It seems someone has answered that question that has been on everyone's mind since the Blackout of Naught-Three: Why does Texas have its own Power Grid?
Blackout postmortems have noted that America's electricity system consists of just three regions—the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. Why does the Lone Star State have its own power grid?Besides, we have a reason for having our own power grid:Partly because of a historical desire for self-sufficiency and partly because of that famous "Don't Mess With Texas!" attitude. The majority of the state's residents live within the region regulated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, an "island" that generates and supplies all its own electricity—unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard way that lots of their power comes from Canada. (A small sliver of Western Texas gets its juice from the Western Interconnection, while a few customers in the north and the east are hooked into the Eastern Interconnection. Still, ERCOT handles 85 percent of the state's electricity needs.)
The state uses more electricity than any other, 44 percent more than runner-up California. Much of this is used by industrial customers such as petrochemical plants and oil refineries.and at what cost to the poor citizens of Texas?
Despite Texas' massive thirst for electricity, ERCOT has been able to provide cheap power with few service hiccups. In fact, Texas electricity is cheaper, per kilowatt hour, than the national average.So, all those things the power companies were telling us when they were pushing for deregulation about how we would not face the debacle that California faced were true. Of course, I thought our rates were pretty expensive myself, but maybe that is another thing I should be proud of by living in the Great State of Texas. Posted by Tiger at August 20, 2003 09:32 AM | TrackBack