Well I'm not an fan of the Texas republicans but, in the grand scheme of things Abbott wasn't entirely wrong. So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of it

Well I'm not an fan of the Texas republicans but, in the grand scheme of things Abbott wasn't entirely wrong. So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of its installed capacity. Had it been producing at anything near its nameplate capacity then we wouldn't be talking about this now. But of course this isn't entirely unexpected, it was the predicted behavior. OTOH, the reliable sources of power in TX has been getting squeezed for decades now. Many of them are only making money when the wind stops blowing. The rest of the time they are starving, so its no wonder they cut weatherization efforts (and lots of other things) because it costs money for something which may/may not happen. And you have to pay the NG suppliers to maintain a couple extra orders of magnitude in capacity and storage which sits unused most of the time, which again they didn't do. So the wind didn't blow, and the NG plants and producers simply failed to make up the loss because they didn't have the cash to assure their own reliability. So, its basically what many people (including myself on this board) have been saying for a long time. What you have now is a game of weather predictions statistics dictating the reliability of the power grid. Its possible to win for years on end, and then boom perfect alignment of the stars and you fall back to non renewable sources which have been underfunded and not built out sufficiently to carry the full grid load. So you can play games with the statistics but solving the problem is an exponential cost problem unless you willing to just go build and maintain 100% of the grid requirements using carbon sources as backup.