When I was living in California (no, not a large scale event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small houses)...
The mother in law of the guy who handled the property would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and would have loved to have him sell it.
And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.
She didn't fuss about the RV after that.
If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill many people who depend on the consistent power to keep their medical devices working.
Isn't it reasonable to expect people reliant on powered medical devices to include a plan B in case the grid goes down? It's not like the grid is perfect. Even in high-reliability countries like the USA there are unforseen events.
You can expect whatever you like. But the reality is that lots of people don't. Maybe they're short-sighted, maybe they're poor, maybe their backup plan wasn't tested to best-practice standards.
I'm sure everyone has seen the bit about half the country lacking a $400 emergency buffer. You can blame them for their own plight if it makes you feel better. Or you can blame a skewed economy. Or god, or me.
You're still left with a grid buckling due to underinvestment, and a future that's likely to demonstrate that this was just a warning.
California has rolling blackouts every summer (and winter) with power that cost about 3x more than Texas. Rolling blackouts also affect hospitals. I think OPs sentiment is that overall Texas is a better system. Compared to CA I agree.
Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be improved, but spending 3x more and looking more like California is a huge net loss.
It seems unlikely and reductionist to think that taking Texas' existing power system, and investing more money in reliability, would make it LESS reliable. But this is what happens when you compare two very complicated things (different states' utilities) and consider price of service to be the only relevant factor.
I'm not familiar with rolling blackouts in the winter in CA. And, in fact, I've never been part of a rolling blackout, period, in my 20 years in CA.
But the rolling blackouts that some areas experience now are by and large due to (fire) risk avoidance by the utility, not by generation issues.
> Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.
No, this is simply a baseless assumption made by you, with an effect similar to poisoning the well. I know people on medical devices, and one day of power loss per 30 years is absolutely acceptable to them, give that they arranged to have backup power.
