Honestly, there are few usages of the terms "deregulation" that aren't bastardized.
It very rarely refers to a removal of laws. Deregulation can mean a change of laws, change of regulator, establishing a regulating consortium... etc. One deregulation doesn't necessarily have anything in common with another.
We've reached a meta stage where "deregulation" means the types of policies favoured by the deregulation camp.
It's not like Texas' grid is actually unregulated. They have their own regulatory structure. It's just kinda sorta supposed to behave like a unregulated grid would... if that sort of thing was actually possible.
Extreme results in extreme conditions are more or less intentional. It's never going to be economical to prepare for 10 year events to avoid a few days of lost revenue. That, in deregulation-camp terms, means that it is a bad investment and wasteful.
The whole pricing debacle is a great case in point: "ERCOT triggered the squeeze when it pushed up spot-market rates to $9,000 per megawatt hour"
On one hand, the heart of the "deregulation" idea here is that "regulation" destroys pricing systems. On the other hand, what kind of a laissez faire market has a body that sets prices? In this case, it seems like there is a price regulator that is trying to replicate a failure in pricing systems... when demand and supply curves don't intersect and price goes to infinity.
PG&E's budget has a line-item veto by their regulator CPUC, who are just as happy if not more so to defer maintenance because they're mainly interested in not letting anyone's bills ever go up. They're investor-owned but not really privately controlled.
The free market is great at incentivizing companies to solve problems - but also to later "unsolve" solved problems so the company can keep their high profit margins even after the solutions have become trivial (see also Gillette, printer companies, out-of-patents drugs). The market solution to this "should" be that a competitor can undercut someone doing that, and drive them out of business - but why would anyone bother doing that, if the reward is to conquer a commoditized market that by all rights shouldn't be all that profitable, and isn't after your price war. If you have the chops to do that, you'll probably go into some other more profitable market instead (in that vein, hats off to that new drug company backed by Mark Cuban, if they end up actually doing that with generic drugs). Or someone does it, then gets an offer they can't refuse, so the upstart gets acquired by the incumbent, who can go back to exploiting their captive audience.
