The dire situation in Texas power grid is driven by a perfect storm of record demand and generation failure. The later appears to be a more severe driver.
One the demand side, I haven’t seen the exact data but the peak demand over this week has been much higher than operator’s highest estimate of 67,000MW, which could in the order mid 70,000MW or approaching 80,000MW. Texas, being a Southern state, usually sees its absolute peak in summer, driven by cooling demand.
On the supply side, there should be 83,000MW of available capacity to meet demand but 34,000MW has been kicked offline, meaning there’s only around 50,000MW left . It is still unclear what exactly causes the outage and I have seen reports quoting significant gas supply failure/limitations. Renewable energy like wind and solar didn’t help due to the freezing temperatures. What makes things worst is that Texas grid is not connected to other power grid in the US as it is an closest market with its own pricing and dispatch rules.
With the information on hand, I don’t think there is too much the grid operator can do as on paper it should have enough power supply to meet this extreme demand even they didn’t expect it to be this high. the generation were kicked out in batch. No one can do anything when 40% of the generation is taken offline. Can there be more generation be built to cover this. Certainly but it also means they will be sitting there most time of the year and not making any money.
What they can probably do differently is connecting to other power grid in the US. They should still able to run their power market as this is how power markets in Europe work. When there is significant shortfall in supply you can draw power from other part of the grid, with a price naturally. However the question is who is going to pay for building the transmission lines that is capable of transmitting this kind of power in the US. It may well be cheaper to build power plants within Texas and let’s sit there as backup, which is a cost. It all comes down to the question that whether electricity is a commodity or social goods. In China it is clearly the later and they have put security of supply to the uppermost position and build massive margin into the system. In Texas’ case, they have put more focus on economical efficiency which means there is less margin of error.