Doesn't matter where you are you need that. There is no place in the world where the grid is reliable enough that someone who wants to operate with high reliability can get by without ample backup power. Grid power is normally a lot cheaper than running backup power (that is the capital and maintenance costs are sunk costs, just counting fuel) so it isn't worth disconnecting from the grid despite having enough backup power that you could.
There are grids where you are planning for hours of power outage, grids where you plan for days, and grids where you plan for weeks. Texas is in that last category. And you have to ensure your internet uplink has similarly reliable backup power
some former soviet industrial parks are like that. They had redundant direct lines from say local power plant, a direct line from fairly far geographically removed Nuclear power plant and regular grid. They were classified as critical consumer so hospitals would get cut from the grid before they would.
Because the powers that be in Texas will siphon off funding to make things work better to fund their own projects. "Should we winterize our power grid" Nah, it's Texas where it doesn't get that cold for that long. Should we implement a warning system in an area that is historically known for being prone to flash flooding? Nah, it doesn't happen that often and we have other things to spend money on instead.
What conspiracies? These are actual things that happened delivered as a sarcastic dialog that goes to show how the government in Texas behaves. Also, I never claimed anything about investors of TXSE. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where an SE's data centers are located. They will all need redundancy plans. If you think Texas is a better location than other sites, then you have to focus on what have historically been issues for Texas. If you depend on the state's government doing things other than lining their pockets or at least the favorite pet project's coffers, then you are prone for failing. Those unwilling to study history are doomed to repeat it
I'm afraid your comments just come off as an attack on local politicians and their priorities, not the topic of addressing whether TXSE could be more resilient than peers.
The discussion evolved into where the data centers would be and pros/cons of having them in the various locations. I was discussing the cons of a Texas location
Tho energy is also a lot cheaper in Texas than NY. If you have to have ample back up regardless, total cost of maintaining consistent power can be lower even when grid quality is lower
(ofc, I'm looking at retail rates, who knows what specific numbers can be cut in contract)
Is this true though? Texas has had some well-publicized failures (well, really one major one), but as best as I can tell they are more or less middle of the pack on grid reliability[1].
I mean, you'll need a backup generator anywhere, but the report I found (admittedly with just a bit of googling) makes it seem like Texas is a better potential location than quite a few states (including California).
The really major one is the only one that matters. If you are running a datacenter that needs to always be up and running, you're going to need backup power. A power grid that goes down once a decade for multiple weeks is far worse than one that goes down for 5 minutes once a week.
In Texas, if you support those in power with good enough donations, you can ensure that your site does not loose power when the decision is made on who to disconnect. So you can spend the money on back up power equipment, or in donations. Either way, it's going to cost to play.
Yeah, Oncor isn’t great. They do just enough to keep the lights on for regular customers. But I’m pretty sure large data centers negotiate a higher level of service and purchase power at discounted rates. FB, for example, has a massive data center in the Alliance corridor — check out the link. Those trailer-sized units you see along the outside of the building are enormous diesel or natural gas generators — more than a hundred of them, each about the size of a locomotive. They even have their own electrical substation. The scale and redundancy of that place are unbelievable.
So I’d imagine they could keep everything running for as long as necessary. I remember during the big winter outage a few years ago, they didn’t have any issues at all.
Each building has 2 large fuel tanks which is where I was expecting to see a fault in the plan. I wonder how redundant the fuel supply is. If building 1 is the only one on generator power and the fuel tanks start to run low, can they easily route more fuel from another building's tanks? Just how paranoid were they with the design?
When ever there is an extended power outage at a facility like this, tankers show up. I would not be surprised if there are contracts with Suncor distribution to have a steady flow of tankers supplying fuel to the facility. There are several fuel distribution hubs throughout the DFW area that supply the local markets including two major airports.
That's a big assumption, and precisely why the tanks are on site. If snowpocalypse events make roads unsafe to drive, those tankers might not be there. There's always a way to think about how something else could go wrong. At some point, you just have to say it is good enough for the money willing to be spent.
The NY4 data center is on the edge of a tidal marsh (The Meadowlands) in Secaucus NJ, I would be curious to know Hudson County NJ uptime and the uptime for the area near the Texas data center.
ChatGPT is a long, long way from being able to successfully analyze this sort of thing. Texas's failed in a way that caused people to freeze to death that's unlikely to occur in NY.
It would be helpful for readers to know what Equinix is
> Equinix's infrastructure supports the digital services businesses rely on, from cloud computing and enterprise applications to content delivery and financial trading platforms.
But depending on the setup, often you just cant "sell the one thing at another exchange which you bought earlier at a different exchange", sure this depends on the country/etc.
There may be some odd financial instrument that can only be traded on a single exchange, but that's generally not going to be something that is liquid enough for HFT trading anyway. The idea that a stock is listed "on the NYSE" and can only be traded there is a quaint anachronism. e.g. https://help.tradestation.com/10_00/eng/tradestationhelp/rou...
