It's a little bit of a misnomer to think that "rugged individualism" is really behind Texas' decision to have its own grid.  The roots of that go back at least 50 years, but there was additional privatization among the providers about 10 years ago.  As with many things, the driving cause is . . . money.  With Texas full of smaller oil and gas producers, a lot of those know that there are additional profits to be had if they can get around federal regulations more designed for the north.  After all, they NEED those million dollar ski condos in Aspen, Vail, Telluride, or Sun Valley, don't they?  :-)

So the lobbies pushed politicians to move in this direction.  And for a long time, it actually worked quite well. But there was always this vulnerability, and it's not like it hasn't been written about.  With Republicans in charge for about 25 years, there has been next-to-zero impetus to add some basic regulations around failsafes.  I find that odd.  The energy producers gladly manage with standards implemented by OSHA and by the EPA.  Why try to pinch pennies in winterization when the consequence of being wrong is so severe?  When I moved down out of the north, I was stunned at the lack of winterization done in local chemical plants here.  So much so that I actually brought it up in several meetings including ones with third parties.  Every time, I was told, "oh, it just doesn't freeze that hard here."  And actually for 20 years, that proved to be correct.  I still think that when dealing with utilities as crucial as electricity and water, they should be forced to maintain some minimum winterization.  

Also amazing that natural gas pipelines were supposedly freezing.  At atmospheric conditions, natural gas doesn't even liquify until about -260 F.  Problem is, those pipelines are pressurized, and every Chem E 101 student knows that higher pressure raised the temperature of liquification and/or solidification.  

On the good side of the Texas grid privatization is that the barriers to "play" were lowered so there are a lot of providers.  The path out of this next week ought to not be too bad.  But that said, I hope and strongly suspect that some changes are coming.  

What I'd really like to see:  break the Republican stranglehold on Texas.  I do NOT want to see it go 25 years Democrat. Then it just becomes California, which has its own set of problems.  But the lack of transfer of power in Texas creates a bizarre kind of groupthink that occasionally works but also gives it major blind spots.  This was one of them.