Residents of a Texas Border City Long Felt Overlooked. The Storm Made It Worse.
Del Rio residents, searching for fresh food and water, said that government aid has been sparse. “When they’re running for office is when we see them,” one man said of politicians.
Though last week’s snow has melted in the city center of Del Rio, Texas, many shelves remain empty.Credit.Christopher Lee for The New York Times
DEL RIO, Texas Surrounded by ranch land, towering mesquite trees and acres of thorny brush, the border city of Del Rio can feel like the definition of rural Texas. Residents said they have long felt alienated from the state’s power centers and bewildered by the shifting approaches to immigration by their elected leaders in Washington.
. The Texas electrical grid has been a ticking time bomb for decades. This was laid bare for the world to see, and the fallout will be enormous. The humanitarian crisis will have ripple effects for years. There will be long lasting economic development implications. Hostile foreign and domestic terrorists now know that the Texas electrical grid is vulnerable to a cyber attack. The current focus on finger-pointing is detrimental to long-term grid reliability and reform. The recent resignation of board members from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is an important symbolic gesture, but it will not solve the ongoing and still-present structural problems.
February 26, 2021
A record-setting winter storm left many Texas households without power for days last week and left those who did manage to get power stuck dividing a $50 billion electric bill, the product of a wild upward swing in wholesale power prices.
This is the gamble at the heart of a deregulated electricity market, in which companies compete to produce and sell electricity, as opposed to a monopoly system with rates fixed by regulators. In this kind of system, which covers about 60% of the US, consumers accept some price volatility in exchange for, in theory, lower rates and better service most of the time. Some types of retail contracts offer more insulation from wholesale price swings than others. But ultimately, all customers have to trust that the companies and officials running the grid will invest and plan in a way that will produce the greatest reliability at lowest cost.
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