People don't understand that there is a money trade off when it comes to utilities. In a draught, which may not happen often, people need to reduce water use as the system capacity is balanced with water prices for the 99.9% of the time. But when that .1% time comes, we need to have a back up plan that doesn't raise prices considerably. In other words, Texas should have contracts with other states or other systems that can fill in the .1% of the time it freezes there for a few days.
Texas cannot import the kind of power needed to stop load shedding of the magnitude that just happened. Texas power grid is not frequency nor phase synchronised with either the Eastern interconnect nor the South western interconnect. Texas has 6 high voltage DC feeders when the stage 3 was declared 5 of 66 were in negative move meaning importing DC power and turning it into synchronised AC nearly 2,000 megawatts worth HVDC back to back interconnects are enormously expensive. Texas lost 40,000 megawatts the DC feeds brought in 2,000 to have 40,000 more would be in the tens of billions in infrastructure costs it would be cheaper to build new capacity inside the ERCOT grid than use DC/DC>AC station’s. To AC the Texas to either grid in an AC\AC link means one of the grid has to go black and then black start in phase and in frequency then roll on each and every.generator station to the new phase control weeks of power outages to do that. The Texas grid is not going to be hard AC linked ever because of that. Texas grid was independent from the start it has never been shut off since.