Was reading about the wisdom of Texas energy policy and you came to mind. This episode neatly sums up Texas' go it alone approach. Hilarious. The question is, will anyone learn from this? Doubtful, eh?

It's a long read so I'll snippet the best bits below. Here is the link to the full article:

Cold Snap Brings Rolling Power Outages to Texas; is ERCOT Policy of Isolation at Fault? | The Energy Collective

Texas has pursued a policy of isolation for the ERCOT power grid so as to keep the stateā??s largest utilities subject primarily to state, rather than federal, regulation. Two minor links connect ERCOT and utilities in Oklahoma, but they are of little commercial significance. A small interconnection with Mexico was activated to send power into Texas for a few hours, but cold conditions in Mexico required it to suspend the assistance. The policy of isolation is questioned from time to time, but remains popular with the industry and many state policymakers. While the policy has important benefits, the costs are particularly visible at times of system stress.

In the Southeastern corner of the state, Beaumont was not experiencing outages. The local electric utility, Entergy Texas Inc., is not connected to the ERCOT power grid. If Entergy Texas had excess power capacity on Wednesday morning, they could have sold it east into Louisiana or elsewhere as far as Florida or even Maine. However, even thought the utility borders against ERCOT near Houston, no power could flow to help out the rest of the state. Nearby CenterPoint Energy had to blackout an average of about 330,000 customers at a time during the emergency.
Amarilloā??s Xcel Energy reported operations were running smoothly despite temperatures falling below zero overnight in the region. If the utility had excess power, however, none of it would have been able to reach ERCOT. Like Entergy Texas, Xcel and other utilities in the Panhandle and South Plains are connected into the Eastern Interconnection, which stretches to the Atlantic coast in the east and to Canada in the north. (On Thursday Xcel called upon consumers in the Panhandle to conserve power and natural gas, as heavy demand for gas was temporarily making the fuel harder to obtain.)