* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.
* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.
* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.
* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.
Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.
Extreme winter events like this, now being seen more often in unusual locations, are EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago in a number of reports and research papers about the coming effects of climate change. Global warming and climate change doesn't just mean "everything is getting hotter everywhere all the time", it also means shifting global wind patterns and unusual weather that breaks previous 100-year records every 5 or 10 years.
And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?
If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world: The installed wind capacity in Texas exceeds installed wind capacity in all countries but China, the United States, Germany and India. Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state.
The fact that states with notably high winds and 1/30 of the population are 3-6x higher in a per capita metric is predictable based on these simple approximations.
The idea is that people need that power. If a state with a lot of people has a lot of power generation this will be not enough if per-capita power generation is too low. Of course power can be imported but overall per-capita seems to be more important than the total.
Correct. It is also relevant here because Texas is not connected to the federal electrical grid. That means any amount of excess wind power they produce cannot be harnessed by selling it to other states (or bought, during outages).
But power use per capita does not tell us that with any degree of confidence.
If this metric is adjusted for residential use, I would agree, but if this metric is a simple division of aggregate totals it seems of very little use.
The number of people residing in Texas is not a good indicator for how much energy various organizations operating in Texas are consuming.
I don't like per capita metrics with states because some states are the size of countries in population, and others like the one referenced are more like cities. (North Dakota pop: 700k, Dallas city pop: 1.3 mil).
It's like saying "Well Germany does X, but Luxembourg has better per capita stats!" Ya don't say... perhaps there's a reason! Maybe Germany should be more like Luxembourg
Isn't per capita a more equalizing metric? If you go off raw numbers the data will be skewed even more heavily. Though there are certainly other methods to compare, such as per km^2, that you could use to perform other comparisons, depending.
It's not, because of the scales involved. One is a heavily agrarian/rural state and the other is a combination of rural and major metropolises.
Because of how the states are divided, it becomes a compare "nearly pure rural" to "vibrant mix of major rural, suburban and urban" communities. Some states are just absolutely tiny by population and entirely rural. And it's just not an apples to apples comparison to compare one rural area with one rural/urban area. A better comparison would be just Texas's rural areas to Nebraska, without any of its cities.
When comparing apples to oranges this way, it's a roundabout way of saying "just be rural" or "don't even try to solve urban problems".
It’s a relevant metric when the discussion is about asymmetric supply/demand. The context is that if they are disproportionately high in the demand side, it stresses the grid.
It’s essentially an approximation for normalizing production (supply) based on consumption (demand). It tells us (roughly) how stressed the grid is.
To be a "leader in wind power" you shouldn't just be a populous state with an ordinary per-capita amount of wind power. That wouldn't make you "the leader in wind power", it would make you "the leader in large population".
So this person is taking seriously the idea of being a "leader in wind power", and exploring whether there's any merit to it.
15-20% renewable power doesn't mean they aren't "a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism", especially given how much oil they produce.
Nonsense, they're ahead of the game, as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.
If you drive I20 west through Dallas and on toward Midland and Odessa, you will come to the Permian Basin. From there to I20’s merge with I10, the air will smell like a can of motor oil much of the time and at night the land will extend to the horizon with mercury vapor lights of pump jacks every few hundred yards.
Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind.
And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air.
The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.
And certainly not just domestically either, if you look at where much of the technical expertise came from that set up the modern organization of Saudi Aramco. Houston, mostly.
Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did.
Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion.
It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?
> If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas
This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers.
If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary.
Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.
> Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.
Well, your source doesn't necessarily contradict my claim. If there had been similarly competent propaganda on the risks of more and more extreme cold events due to global warming, to the same extent as climate change denial propaganda, perhaps the trend in this study might change.
>as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.
Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions.
People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.
> pump back hydro
Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale.
> other storage solutions
>People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products.
There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible.
The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.
> Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.
Only for a very weak definition of "prohibitive".
Let's say nuclear costs 10 cents per kWh if run at full load. If you use only those plants, averaging 2/3 output, your power costs 15 cents (plus distribution). If you plan for really high peaks maybe you average 1/2 output and power costs 20 cents (plus distribution). None of those costs are prohibitive. It's more than 9 cents (plus distribution) from coal but not that much more.
Prohibitive is something like trying to use batteries for long-term power balancing. A battery that's needed once a year or less could cost upwards of 10 dollars per delivered kWh.
