There's a lot to like and some to dislike, but I imagine that holds true just about anywhere. I've enjoyed my time living in North Texas, mostly from a cost of living and plenty of opportunity perspective. I don't exactly make a massive income (probably about half of a similar salary to the valley) but with that I'm able to actually afford a decent house with a single income family and still save, have a commute of only a few minutes, and I can take a light rail very close to my home into downtown to access all the things I'd want from a big city.
I definitely don't pretend its all just roses though. It being over 100F every day for the past month or so is definitely a big negative, and a good bit of the politics here is getting ugly. We need to continue to expand the public transit in North Texas and make it more useful to reduce car dependency. More dense housing options need to be available to allow people to choose different ways to live and alleviate rising housing costs. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but there's movement in positive directions around here.
A lot of the debate about Texas power grid make things sound way worse than it is. In reality Texas is about average when it comes to reliability in the US. Meanwhile we produce the most renewable energy in the country, we enable people to buy 100% renewable electric plans, and our cost of energy is some of the cheapest in the country. There's definitely challenges ahead for the grid and some of the market strategies we have need to be re-thought, but overall I'm not too worried about the grid long-term. Texas isn't alone with its grid challenges though, most states need to address massively aging infrastructure.
> In reality Texas is about average when it comes to reliability
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotally, I felt the need to buy a generator when I lived north of Austin, because outages were frequent enough that it seemed warranted. Since moving to North Carolina (just north of Charlotte), I’ve had exactly one outage in a year, and that was on a mild day, just had some equipment failure.
Never once here have I received notice that I needed to reduce consumption to help the grid.
Here they rank it 30/50 in reliability and performance metrics.
If we're sharing anecdotes, I've never lost power for more than a few seconds in the past decade or so, and before that it was pretty much only because of hurricanes or tornadoes in the area.
I definitely don't pretend its all just roses though. It being over 100F every day for the past month or so is definitely a big negative, and a good bit of the politics here is getting ugly. We need to continue to expand the public transit in North Texas and make it more useful to reduce car dependency. More dense housing options need to be available to allow people to choose different ways to live and alleviate rising housing costs. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but there's movement in positive directions around here.
A lot of the debate about Texas power grid make things sound way worse than it is. In reality Texas is about average when it comes to reliability in the US. Meanwhile we produce the most renewable energy in the country, we enable people to buy 100% renewable electric plans, and our cost of energy is some of the cheapest in the country. There's definitely challenges ahead for the grid and some of the market strategies we have need to be re-thought, but overall I'm not too worried about the grid long-term. Texas isn't alone with its grid challenges though, most states need to address massively aging infrastructure.