Heating your house/cooking/bathing etc during this time put extraordinary strain on the grid. A big reason why others did not have power is because those that did did not reduce their consumption by much. So many of my neighbors/friends/collegues made comments like "we didn't lose power, so we kept the heat cranking at 75". So it would make sense that load shedding primarily affected neighborhoods, but my recollection of the events from people who lived near emergency centers was use it up before it goes away.

> 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.