I can't find the link anymore, but a few years back they were looking into using pulley systems with large blocks of concrete to store kinetic energy in a similar fashion to pump back. I think something like that in theory could work.
Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult.
Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return.
So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two.
Getting full power from a nuclear plant has negligible fuel costs, so it's good to stay at 100% and use the power somehow, but that doesn't mean they're bad at load-following. A plant made with load-following in mind can go between half power and full power in minutes.
Nuclear, yes, but hydro, no. Hydro simply isn’t scalable, once you build out practical sites, you cannot get more of it. This is doubly true in flat and dry places like Texas.
I might nitpick and point out that Texas is not flat and dry. It is flat and wet, or dry and hilly. East Texas has the swamps and weather patterns of the traditional gulf southern states. West Texas has mountains higher than anything on the east coast of the US. The rockies don't just dead end in northern NM, there are sky islands and mountain ranges extending all the way down through Mexico. Central Texas has a bit of both, but the water situation is unreliable enough that while there are a fair number of dams and reservoirs with hydroelectric very little of it is used consistently for electric generation. That is because the water value in the reservoir exceeds its electric generation value. Those dams were built mostly for flood control, so they get hammered every couple years and end up opening spillways, then slowly dropping for years as the remaining water gets used up. The hydro only really takes effect when they are sending water from one lake down to the next for water control purposes.
I think I worded my point poorly. Nuclear and Hydro can provide great low emission baselines, but if you're building up a large percentage of your grid on solar and wind you need something which can very quickly ramp up and ramp down generation. Nuclear's costs means that it would be far better to have be a consistent baseline running at full capacity.
In that case simply don't use that much wind or hydro. It seems that the costs outweigh the benefits when hydro and nuclear are so cheap and provide such low emissions.
Either that, or structure the grid so that wind and solar are used to power accumulative loads.
Yes it can, but it's not practical to have intermittent nuclear to supplement your solar and wind. You want nuclear to be producing at capacity at all times.
Coal, oil, and nuclear are scalable. What's special about natural gas here? The production method doesn't leave it in a significantly better place just because the actual burn process is cleaner.
According to that same page, most natural gas plants currently in use utilize a combined cycle system which takes significantly longer than more flexible, but less prevalent, combustion turbines.
Though maybe the point is moot: Even if the total environmental impact of natural gas is the same as oil, and leaving aside the geopolitical issues-- natural gas is still cheaper, so if you're going to choose between two bad options then you might as well go with the lower cost one. At which point you just invest in upgrading those combined gas plants to more flexible combustion turbines.
However, nuclear isn't completely out of the game here: It may have a very long cold-start time, but in the last decade there's been progress in making it capable of load-following instead of just baseload, especially when it's planned, e.g after sunset. There's certainly other environmental factors there, but if we're worried about decreasing CO2 ASAP, nuclear should probably be part of the conversation.
I absolute agree that nuclear should be part of the conversation, but the biggest barriers to nuclear is regulation and costs. Spending all the effort needed to build a plant just to not run it at maximum capacity all the time would be an unaffordable luxury. It makes much more economic sense to have it be base.
An underutilized nuclear plant may still be a necessity instead of a luxury if we're running out of time on CO2 emissions. In this case, making economic sense may run counter to long term human interests.
The important combination is easy fast regulation as you say, but also cheap to build and operate.
Many are built to operate < 10% of capacity, so simple single stage instead of more efficient CCGT, because it's insanely cheap peak power compared to alternatives.
There are a few industry stakeholders... energy producers, petroleum, energy infrastructure, etc. Each has different drivers and motivations. One of the issues with all of these businesses is that maximizing return in capital investment is about cost control, and the interests of the operators of power plants and electric infrastructure don’t always align.
Scenarios where you cannot burn gas do not benefit gas drillers. But gas drillers have nothing to due with reducing capital spending that makes infrastructure resilient to unlikely/infrequent risks. That’s all about pipeline and utility operators, who want to keep that dividend rolling.
Texas grid is about a quarter powered by Wind. Since Wind and Solar are dynamic - there may be variations and how they are measured, but to claim Texas Electric Portfolio is 85% fossil is not right numbers.
Coal is almost dead and there is minimal oil for electric generation. Hawaii burns oil more than Texas.
