Just a bit of nomenclature. Rolling blackouts mean temporary shutdowns on a rotating basis so that nobody's completely without and you better distribute the load. Great strategy. Shutting people's power off and leaving it off for 2 days is not part of a rolling blackout. It's a blackout. I'm guessing people have seen a blurb here or there on the news about rolling blackouts in Texas. They're lying. There isn't any load redistribution. Texas's energy grid collapsed and they don't now what the fuck to do about it. And to be fair, these things happen. This is a freak winter storm we're having down here. Yet after two days they're still reporting it as occasional, temporary shutdowns to help manage the situation. The load of bullshit coming out of these people is mind-boggling. I'm looking forward to see some heads rolling, and because this is Texas and Governor Cripple is apparently livid, they will.
For my part, we've had highs at 22 and lows at -2, and my neighborhood went black early Monday morning. My condo was 44 when I woke up Tuesday morning, but I can deal with that well enough. Around 1700 it started dropping again (from 44) and I decided it was probably better to flee. I'm able to tough that out,but since they're not even admitting that the power is out in my neighborhood I have no reason to think they're wiling or able to fix it any time soon, Friday would be my guess, so no point trying to wait it out. I pow-wowed with some of my neighbors, and everybody who can is clearing out. The people that can't might very well wake up to freezing temperatures inside their homes Wednesday morning and the weather won't improve until the weekend, at the soonest.
To top it all off, the City of Dallas is pleading with the powers that be to tell them where they can shelter people without fear of getting the power turned off, and they're being completely blown off. "If we put people in this rec center can we be assured that you won't shut the power off there?" "No comment." Simply because they don't know what's going on or how to deal with it, while still trying to maintain some facade that everything is under control. Dallas is actually trying to stage DART busses at stragetic locations just so that people can go inside for a few minutes at a time to warm up a bit.
Free market capitalists love to point out that nothing's free and you'll always pay for it. "Free healthcare for all isn't free. You just pay for it elsewhere." Well, that low cost of living people move to Texas to take advantage of isn't free, either. You pay for it in myriad ways, and one of them is that when the ramashackle infrastructure fails they'll just leave you to fucking die while spinning the story to make it sound like it's all under control.