<story><title>Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, officials say</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chris_va</author><text>&amp;quot;Bus driver seconds from driving over cliff, if only they hadn&amp;#x27;t turned to follow the road!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;... Nothing in this article seems specific to ERCOT&amp;#x27;s grid vs any random ISO seeing a demand&amp;#x2F;supply mismatch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nimbius</author><text>Read a little closer...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“The operators who took those actions to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this whole event,&amp;quot; Magness said.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;At the end of the day, our operators are highly trained and have the authority to make decisions that protect the reliability of the electric system,&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;strongly implies ERCOT had absolutely no working plan to deal with this issue and instead relied on observance and skill of operators to save them from complete and total blackout.&lt;p&gt;CAISO is an example of how this should work. it has detailed and thorough plans for high winds, inclement weather, earthquake, fires tsunami and flood. If there is an ISO flex alert for customers to save energy or a blackout is planned, its generally forecast with days to spare.  Operators and plants are shut down and restarted in a coordinated, orderly fashion with excellent communication and transparency. CAISO even takes into account climate change and will mail out free coupons for bagged ice for users in a shut-down area along with maps to cooling centers or warming centers if need be.
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.caiso.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.caiso.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, officials say</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chris_va</author><text>&amp;quot;Bus driver seconds from driving over cliff, if only they hadn&amp;#x27;t turned to follow the road!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;... Nothing in this article seems specific to ERCOT&amp;#x27;s grid vs any random ISO seeing a demand&amp;#x2F;supply mismatch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macintux</author><text>It does seem like a PR ploy to emphasize the fact that the operators did the right thing, and divert attention from the massive failures at the management level.</text></comment>