As it turns out, the winter storm and historic outages in Texas have been predicted and warned against for decades.  However there has been little regulatory requirement for utilities, generators, or grid operators to take action.  Texas Was Warned a Decade Ago Its Grid Was Unready for Cold (yahoo.com)

I found this discussion on The Energy Gang podcast regarding the Texas outages to be enlightening.  Of note this was Jigar Shah’s second to last appearance on The Energy Gang; he was hired by the Dept of Energy Loan Office, which is very good news for renewable energy companies trying to bridge the gap and scale their innovations up to market.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-03/jigar-shah-to-run-u-s-energy-office-that-backed-tesla-solyndra

Regarding the Texas grid failure, and its much less regulated grid, we will be learning much over the coming months, and it will be interested to see how those monthly electric bills work out for people.  You can anticipate there will be plenty of greed and corruption on public display.

Our vision is to avoid the worst of what we saw in Texas by promoting clean renewable and distributed energy generation.  The more grid-tied arrays are at the point of use, the better off everyone will be, not only the owners of those arrays saving money on their bills.  Ultimately the entire grid will become more stabile and less reliant on  centralized energy sources and those that control them.

 

5 KW Sunpower array in Chimacum on Jefferson PUD Grid, July 2020