The Hill: Lawsuits allege deadly 2021 Texas blackouts were an inside job

Those deadly blackouts that killed hundreds of people during the 20-21 winter storm may have been an inside job. A new lawsuit alleges energy companies created an artificial natural gas shortage. KXAN's Tom Miller talked to The Hill reporter Saul Elbein about the other claims made in the suit.

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[AP-gbeh]

Unless Executives go to prison nothing will change

[harmonizedigital.]

I suspected this in 2021. As an electrician some of the claims they were making made no sense. Saying the electrical equipment could not handle the cold. Then jacking up the price by thousands of dollars per customer. Complete scam!

[Raptorman]

Remember when Enron was telling its power producers in California to go offline for maintenance so that they could jack up the prices due to an engineered shortage -- seems the Texas energy companies remembered!

[philoctetes_wordsworth]

So: who will be prosecuted? What’s that? No one? Yep.

[tetchuma]

Texas residents have been paying a surcharge since 2011 after the LAST major snow storm… This fee is called an “Upgrade Fee”.

Every month, every resident, for 10 years…

Where did that money go????

[jeanniestegner]

People died, pets, livestock and wildlife. Along with price increases etc.
5 days without phones, power, and frozen pipes that busted. It was horrible

[fluxfaze]

Greed-driven murder. Nothing new here.

[Heavilymoderated]

This is what big companies do. Whenever there’s a crisis, they find a way to rip people off and blame it on the crisis.

[Starfish]

Wouldn’t surprise me. Remember Enron? Those assholes were laughing while people died. Until you start throwing these executives in jail for a long time, this kind of stuff will continue.

[seanrhone]

Um, there is no "time line" on bringing charges for murder!

[mourka]

So someone is going to jail for manslaughter right or because the companies are rich they just get to pay money.

[toddparsons]

Something was very suspicious about this outage.

[jennbaay]

We watched the companies prepare and winterize several months before this happened....it was premeditated.

[susana]

Excellent investigative work and thanks for reporting to public. Don’t trust private business and neither Abbott. Greed and still gouging Texans

[j.thomasgough]

This will all end up costing taxpayers millions in legal fees while the energy companies cry, “oopsie” and get themselves a meaningless oopsie fine.

[anaashb]

Okay, people died but the important thing to remember is rich people got "a little" richer in the process.
That's all that really matters.
(Sarcasm)

[jlongjr]

How can we follow this case? Or will this be the last we hear about it? The question at this point is what was done to mitigate the root cause and prevent this from happening in the future. If nothing measurable was done and ercot says that this won't happen again, someone needs to pay for what was done.

[jaysonpida]

Even if the allegations in the lawsuit are eventually proven not 'true', the court MUST let this proceed just for the CRITCAL IMPORTANCE of presenting fact and truth about that entire horrible debacle ....and then Texas can move on.

[ItsWhoIAmItsHowILive]

They DIED. We all almost LITERALLY DIED. I lived like this for 7 DAYS. FREEZING TO DEATH.

[shalulive]

It’s too late for what? Is there a statute of limitations on murder??