In fact, it won’t be. Which is why NYSE was so quick to rebrand NYSE Chicago as NYSE Texas when TXSE made the announcement they were launching in Equinix NY4 in Secaucus. The only real differentiator these guys would have had (outside of listings rules) would have been location, but they opted for the lower resistance of locating with all the other markets.
"There have been 263 power outages across Texas since 2019, more than any other state,
each lasting an average of 160 minutes and impacting an estimated average of 172,000
Texans, according to an analysis by electricity retailer Payless Power
(https://paylesspower.com/blog/blackout-tracker/)"
Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.
That website shows California as currently worse. It looks like Larger states just have more power outages, which is to be expected. Texas also is a weird state that is very large it gets Tornadoes, extreme heat, and hurricanes, while also having several very large metro areas in it. There also isn't anything indicated differences in grid monitoring, are all grids (like large rural grids) monitored to the same levels?
We also have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg
We have high power demand in both winter and summer: in the latter, air conditioners use a lot; in the former, about half of Texans heat with electricity because we have less cold and so less usage of cost-effective, grid-preserving furnaces.
Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.
California has power outages as a matter of routine in some places. When I went there the rural areas were constantly experiencing load-shedding power outages and some of the rural lodging advertised that they had backup generators because this is so routine there.
Yeah, but that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Texas for example had ~400 heat deaths in 2024 depending on where you look but in 2023 it was 334 or 563 depending on your criteria [1].
>But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.
Most of these deaths are not because of electrification but the fact that homes are built out of bricks and mortar and become ovens with heat waves that get hotter each year and ~10% to ~20% [2] of homes in Europe have air conditioning meanwhile ~95% [3] of homes have air conditioning. Your apples to oranges comparison mostly shows how Europe is generically unprepared for climate adaption (specifically heat resilience) and has nothing to do with electrification stability.
The vast majority of these 400 heat deaths have nothing to do with the power grid. They are people living outdoors, roofers, elderly, etc. When the temps hit 105+ for long periods there are bound to be people who don't have access to AC or overexert themselves outdoors.
It's a perfect apples-to-apples comparison if you level accusations of grid incompetence at Texas. Should all those EU homes suddenly go out and buy AC, EU power grids would have to enact massive load shedding during heat waves. Such waves already push demand up, causing local blackouts and price spikes: https://www.ft.com/content/23b3dc59-b40f-48e2-ad93-e301de7ac...
So about one every 9 days that affects 0.55% of the population. So in a 3 year window a Texan has about a 50% chance of losing power for 2.5 hours. Seems pretty good to me.
Texas has installed a vast number of solar and battery backup systems since 2019. And it will be a few years, but is going HEAVILY into nuclear (and for the next 3.5, is going to get auto-approval to actually build them. ERCOT is changing fast, don't rehash stale narratives.
Only as long as the Texas politicians don't sabotage wind. Texas businesses make lots of money on wind, but the legislature and governor absolutely hate it.
Having experienced the Snowpocalypse and mini Snowpocalypse, weeks of 2019 PG&E PSPSes, and the 2000–2001 CALISO-Enron rolling blackouts, it's ridiculous for those in glass houses to throw stones.
> Texas loses power one time for a week and the redditors will never let it go. Wild how this is still a cringe joke so many years later.
Texas had the most number of power outages between 2019 and 2023 [1].
It wasn't one time. And it's not a joke. Infrastructure weatherization is a very real overlooked (and expensive) investment that still has not taken place.
Those power outages are local, not the Texas grid.
It was one time. I have been in Texas for over 30 years. Besides a local transformer exploding or something and giving me a temporary outage, I've only had the ONE extended outage in that time.
You guys just really don't know what you're talking about.
> In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state… Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems.
> Unlike other power interconnections, Texas does not require a reserve margin of power capacity beyond what is expected. A 2019 North American Electric Reliability Corporation report found that ERCOT had a low anticipated reserve margin of generation capacity and was the only part of the country without sufficient resources available to meet projected peak summer electricity demand.
I lived in Texas and we never got rolling blackouts for this. We didn't hear about it from family and friends in every major Texas city. Maybe this means 75% of the state by area rather than population? We just didn't drive because much of Texas isn't set up to clear roads and, more importantly, few of our drivers know how to deal with snow and so most get very unsafe to drive around.
The report your wikipedia article cites for 75% says this: "In the case of ERCOT, where rolling blackouts affected the largest number
of customers (3.2 million), there were 3100 MW of responsive reserves available
on the first day of the event, compared to a minimum requirement of 2300 MW." So an eighth or so of Texas' ~25 million population in 2011.
If I hadn't been reading headlines I wouldn't have even known about the 2011 blackout, and I was definitely here for that. Things were pretty much normal for everyone around me and friends around the state (Houston, Austin, DFW, Lubbock, San Antonio, etc). The Superbowl even went ahead in AT&T stadium. It really wasn't as big of a deal as a lot of internet commenters seem to act like.
You originally called someone a redditor making a cringe joke for highlighting a serious historical problem. It wasn't clear to me that it was a joke at all, but my impression is that it seemed clear to you that it was a joke.
What if that person has also lived in Texas for 30 years? And what if they had a family member that died during that power grid failure in 2021? I personally would find it quite difficult to communicate to them the nuance of a local problem and a state-wide problem when the end result is the same: no power.
In the future, you might consider approaching an interaction online with more balanced judgement.
Edit: Actually, looking back at the original comment, it's not even clear they're talking about the Texas power outage in 2021. All they said was "Hope they have ample backup power." Seems like a reasonable thing to hope for what might be critical infrastructure.
I'm not sure what is meant by Redditors... I haven't used Reddit in many years.
Admittedly anectodal, but I don't remember any power outage here in Chicago over the last 11 years I lived here, but I was in Texas for work for a few weeks this summer at the NASA balloon base and there were multiple power outages.
Anecdotal, but I've lived in DFW for over a decade. The only time I lost power for more than a minute was due to a drunk driver hitting a utility pole just outside my house. They had the pole fixed and everything working again within an hour.
The Houston metro area is particularly bad. When I lived in Austin, the outages were very rare. In Houston, I would guess there is at least 1 outage every month that lasts for an hour on average.
Texas' grid was very reliable when I was growing up there. Since deregulation however, it's no longer reliable. It used to be mandated that grid facilities were overbuilt to have some headroom for emergencies. That's no longer true. Now, Texas utilities only maintain the minimum infrastructure needed for normal operations and they have no cushion if something goes wrong. Any CEO of a Texas utility that spends money building overcapacity gets fired by Wall Street.
This was supposed to change after the 2021 crisis, but I haven't seen much evidence that it has.
The US did do this for most of the 20th century. Or at least something close to this: Many utilities were private companies but they were regulated monopolies. The state allowed them to be monopolies in exchange for tight state control.
In the 1990s this started to change. The idea was that the different utilities could compete for customers, and thus they wouldn't be monopolies any more and thus market forces would take the place of government regulation.
Of course this has failed spectacularly. Deregulation brought us the Enron disaster and the 2021 Texas grid crisis, among others. But since corporations control the US government now, there's no chance regulation will be brought back.
I'm surprised that you put the blame squarely on the the (bought) government.
Deregulation and "free" markets are something that many americans actively want. You can argue that they're misinformed and they're advocating against their own self-interest. But it's still something they actively want, this isn't just the evil corporations taking control of the corrupt government.
In fact on this very site I'd wager that more than half of Americans users are against regulation in general, state ownership of any utility, or any additional control on financial markets.
It's not just the "snowpocalypse". In Houston, for example, there have been multi-day power outages since then, often during hot weather where lack of adequate cooling can become a life-threatening concern. Personally I don't find it any more "cringe" than the weird boasting people like to do about our state.
Reddit can become a echochamber, a one sided flog machine, all good content decaying, no good or viable business after 10 years (propped up by YC investors), it’s even become a slur to denote a certain type of brain and eventually it will die off like slashdot and digg did.
But you won’t be able to take the Redditors off the internet. They be lurking, waiting with a perfectly annoying post ironic millennial reply.
I hope the TSE does well and expect the state with the largest concentration of energy tycoons and businessmen will figure out how to add grid robustness - a problem solved in nearly all states.
> expect the state with the largest concentration of energy tycoons and businessmen will figure out how to add grid robustness
This reads like the energy tycoons and businessmen only recently moved to the state, and now they can fix the problems. My understanding is that these energy tycoons and businessmen presided over the creation and deterioration of the Texas grid in the first place.
> grid robustness - a problem solved in nearly all states
Shouldn't that drive the question of why Texas is so bad, though? This argument seems to amount to "Everyone else is better than us, so we must be the experts in fixing the problem.", which seems weirdly backwards.
Texas has more reliable electricity than California
considering the California electricity provider PG&E shuts off the electricity multiple times a year when it gets windy outside, to prevent power lines falling (due to lazy maintenance) and starting a wildfire
I wonder where the California’s additional 13% tax on capital gains is being spent? SF parking ticket enforcement?
"us versus them", "blue vs red", "liberals vs conservatives"
Texas is the favorite punching bag of the left, and California is the favorite punching bag for the right. When one side is attacked, they defensively jump to the default. Which is kind of ironic, when you consider there's more Democrats in Texas than in many "blue" states, and the inverse is also true for California.
I can find many Republican representatives, Trump, and media personalities insulting New York with sweeping generalizations and hateful rhetoric.
The only negative comments from Democrat representatives and the media on the left I see is are critical of specific laws, for example abortion, but they don't insult the entire state or generalize.
