Is this power outage truly such a bad thing? It seems like a decision that the elected representatives of Texas have chosen to make. They basically said we would rather have much lower utility costs on a regular basis and have a risk that we lose our power every 9 or 10 years in a big storm. Everything is cost vs benefit trade off, and this just seems to be a different decision than most make.
This outage is undoubtably causing 10's of billions of dollars of property damage as we speak (the internet is being flooded with pictures of burst pipes, not to mention rather stark conditions for everyday people that will almost certain result in many deaths in outlier populations).
If the utility company had a disclaimer on their bills, or a billing option to pay more or less depending on if you wanted to run this type of risk - maybe it would be a tradeoff people could make?
Instead this seems to be a complete failure of the regulated utility and it's governing political apparatus resulting in an entirely preventable 'major hurricane' level crisis.
The deaths and impacts on the poor make it, to me an unacceptable tradeoff.
I don't see why others states can do it and Texas couldn't or shouldn't. This is hindsight, but out past strategy, if it was intentional, was not optimal.
Even just numerically, I would bet money that the lost productivity and sales will be much more than the "ounce of prevention" costs, even ignoring the humanitatian aspects.
My friends have been unable to drive, without water or electricity for a few days now. Their house is slowly losing all residual heat, making its way down to ~18 degrees.
They're young and prepared, so they'll be fine. I expect there to be a lot of deaths. And then a wave of burst pipes and property damage. Many people may be going without running water for weeks or months to come.
Is this lowering cost or just shifting cost, given the huge amount of property damage being caused due to lack of power? The “stitch in time” would apply here. Not to mention how to calculate the cost of human suffering caused by trying to survive in freezing temps with no power for multiple days.
