

Because it’s way, way cheaper to pay one guy to sit in a room monitoring 50 pump stations remotely, than it is to pay 50 guys to sit in random pump stations 24/7 when they don’t need human intervention for months on end.
Why aren’t the networks properly air-gapped and protected? Read the first five words again.





Done right, it actually would.
Powering those centres would require building ton of new power generation, and in the case of a risk of running out of power, non critical infrastructure - like a datacenter - can be disconnected from the grid to redirect that power to the uses that actually matter. Like here in Finland, if we are risking blackouts for homes during winter for example, they will cut power to factories and stuff like that first in an effort to prevent it. It’s part of the contracts for commercial electricity connections, and they have to just accept that.
The bigger the section of non-critical infra you have, the more capacity you can free up in an emergency.
In Texas, though? Not very optimistic it would ever work that way.