I think there are 2 nuclear power plants .. one is Comanche Peak which is south west of DFW, not sure of the other.
Locals call it STP. I’ve looked at the blinking lights on the domes from my aunt’s farmhouse since childhood. It provides power to 2 million homes a couple hundred miles away in central Texas.
All the scientific evidence points to global warming is real and will cause more extreme heat events.
But the science that global warming will cause more extreme cold events is on much more tenuous grounds.
From the epa
"Although the United States has experienced many winters with unusually low temperatures, unusually cold winter temperatures have become less common—particularly very cold nights (lows). Record-setting daily high temperatures have become more common than record lows. The decade from 2000 to 2009 had twice as many record highs as record lows."
I recently watched an interesting video* on the phenomena of extreme cold events increased by climate change. To massively simplify, one theory is the jet stream around the Polar vortex is being destabilized by climate change. While the North Pole is warming faster than ever, it is still very cold air, and moving that air further south means unusually cold weather. The jury is still out of course as you mentioned.
On a large scale, it's basic physics. The jet streams are driven by temperature gradient: warm air from equatorial regions flows to the cold poles, warming up the regions inbetween.
The planet is not heating up uniformly, poles are heating up more than the equatorial regions. This of course means that the temperature gradient between the hot and cold realms is not as steep as it was. Net result? Weaker jet streams.
Now it appears that moving heat from the equator to the (northern) high latitudes was only a part of the equation in keeping these latitudes temperate. Confining the freezing polar vortex to the pole was another.
I'm sure there are others, and the population at large is going to learn about them in some very instructive ways in the future.
Yeah I read a similar one; because of warming, the glaciers and melted ice melt, causing the sea to desalinate a bit, which in turn makes the gulf stream stop. This stops warm water from going north and vice versa, making the north colder and the south warmer. It was implied that this caused the ice in the last ice age to travel southward.
I mean I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, there were kilometers of ice on my country.
The propaganda against climate change did a number on awareness of climate change. Blaming people for not phrasing it perfectly is a secondary cause at most.
FWIW a better phrase would be "climate destabilization".
And to your other point, it must be emphasized that oil and coal companies knew about it 40+ years ago, and chose to fund opposition research and disinformation instead.
> If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result. Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London.
I like Climate Catastrophe, because that's what we are in.
Frank Luntz brags (exaggerates) about changing the vernacular to benefit the GOP/deniers - we should do the same to scare people into accepting and understanding the current reality.
Catastrophizing doesn't work. It fuels extremism at worst and at best breeds distrust in experts. Covid19 has been a fantastic study on how not to handle global catastrophes.
Sure. But getting everyday people to panic will actively hurt efforts to deal with these problems. People get really stupid, shortsighted, violent, and desperate when they feel like the world they know and benefit from is slipping away from them.
That's like saying the term "stunted growth" in children is bad because we keep finding examples of increasingly taller or obese children.
"Global warming" always referred to an on-average increase in warming on a global scale. The term wasn't the issue, it was people intentionally deciding they didn't like it for political reasons.
Arguably, the term itself was only part of the problem; the ensuing propaganda deluge that followed in its wake also seriously conflicts with the claims. tl;dr: hyped-up panic usually finds itself at odds with findings mere years later. Slow down and step carefully, and you'll find you don't get this kind of whiplash.
But in this particular case, all signs point to the panic being significantly hyped-down: the world is in a much worse shape than most mainstream predictions, and global warming is accelerating faster than many "worse-case scenarios" even a decade ago.
It's also important to remember that this isn't a gradual phenomenon - there are certain break points that, when we'll reach, we won't ever be able to go back. And by all accounts, unless we significantly change the global economy literally today, there is no chance that we won't reach those breaking points in 50-100 years. And even if we did today, there's a good chance it's too late.
The mess we're leaving for our children to fix should make all of us feel deeply ashamed.
Right, but in the early years of messaging, a lot of media was generated that spoke in volumes without proper scientific understanding; or the actual conclusions were stated publicly before sufficient certainty was had, leading to the average person seeing wildly different narratives begin to conflict, one after another. That's a colossal messaging failure, and what's worse is that politicians tend to get stuck in one of the intermediate messages regardless of how outdated it becomes, using it to drive action in all sorts of wrong directions. See the problem?
The term climate change took over global warming because of how laughable wrong all the "global warming" predictions failed to come true and disastrously so.
15,000 years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I sit. We are still coming out of that glaciation. It is warming.
C - catastrophic - there is no evidence in the historic temperature record that anything unusual is happening.
A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.
G - global - not local.
W - warming - see above.
In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.
> C - catastrophic - there is no evidence in the historic temperature record that anything unusual is happening.
There is no evidence in the historic temperature record that the Earth has ever been this hot in the past million years.
> A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.
The human contribution to CO2 and other greenhouse gases is not small, it is almost the entire quantity. There is very little contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from non-human sources (of course, methane from cows for example is a human source).
> G - global - not local.
Not sure what you mean here.
> W - warming - see above.
see above.
> In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.
The brainwashing propaganda from interested science deniers is not better informed than the practically unanimous conclusions of all the earth's climate scientists.
The Earth is headed for catastrophe, both ecologically and geopolitically. Sea level rise is already above initial predictions, and that effect alone will displace the 300 million people currently living in one of the lowest plains by the sea in the world, in Bangladesh. The coming migrant crisis at the confluence of India, Pakistan and China, three nuclear power with an uneasy relationship, would be cause for serious concern alone.
Of course, the ever increasing droughts and extreme temperatures (including >50C wet-bulb temperatures, which can kill healthy adults outright) in those same regions makes them a literal hotbed for social and political upheaval like the world has never seen.
You are simply deluded if you think everything is fine.
>The coming migrant crisis at the confluence of India, Pakistan and China, three nuclear power with an uneasy relationship, would be cause for serious concern alone.
This is what really keeps me up at night. Nevermind the direct effects of 4+ degrees of warming if we fail to stop it - we'll start WW3 long before the temperatures hit that.
So that's why the key here is strong international organisations. We need to co-operate both to have any chance of making the changes that need to be made to keep warming within survival bounds, and to keep discussions open so when conflicts do arise, they are less likely to result in war.
> A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources
CO2 from burning fossil fuels and burning plants has a different isotope mix than does CO2 from other sources. We can use this to tell how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from that kind of burning. There aren't enough wildfires or other natural sources to account for more than a small fraction of it.
Hence, we can prove that most of that type CO2 comes from human sources. And that type account for most of the increase since pre-industrial times.
C: Irrelevant. It doesn't matter if this is unusual on a geological time scale. It can be catastrophic either way.
A: The enormous consensus based on available evidence contradicts you here in your implication that human contributions are irrelevant. Natural sources have also been balanced out by natural sinks. Humans are both destroying natural sinks and releasing more of our own. The issue is also not whether we "own" a majority of the emissions, it's about upsetting a delicate balance. Chaotic metastable systems do not necessarily need a big push in order to have a massive impact. Sensitivity to initial conditions is very high.
G & W: you're not expressing your criticism here. Global average temperatures are rising. What is you dispute with that?
Your last point: I'm not aware of alternative theory for the observed changes that fits available evidencr, while on the other hand there are plenty of research papers like the following: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770. Whether or not there is smoking-gun level proof, available evidence fits the theory.
One third of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man made. It's not small. 66% times 1.5 is 100% meaning humans have added 50% CO2 on top of natural CO2 in the atmosphere.
One of the worst names ever coined is "global warming". To the layman, it simply means things getting hotter, and that's not what it means at all.
Earth's climate system is an energy matrix, a complex interoperation between co-operating systems, all driven by energy, all "seeking" lower energy states at the expense of other systems. Some of that energy does indeed go into warming (melting ice, sea temperature rise, ...) but a huge chunk just makes these energetic systems more energetic because of a lack of suitable energy sink.
Put a glass beaker full of water on a lab-stirrer, and you're going to get the occasional splash, but replace the 9v battery-driven motor with a Harley Davidson (you know, to force way more energy into the system) and you're going to get a whole lot more splashes. Splashes are bad.
Forcing energy into immense, complex, non-linear dynamical chaotic systems that literally govern our existence on this planet is not a good idea if you want to continue to exist on this planet. All you're doing with "global warming" is giving these systems far more phase-space to explore, and we just don't have the knowledge or experience to predict what some of the solutions those systems can explore will do.
I still feel it ought to have been christened "energy death of the planet" or similar (akin to the heat-death of the universe". Something that the tabloids could grab hold of and point out disasters as we creep, seemingly inexorably, towards a tipping point we may not recover well from.
