Probably a stupid question...

[Doug Garson]

I think the Texas incident was more a message that the power grid needs to be upgraded and interconnected with the rest of the country. Better insulation on your pipes only buys you a little time, without power at -10F it's just a matter of time before they freeze.

[Bill Dufour]

My uncle works for years for Lockheed in San Jose. Many of the buildings had been built during WW2. In the early seventies the Vietnam war ended and business slowed down. It was no longer running 24/7. They found out that much of the lighting had no switches. The lights had been turned on 35 years ago and never switched off. There were circuit breakers buried away locked up somewhere and hard to figure out.
Bil lD

[Keith Outten]

Texas is very proud of the fact that their electrical grid is not connected to the national grid. There are very good reasons to operate outside of the main grid, think about the power outage that happened in New York that brought down the entire east coast. We now have protective systems to keep this from happening again but they could fail, nothing is perfect.
Connecting to the main grid saves a lot of money allowing each state to build and manage less power stations so that there is makeup electricity available during plant refueling and maintenance outages. The downside is that you must comply with a broader range of safety regulations and be able to provide neighbors with power during unplanned events. The power company in Virginia is part of a multi state cooperative, years ago we had to keep 20% on the grid above our normal demand so there was always capacity to pickup the loss of a power station. Don't know if this is still the case because there haven't been any major power plants built in Virginia since 1980.

Virginia is currently building one of the largest wind farms in the Atlantic ocean 25 miles off the coast. I expect it will be a major failure, the cost is prohibitive based on the projected lifespan of the equipment.

[Curt Harms]

The only way people know things are by learning things. What class teaches you home ownership?

I learned it at my father's knee, not everything we need to know is taught in class. There's also This Old House and its ilk. Someone who has grown up in an urban area or grew up in a rental situation where the solution to every utility problem was to call the landlord, there's a lot to learn.

[Malcolm McLeod]

Texas is very proud of the fact that their electrical grid is not connected to the national grid. There are very good reasons to operate outside of the main grid, think about the power outage that happened in New York that brought down the entire east coast. We now have protective systems to keep this from happening again but they could fail, nothing is perfect.
Connecting to the main grid saves a lot of money allowing each state to build and manage less power stations so that there is makeup electricity available during plant refueling and maintenance outages. The downside is that you must comply with a broader range of safety regulations and be able to provide neighbors with power during unplanned events. The power company in Virginia is part of a multi state cooperative, years ago we had to keep 20% on the grid above our normal demand so there was always capacity to pickup the loss of a power station. Don't know if this is still the case because there haven't been any major power plants built in Virginia since 1980.

Virginia is currently building one of the largest wind farms in the Atlantic ocean 25 miles off the coast. I expect it will be a major failure, the cost is prohibitive based on the projected lifespan of the equipment.

Yes, always an outlier, but in my travels most here would agree with this. By all the reports I've seen/heard, our neighbor states could not have helped anyway. They had their own victimization to deal with.

We've discussed building other power plants (in other threads); all end up locked.