Right, the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid just a couple decades ago was one of American civil engineering's dirtiest secrets. It was vulnerable to physical attack, to cyber attack, to sabotage, and to deficiencies caused by widespread natural disaster. A great deal of effort has been expended toward improving the U.S. electrical distribution infrastructure and hardening it against failures -- both natural and human-intended kinds. But there is still a long way to go.
My reference to Perry, and especially to his role in the Trump administration (which is why I posted it in this thread), is that it's being widely reported that Perry and others who hold or held authority in Texas specifically separated Texas from the U.S. national power grid system so that it would not come under the regulation that makes the national power grid work. That is, the regulations that require expensive backups, hardening, and other measures. My brother is an electrical engineer now working in the field of infrastructure-scale power distribution and management systems. His regulatory structure is even more stringent than aerospace now. Texas is not part of the national electrical grid systems not because of a failure in infrastructure upgrades, but because Texas explicitly chose not to be a part of it.
As a result, Texas could cut corners and provide only a minimally robust electrical distribution system. It could rely on whatever generator technology it wanted. It wasn't fettered by cost and rate controls that are generally uniform across each of the major U.S. grids. It is responsible only to minimal federal oversight. In short, it seems it was a system designed to privatize electrical generation and distribution for the financial benefit of a select few. It's the "free market forces" at work. In other words, while the technical topology that's presented here is accurate and is the proximal cause of Texas' current problems, it also seems that the Republication leadership that has dominated Texas for the past 20 years drove the policy that resulted in Texas opting out of the more heavily-regulated, but also far more robust, national electrical grid. If the reporting I'm reading is accurate, we can certainly entertain political causes for the failure.
And the reason I say we dodged a bullet is that Perry, as Trumps Secretary of Energy, could have implemented at the national level a "free market forces" privatization of the electrical distribution grid that would have amplified the failures were seeing in Texas to a national level of vulnerability.
Don't. Privatize. Your. Infrastructure.