It's a little bit more complicated than that. The primary "extreme weather" predictions I remember from 20 years ago was more hurricanes. We do seem to observe and name more hurricanes (in part, at least, due to much better weather equipment), but fewer hurricanes have made landfall in the United States. https://www.statista.com/statistics/621238/number-of-hurrica.... Other extreme weather statistics are similar - we spend a lot of time talking about polar vortexes (vertices?), but many of the cold records are from back in the 1930s. I don't doubt that the world's temperature is rising, but I continue to view the extreme weather predictions as fairly speculative and a distraction from the core issues - temperature rising, ice melting, sea level rising, with unpredictable effects. If you had some more academic (and less click-funded) sources to share related to data demonstrating the extreme weather hypothesis, I'd be interested in taking a look.
This isn't quite what you said, as your comment spoke about the energy industry specifically, but I decided to see if there was any data on people's beliefs about climate change by state. I found this interesting site from a program on Climate Change Communication from Yale, and it allows you to view the results on various questions related to climate change by state. My conclusion from clicking through a few of these is that Texas is close to the national average in climate change beliefs.
Some numbers: Global warming happening 71% (-1 from Avg), Caused by humans 56% (-1 from Avg), Support regulating CO2 72% (-3 from Avg), Expand offshore drilling 57% (+5 from Avg)
Due to the broken nature of American politics; what Texans believe on any single issue doesn't really matter unless Texans can organize better than the vested interests paying for climate change denial in policy.
There has not been increase in cold weather events in Texas. Rather, the shift to energy producing technologies that are more susceptible to going offline in cold weather is why Texas is now going offline more often.
Back when people burned coal for electricity, it was a lot dirtier but did not suffer the issue of windmills freezing. Attempts to politicize this issue and hijack it for whatever crusade you are waging means that the Texas grid wont be made more reliable, and this is going to be a growing problem in other areas that are beginning to rely more on energy sources that are subject to being disrupted by cold weather.
It's factually true - unless you believe the phenomenon of climate change denialism itself does not exist.
Follow the money. Who funds it? Primarily Houston headquartered oil and gas companies. Or if not headquartered in Houston, with very significant operations in texas and its oil industry.
What are you hoping to prove with this? In terms of what they are actually doing, it sounds like they're installing a lot of renewable energy. Indeed, more than most places. Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?
What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?
> Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?
Expect them to? No. Wish for it? Yeah, definitely. And then hold them accountable for the decades of gaslighting while they knew that was the case. That’s kind of the role of a government. How is GameStop stock more controversial than climate change denial? GameStop is ephemeral, climate change is existential.
The easy thing is to say “bankrupt the fuckers, kill the orgs!” and I feel that. I want to see them suffer for the path they’ve put the whole planet on. The responsible societal thing to do though is probably to mandate renewables, stop petro subsidies, and make them eat the cost for the switch if they (the orgs) want to stay alive. We have the evidence; it’s public knowledge now even if not widely disseminated.
They’re adding renewables, but not fast enough because there is still profit to be made in petro even though it fucks us further. That has to stop ASAP. Governments are the place where that happens.
> What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?
It matters A LOT. The anti-climate change propaganda is one of the biggest roadblocks to meaningful climate action. In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had withdrawn from climate accords or forced the EPA not to talk about global warming. These are lunatic acts, much crazier than the than Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Sure, it's nice that they're planting a few wind farms. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the real changes required if we are to stop global warming from completely dooming our civilization. Building wind-farms would have been a solution if it had started 40 years ago.
Today, the only option is to stop most non-renewable plants, and most factories that rely on their power. We need to produce a fraction of the goods we are producing today (not talking about the US specifically, this is a global problem), with all the human costs that will entail. I'm not holding my breath for any of it.
In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had signed such a do nothing deal like the climate accords which fails to even get us within spitting distance of dealing with the issue.
The solution wasn't building wind farms, it was finishing the nuclear build up like they had originally planed, just like how France did. But that was killed by self proclaimed environmentalists of that era.
Quite possibly, though there are/were good reasons to be wary of nuclear energy as well. I do personally believe that the risks from global warming outweigh those from nuclear plants at this time, but I don't think this was clear at all 50 years ago.
> Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?
