WOW, thank you for this write up! I am able to follow most if not all of this thankfully.

I’m still learning things like this for myself, so I’m happy to share knowledge.

I recently had the tug of war analogy used in an explanation given to me regarding some engineering work to sync a new generator to the grid and it is effectively eye opening.

The tug-of-war was my third attempt at an analogy when I was writing this, so I’m glad the concepts made it through. I was thinking I should have put made Squid Games reference for more clarity about the stakes, like this:

I also assumed that the ERCOT situation was largely or entirely due to gross negligence and Texas things, so it’s nice to learn otherwise. I’d done some reading on the matter awhile back but I mostly just recall the discussion revolving around winter weather without highlighting concerns such as these.

Oh, don’t worry, as I understand it there is still plenty of ERCOT negligence. Apparently Texas’s ability to deal with over-production or under-production is seriously compromised because of its very small connection to the other grids around Texas (by intentional Texas design). From memory, there’s a small link west of Texas through New Mexico, but it can only pull or push a tiny fraction of the electricity riding on the Texas grid so its effectively useless to handle big gridscale swings.

Texas has finally figured out this is a bad idea, and got a check written by Biden’s DoE for $360M to make big boy connections to the national power grids. source.

I’m fine with some of my non-Texas tax money going to help the people of Texas step into to the grid the rest of us use. We’re all citizens of the USA after all. That is unless Musk and trump decide that $360M is waste that Texas doesn’t deserve and cancels the grant through DOGE. Then Texas is back where it started or will have to foot the entire bill themselves.