"Texans must ask their *elected leaders* these 4 questions"

Have some Texas folks been led to believe the rest of us are paying $600 a month for electric!?! 

One of the main things the myriad of articles about the Texas power that are not being mentioned is a key piece of history. One of the main reasons the power grid in Texas was isolated was to support the war efforts in WWII. Much of the war manufacturing was taking place in Texas. If the major citie of the East and West coasts were attacked the US as a whole would have been seriously SOL. Keeping the Texas grid isolated meant we could keep churning the needed supplies to fight and support our allies during Hilter's rein across Europe. I am trying to find the articles to support this but they are buried with the current repeat of winter storm stories about Texas.

As for the rest of country spending billions to help Texas? Texas and Texans pay taxes, too, so that argument is pretty short-sighted. If the rest of the country really wanted to go there then Texas could shut our ports and exports down but that sure would put a dent in everyone's Keto diet, ability to wear cotton t-shirts, fuel their cars, build just about any building, have heavy equipment and parts to maintain what is already in place not to mention what it would do for our national defense and country's technology climate.

I'm not for secession but when your state has the 10th largest GDP in the world (in front of Brazil, Canada and South Korea) and it keeps growing then you know you are doing something right that puts things back into the coffers of the entire US in some shape, fashion or form.

Yes, we do have friends in northern parts of the US who have exorbitant electric bills when summer hits and their power grids cannot maintain the demands to keep cool. It may not have happened to you personally but it does happen.

FYI - the Texas grid is connected to the East, West and Mexico grids. We can (and have) transferred power to both Oklahoma and Mexico before. Almost got in trouble for it but the Federal government sided with Texas because we were doing the right thing to help neighbors out when the Eastern Interconnect couldn't fix their issue in a timely manner.

(I'm sure these comments are going to stir up a hornet's nest now. )

Please keep in mind managing a power grid is not as a simple as one article on CNN makes it look.

The $600 a month for an average home isn’t a thing here, and I live in MN where it can get freakishly cold at times in the winter and beastly hot in the summer. My house is 3600 SF and we keep it at about 70° year round. Even when our gas and electric isn’t on a budget plan (which many people do to average out their monthly bills to make them more predictable throughout the year), we haven’t yet had a bill over maybe $300 in one month and that’s when it’s been the worst of the worst in winter or summer.

Texas isn't the only state that gets weather issues, just so you know. Being connected to the grid hasn't done anything significant like this for the rest of the country, has it? it sounds like just fear mongering, that you've bought into.


for anyone wondering-- this post is a great example of why people vote the way they do.  Because they believe stuff like this when it's told to them over and over.
(Just like people kept voting for Joe Arpaio in AZ for YEARS because the retirees were told lies over and over again about how Mexican illegal immigrants wanted to rob and murder them. ...instead of wanting to take care of their yards and do construction, which is much more likely what they WERE/ARE doing.)

I love your post. I challenge you, evie, to give me a state that doesn't have severe weather or other issues. There isn't one. I live in Missouri, and we get it all. Tornadoes. Blizzards. Ice storms. 100 degree temps with high humidity. Heck, sometimes we even get the remnants of tropical storms and hurricanes from the Gulf. That happened twice this past summer. I don't claim they are anything like a hurricane, but for us, high winds and torrential rains from the leftovers are not uncommon. My only point is that Texas doesn't have the market on severe weather.

One of the main things the myriad of articles about the Texas power that are not being mentioned is a key piece of history. One of the main reasons the power grid in Texas was isolated was to support the war efforts in WWII. Much of the war manufacturing was taking place in Texas. If the major citie of the East and West coasts were attacked the US as a whole would have been seriously SOL. Keeping the Texas grid isolated meant we could keep churning the needed supplies to fight and support our allies during Hilter's rein across Europe. I am trying to find the articles to support this but they are buried with the current repeat of winter storm stories about Texas.

As for the rest of country spending billions to help Texas? Texas and Texans pay taxes, too, so that argument is pretty short-sighted. If the rest of the country really wanted to go there then Texas could shut our ports and exports down but that sure would put a dent in everyone's Keto diet, ability to wear cotton t-shirts, fuel their cars, build just about any building, have heavy equipment and parts to maintain what is already in place not to mention what it would do for our national defense and country's technology climate.

I'm not for secession but when your state has the 10th largest GDP in the world (in front of Brazil, Canada and South Korea) and it keeps growing then you know you are doing something right that puts things back into the coffers of the entire US in some shape, fashion or form.

Yes, we do have friends in northern parts of the US who have exorbitant electric bills when summer hits and their power grids cannot maintain the demands to keep cool. It may not have happened to you personally but it does happen.

FYI - the Texas grid is connected to the East, West and Mexico grids. We can (and have) transferred power to both Oklahoma and Mexico before. Almost got in trouble for it but the Federal government sided with Texas because we were doing the right thing to help neighbors out when the Eastern Interconnect couldn't fix their issue in a timely manner.

(I'm sure these comments are going to stir up a hornet's nest now. )

I wish that scientists had chosen to call it “climate change” rather than “global warming” from the start.  Because the term “global warming” is what science deniers like to glom onto and point at snow, when it happens, to “prove” that global warming/climate change isn’t happening.  They refuse to understand that climate change means that all sorts of previously atypical weather patterns will happen with increasing frequency. 

I know that scientists first studying the climate changes occurring never imagined the stubbornness with which their findings would be met. But, in little minds, it is harder to dispute “climate change” than it is to dispute “global warming.”

Yep. Unhedged floating price risk is no issue when things are "normal".

But they're bottomless pits when situations are abnormal.

That's what you sign up for w/unhedged floating prices. People think they're the shizz when things are going their way - like during the housing crisis. Then they take it in the shorts when "disturbances" come along.

Oh, we’ll be asking. Except for Karen in Bumblefart county, who has informed me on Facebook comments that Abbott et al have failed Texas only because they haven’t been *conservative enough.* 🙄