorse. Be very careful in your dealings with them. They do not value the lives of others the way normal people do.
Cops don't have to serve and protect or abide by the law. Power companies don't have to supply power. People who sell you things can deny you access to them.
The more and more I hear about these terrible decisions made in Texas, no exception abortion (even if medically deemed necessary) and now this, the more and more I am grateful I don't live in that trainwreck state.
The free market solution would allow communities to negotiate contracts that DID hold the provider liable and allow competitors to emerge that would focus on different aspects like reliability, renewable production or integration with other grids.
If you aren't aware of the story of Central and Southwest Corporation (a Texas power company) and thr "midnight connection", it's the type of story that I'm sure is nearing the top of Netflix's documentary todo list.
On May 4, 1976, a power company based in Texas sent electricity from a substation in Vernon, Texas, to Altus, Okla. By doing so, they were breaking a deal among power companies in Texas to keep electricity within state borders.
Rich people's electricity stayed on, I'm just saying...
People seem surprised that the face-eating leopards who said that everything was going to be fine if you just allow deregulation of the market, proceeded to then eat the faces of the poors (but not those of the rich, at least whenever it could be avoided).
I'm not even kidding - see no /s - but in Texas, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. This is what "lower taxes" means, bc you don't get something for nothing; and when you pay less, you necessarily get less in return (even though the converse is not always true) - in this case lower robustness to perturbations of the system.
In the opinion, Justice Adams noted that, when designing the Texas energy market, state lawmakers “could have codified the retail customers’ asserted duty of continuous electricity on the part of wholesale power generators into law.”
Wow, so helpful to say that 20 years after the fact
It amazes me that Texas gets away with this. One would think that being part of the federation of states means what you do immediately puts you under federal oversight, regardless if it crosses state lines or not.
Yikes. You'd think in a place where they know they will have extraordinary weather events, they would legislate special requirements to ensure everyone's safety.
Incidentally, I first heard about this saga when I saw a report a while ago about people being scammed by solar panel grifters (who overcharge for installing systems that provide little to no independence from the grid despite making those claims in their ads).