Texas Blackout - The Real Story

The current power shortages and resultant blackout in Texas have caused a flurry of finger-pointing at ERCOT and other scapegoats.

But three parties who may be the real culprits are seldom mentioned:

• Congress
• Wall Street
• the climate change industry

For decades, the US Congress has been promoting and authorizing the deregulation of the electric utility industry. Such deregulation has turned formerly solvent and more or less well managed utility companies into a gaggle of fragmented, under capitalized shadows of their former selves. This has had disastrous consequences, including the current mess in Texas.

One episode of those consequences was the buyout of TXU by private equity firm KKR in 2007. You can read about it here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-txucorp-takeover-kkr-idUSWNAS203120070226

Not only did that buyout saddle TXU with unsustainable debt (it filed for bankruptcy in 2014), it also led to the cancellation of 8 planned coal fired power plants. It's quite likely those plants, had they been constructed, might have prevented the power outages now being experienced by millions of Texans.

Another episode was the attempted leveraged buyout of electricity distributor Oncor by Elliott Management Corp. in 2017 and its subsequent purchase by Sempra Energy. You can read about those "deals" here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oncor-m-a-elliott-idUSKBN19V1JM

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oncor-m-a-sempra-ener-idUSKCN1B10J2

It's quite likely such high finance shenanigans also left Oncor in a precarious position, and I'd really like to know why Sempra was able to buy it for $9.45 billion when Elliot bid $18.5 billion just a short time before.

And that brings us to what I call "the climate change industry". The 8 cancelled TXU coal fired plants had been opposed by environmental activists, who apparently were quite pleased with the KKR deal. I'm guessing they're still pleased that no one is suggesting they may have played a role in facilitating today's blackout.

But we shouldn't let them off the hook, because they, Wall Street, and Congress plan to enact significant fundamental changes to our power grid in the next couple of decades, as suggested by this report:

Most of the country’s power comes from coal, oil and natural gas - the very fuels driving climate change. The grid of the future will need to be powered primarily by zero-carbon electricity sources, such as solar and wind - and rebuilding the grid from top to bottom, without further disrupting energy supplies, will be a delicate balancing act.

Source - https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-02-16/texas-blackouts-california-climate-change

"Delicate balancing act"? In case you haven't been paying attention, Texas wind turbines have been failing in cold weather and solar cells don't work in the dark. When they become the primary electricity sources for the US, you can expect blackouts like what is happening in Texas to become a common occurrence.

The Green New Deal is more likely to destroy the US power grid than it is to save it. If we don't wake up now and stop the Congress-Wall Street-climate change industry triumvirate in its tracks, we'll all live to regret it.

Update - 2/17/2021

Here is a good description of what's been happening on the ground in Texas:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/texas-facing-humanitarian-crisis

Without energy, our entire nation would grind to a halt. Do you really want to trust our energy future to the Biden administration? I certainly don't.

Update - 2/19/2021

I keep reading reports about how Texas failed to winterize/upgrade/update its power-related systems. No doubt this is the case.

But the underlying question of WHY they failed to do these things is not being truthfully answered.

As I point out above, deregulation and the subsequent financial ravaging of the industry left it unable to do such things. They were preoccupied with paying off the debt incurred by the "deals" enabled by Congress and so vigorously pursued by Wall Street.

And at this point, they definitely will not be able to raise the money needed to modernize the grid. That will have to come from the feds, and as Ringo Starr so eloquently observed, "everything government touches turns to crap". Don't expect the climate change industry to change that fact.