Before electricity had been restored last month, false claims proliferated as swiftly as the outages themselves. Misguided criticisms included excessive blame levied at wind power, while others have fallen into the trap of blaming “deregulation” of the power industry. That’s dead wrong for two reasons: power markets aren’t “deregulated” for reliability purposes and the data show that competitive markets have a superior reliability record to the monopoly utility model.
Now is the time to focus on the root causes of February’s outages and let the full body of evidence speak to the relationship between regulation and grid reliability. To that end, there’s five truths to go by: