> A big reason why others did not have power is because those that did did not reduce their consumption by much.

First, that was the big manufacturers. ERCOT couldn't force big companies off the grid, and they didn't go off grid until the press noticed and started complaining.

Second, the Texas grid has insufficient granularity to actually shed enough non-critical load to do rolling blackouts. There are too many "critical" things connected to the same circuits as non-critical ones, and it would cost money to split those loads (something Texas just ain't gonna do).

Third, the base production got hit because fundamental natural gas infrastructure wasn't winterized, froze and exacerbated the whole situation. It would cost money to fix. (aka: something Texas just ain't gonna do)

Finally, when you don't have big industrial consumers defining your power grid (aka massive overprovisioning), you can't "shed load" your way out of trouble.

The fundamental problem is that, like so many things in the US economy, personal consumption is so low that it doesn't help when the problem is systemic. We've optimized houses with insulation, LED lighting, high-efficiency appliances, etc. Consequently, the difference between "minimal to not die" and "fuck it, who cares" in terms of consumption differential isn't sufficiently large to matter when a crisis hits.

You must live near and work with some selfish people.

I have more family up there where Mom lives and they lost power for all or most of the week so they all shuffled operations to the homes that had the most reliable power and pooled resources so no one had to be hungry or cold.

We're near DFW. Mom is north of us by a bit. We lost power too, for days. Towards the end we had rolling outages that were predictable so we prepped anything that needed heat or power and as soon as the lights came on we made fresh coffee and tea and water for oatmeal or whatever and recharged the water supply since we are on a private well. Our power bricks handled most of the phone/laptop power delivery so we basically topped off the charge on the bricks whenever we had power. My greenhouse is solar/battery powered though I did use 1 lb propane cylinders for the coldest periods since the heater in the greenhouse was way too small to manage temps that went below 10F. I lost some things but I learned some things too. We are much more resilient today.

Mains power is dirty. Having a data center without line condition on mains would be insane.

Agreed. Even my home computer and networking equipment is 100% in-line with inverters and never see commercial power. PG&E in California got me into this habit with all the Planned Safety Power Shutoffs, wildfires, surges from really old transformers and unplanned outages. Now each of my tiny indoor rings of power have 200 to 800 amp-hour capacity each and over-sized inverters. I put the whole-house inverter plans on hold for now.

I bet. I never messed with the trailer or skid mounted generators. It sounds like you were also USAF. At least modern day noise cancelling headphones are much better. Guessing you probably have tinnitus from working on them. At least I think that is partially where mine came from.

Commercial inverters are massive and highly redundant. They do fail but it is very rare and there are contractors that can be on site to fix things very quickly. A properly engineered system can run in a degraded state for a prolonged period of time.

My data centres have two separate supplies through two separte ups with two seperate generators, kit is striped across each one.

Of course that doesn’t help for fire/flood etc which is why we have critical workloads in two dcs.