Yeah I saw the other day that 70% of the failed power in Texas was gas, not wind or solar. And then I saw this morning that ERCOT was going "dudes don't use your air conditioning or the whole grid will collapse" and that sure looked like a Tragedy of the Commons problem if ever I saw one. Fuckin' use up all the power before your neighbors do, at least you can think back to this morning when you could stick your head in the ice box without worrying about your otterpops melting. Good luck.
A recent experience with my understanding of Texas' heat was in a conversation I'd had with a high school friend's dad. Mr. Wollam, a very soft-spoken emotionally conservative guy that was our soccer coach in high school. I'd asked him, " So Mr. Wollam, how is it now that you're living near Houston?" His reply, "Jeff, It's too fucking hot and I hate it. If I'm not in an air-conditioned building, it will kill me. If this is a common experience in Texas, there are some folks living life on a precipice. Stuff is gonna fall apart sooner or later.
The three years I lived in Houston, I commuted to class and my on-campus office on light rail and foot. The first day, new student orientation, I checked the radar and left the apartment wearing my swimsuit and flip flops, with dry clothes in a plastic bag. An umbrella is actually a handicap in storms that intense. That first day was only the first time I was nearly struck by lightning. It struck behind me so close that by the time the sound reached me and I turned around, the bolt was still active. Maybe 100 yards away. Cool. In the summer (about mid-March thru mid-October), "good weather days" consisted of me arriving for class or meetings dripping sweat from a mere 20 minutes of walking, with a sweater in my backpack. See, pretty much every building on campus was blasting A/C in the hopes of preserving documents, computers, or lab equipment, and within 5 minutes with no sweater, I'd be a wet, shivering mess. Because of (I guess?) the non-industrial-strength A/C unit in my "luxury apartment", when things like bags of chips went "stale", the chips became soggy and wet. We bought a dehumidifier, and it'd pull about four gallons out of the air inside our apartment every 36 hours. We had black mold that couldn't be eradicated. We would have moved if we could have afforded the time. And people wonder why Houston is such a car-centric city. It ain't all an oil and gas company conspiracy, but yeah, prolly some of it is. Winters were alright, though. But yeah, no one should've ever built a city there. I get it, it's the furthest point inland you can get to by boat on the Gulf Coast west of the Mississippi, but blegh.
We'd party in Dallas when we had a chance. There were girls there. And stuff to do. That said getting there basically meant crossing New Mexico, and then ending up in the New Mexico desert except with humidity, an utter dearth of geological interest and slaughterhouses as far as the eye can see. Global warming is not going to be kind to the American south.