Efficiency worked right up until it didn’t.

On February 16, 2021, Texas’s power grid failure revealed how a market optimized for price and efficiency could collapse under sustained stress. As outages spread across the state, the crisis exposed how incentive structures inside Electric Reliability Council of Texas rewarded lean operations while leaving little margin for resilience. The event forced businesses and policymakers to confront a hard tradeoff, systems can be perfectly designed for normal conditions and still fail catastrophically when conditions change.

From bsnsHistory, the daily podcast about the moments when business quietly reshaped the world.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

For more daily business stories, visit www.bsnsDAILYpodcasts.com