Actually, yes, I would be perfectly happy if the oil industry was not run on full 'free market' capitalist principles, and they acknowledged climate change is real.
An article contrasting the Alberta and Norwegian oil industries.
If oil and gas companies are so opposed to renewables and have the money to work against them, how did Texas - which is where those companies should have the most control - become the #1 producer of wind power and the #2 producer of solar?
Both in dollars and cents and in PR value being able to push back against environmentalists and climate change advocates. But you can be assured, global climate be damned, no drop of oil or natural gas will be left in the ground until it becomes unprofitable or unless regulatory changes force the issue.
It is not rocket science. If you are in the business of selling oil and gas, you ideally consume as little of it as possible. Solar and wind are cheaper sources of energy but they aren't easily transported. So Texas is using solar/wind to both cut costs and allow them to export more of their petrochemicals.
The most obvious answer is oil&gas despite its best efforts isn’t all that powerful.
I mean, everyone loves the stories of how car companies single handedly ripped up all the street car tracks but apparently they couldn’t stop Tesla from eating their lunch despite teetering on the brink of insolvency for years.
Well, they do keep electing climate change deniers, which given the political power of Texas does have a big influence on environmental policy in the US as a whole..
This is like the left-wing version of "Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for homosexuality". A mix of generalization, moralizing, and I-told-you-so. Just nasty.
climate science is neither "left" nor "right" - If you believe that the IPCC and its various participants' scientific findings is some sort of vast left wing conspiracy, you probably live in an alternate-reality echo chamber.
If we can’t trust the WHO to give us honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus, I don’t see why we’d default to trusting a similarly structured organization to give us honest answers about climate change research.
> honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus
The accuracy of answers about the source of a virus was very much dependent on the level of openness and cooperation from the jurisdiction in which the virus originated. Climate change, on the other hand, does not have a single geographical source, and therefore the IPCC is less limited in the information available to it.
Similarly, I suspect that the WHO's early mistakes or inaccuracies in assessing the dangers of the virus were due to the fact that most of the early cases and mortality data were being collected in a single jurisdiction.
WHO deliberately chooses to kowtow to China and exclude Taiwan, the country with one of the best records on Covid-19 and with the experience and knowledge to fight it successfully. At some point sacrificing public health to accommodate a genocidal regime becomes a matter of institutional failure. Don't waste your breath making excuses for them. The WHO's "inaccuracies" go far beyond believing CCP propaganda.
You're experiencing the 'criticising the CCP is forbidden' backlash with these downvotes, it's one of the HN voting system failures.
But you've hit on a problem: can we maintain global cooperative institutions in the face of an expansionist hegemonic power like China? I don't think we can, because anything controversial and it gets ripped apart.
The US and allied countries have their own national organizations, but even the EU is compromised on a number of issues, such as creeping fascism (Poland and Hungary) and the inability to take action against member states, or even coordinate in a pandemic. Even NATO is compromised by expansion to include such countries, and Turkey as well. So I'm questioning how useful large group multi-lateralism is for an organization like the WHO.
No he isn't. He is experiencing the "people will downvote dumb criticisms of climate science". The WHO's response to the pandemic is not in any way evidence that the IPCC is untrustworthy after decades of thorough study of climate change. That's the reason for downvotes, not because he criticized the CCP.
Large multinational organizations can have significant value, as NATO and the UN have shown in the past. But once the "regulatory capture" effect happens and the UN becomes a platform for genocidal dictatorships to spew anti-Semitic propaganda, we should discard that organization in favor of something better (even if "better" hypothetically had to be "nothing"). A truly global organization is, as you've explained, probably impossible because the bullies won't participate in a fair organization. But large regional organizations can still have value, as long as we recognize their limits and don't look to them for leadership that they can't adequately provide.
What we have seen with the WHO, and what you can also expect from the IPCC, is a minimization of the problem. The incentives for such organization are always to downplay the size of the risk, to present optimistic estimates as worse-case scenarios.
So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.
> So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.
If official, peer-reviewed reports from international agencies are "wrong or lying," what better sources would you recommend?
Or more importantly..
If they're wrong, why aren't any of the groups involved catching these errors and correcting them?
If they're lying, you're suggesting a multi-decade, international conspiracy spanning thousands of people that threatens humanity as a whole where the watchdogs are either complicit or not competent enough to catch. I hope you have something to back that up.
