I don't disagree with anything you said, except that I don't believe regulations is a complete solution either. See CA. I also don't think you can sue the power

I don't disagree with anything you said, except that I don't believe regulations is a complete solution either. See CA. I also don't think you can sue the power generation, thats like suing the police, you won't inact any kind of reform and the costs are just going to be passed on to the consumers. At that point your just turning the power co into a form of insurance. I tend to think the best way to assure system wide stability is to reintegrate the generators+transmission+retail portions to avoid all the perverse incentives. You know, the old public/CoOp utility model. Plus, the more you can keep politics and MBAs out of it, except to provide some guiding principals (aka lets try to reduce carbon, and keep costs low) the better off its going to be. But realistically, politics in TX, so a solution that can be passed by the government is going to involve some kind of free market adjustment. Usually that is just to raise the power cap (now at $9000) further, but as recently proven it doesn't do crap either. I said elsewhere let the engineers run it, but people assumed I was just talking about engineers, when really what I should have said is keep the decision making close to the people on the ground. If the plant operator thinks his plant needs some maintenance/etc he better not get overridden. Same with other bits, when the lineman noticed a problem with a pole, or an engineer runs a wind loading simulation and discovers a problem, if gets resolved rather than ignored.