You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).
Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.
Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.
It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.
It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.
The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.
Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.
As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)