I've lived in three states that showed really foolish behavior. California, New York, and Texas.
I figure the others just weren't put in the right circumstances to demonstrate their foolishness.
California had power up north and not south. It needed transmission lines to get the power south. Nobody was willing to build power plants in the south--but environmental and social justice concerns trumped them. Nobody was willing to build transmission lines from the north--think of the environment.
New York gets a lot of its power from out of state or from the West. Those in the eastern part of the state suck up power but don't want the inconvenience of the mess. To get power to NYC they needed to build new power lines. They knew this. They'd said this for years. But it would have to go through the outer layers of the NYC population sprawl, and those outer layers were those people who had bought farmland cheap and watched it become upper-middle class. Those power lines would reduce the view. It was messy and inconvenient. (Giuliani's response was mini-power-plants in the City.)
Texas has similar concerns: It started putting up a lot of wind-based power plants in the mid-late '80s and they were coming on line in 2009 and 2010. What do you do with that power? Most of the population is in the eastern half of the state, the DFW, Austin, San Anotnio, and Houston areas. It needs to put in multiply redundance power-transmission lines and actually form a decent grid for moving a lot of energy. But there's resistance from land owners and environment groups. Some of the environmental groups have been really cynical: Yeah, they want to protect the environment and keep this scar from despoiling the blissful West Texan wasteland. But also they want to use the risk of scarcity to push for regulations to drive conservation and forced upgrades to more efficient appliances and equipment. Something like rolling blackouts would be a crisis that they wouldn't want to waste.
There are some weirdnesses about American power consumption. Per capita it hasn't changed much for well over a decade--ups and downs track recessions, not technology. Yet computers really suck down the watts. You have to go back decades to find a real increase in per capital consumption that doesn't dip back down. (It's like per capita federal income tax revenues--they're remarkably stable whatever the tax rate, as well.) Most of the increase in power consumption comes from an increase in population. Pretty much all of that is immigration.
The reason is carbon efficiency, how many tons of carbon per megawatt of power produced. As we've built up more and more products that require electricity we've turned to more carbon-efficient generation facilities and equipment or devices (some from government regulations, some from sound economic thinking). Carbon efficiency in the US really soared in the '80s, '90s, and through 2007. Haven't looked at the charts since 2008. (My prediction: Carbon efficiency would change less and less as a recession continues but power consumption would be way down.)
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