For the almost two decades of its existence as an independent system operator, only electricity wonks, neo-liberal economists and systems engineers talked about ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas). Then the lights went out last week, and then the water, and then a radically imperfect market design caused electric bills throughout the state to skyrocket. Not surprisingly a raft of investigations has begun. In the 1990s deregulatory fervor first took hold in California where electricity prices were already high compared with the…