I'm not claiming some huge conspiracy. I'm just claiming that, just like the WHO initially downplayed the risks of Covid19, so too I expect the IPCC is likely downplaying to some extent the risks from global warming.
This doesn't require some complex conspiracy, just some natural amount of wanting to tell people (heads of state) what they want to hear, some amount of funding and promoting less alarmist research, some amount of feeling like they have a duty to avoid extreme rhetoric etc.
I hope it's clear, I'm not claiming that I know all this for a fact. But it is how international organizations seem to operate in general. You would definitely not expect a major international inter-governmental organization to present a position that would be called extreme position, even if that extreme position may be right.
I didn't say it was left or right. I was responding to your comment, which was petty partisanship.
Anyway, your attitude is unscientific. If there were no unusual weather events for 5 years, it wouldn't "prove climate change wrong". By the same token, it's moronic to say "look, climate change!" every time there's an unusual weather event.
Plot the number of 100 year records being broken per year, for extreme heat or extreme cold, on a chart for the past 20 years and then tell me there isn't something unusual going on in the recent climate.
It's a scientific fact that many places in the world are now seeing weather extremes that have literally not been recorded in their past 100 years of data, on a rapidly increasing basis.
You took my first response as "climate change is left-wing". You took my second response as "statistics aren't real". I never said either of those things.
I think pointing to a weather event and saying "look climate change!" is dumb. It's not statistics. No matter how steep your line is, it doesn't prove "X weather event would not have occurred if not for global warming".
All I responded to was this comment which was nasty and added nothing to your post:
> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?
I understand that global warming models predict more extreme events both hot and cold. However, at some point, empiricists will have to admit that global warming models will have no statistical power.
To that end, what evidence of weather patterns would you have to see to believe less in the global warming model? Would years of "less extreme event days" make you believe in the global warming model any less?
I would need to see average global surface temperature being uncoupled from atmospheric CO2 levels, sustained over a long period of time. Given that we have hundreds of thousands of years of climate records [0], that seems like a tall order.
One cold spell does not disprove global warming. While Dallas might be experiencing abnormally low temps, Jacksonville's seeing uncharacteristic highs (86F today).
If you spend 30 seconds googling you'll see that communities in the high Canadian arctic, alaska and greenland have been setting new temperature records on a regular basis. And the subsidence and melt of coastal permafrost in some areas is increasing at a rate that will soon look like a hockey stick curve on a chart.
> To that end, what evidence of weather patterns would you have to see to believe less in the global warming model?
Certainly a decreasing average global temperature would do it. However, we are seeing a consistent upward trend in the global average[1] even if some regions have lower than normal temperatures.
this is 100% not what was being said 20 years ago - thats why its called global warming and not the destruction of global weather patterns. thats also why all the sources you linked are less than two years old.
the initial alarmism really shot itself in the foot by making specific predictions (ice caps melting, sea levels rising). we still arent even remotely close to being able to model the global weather system today. it really delegitimized the movement and slowed humanities reaction. they had to do this awful, awful position change and say "well, we were 100% wrong about all the predicitons we made but we're still right!" it helps explain how we ended up the way we are.
For example, while we get tons of “extreme weather events” nobody was talking about 20-30 years ago, sea level rise that was announced very loudly and widely, is actually going to be relatively minor: in IPCC report, even in their most catastrophic RCP8.5 scenario, they scientific consensus is that the sea level are highly unlikely to rise by more than a meter by 2100; that’s less than a difference between low and high tide.
You say that as if a meter will not have catastrophic impact on the world. Pacific island nation states, and sea level rise of a meter + a major cyclone hitting Bangladesh could set an all time casualty record for a single weather disaster. Even if it's half a meter average rise and not a full meter.
It could, if people just sit on their thumbs and do nothing about the issue. However, this is relatively easy problem to solve from engineering perspective: the Dutch have successfully implemented solutions hundreds of years ago already, before most of modern technology had been invented.
Really, out of all ways the climate change will negatively impact the world, sea level rise in the amount we are actually going to observe it is really rather minor problem.
In my opinion naming it global warming was the biggest mistake. People hear it‘s getting hotter, don‘t see this effect and „don‘t believe in it“. Events like this is another point why people don‘t believe in global warming, they see very cold weather outside where this is very untypical and say global warming is bullshit.
It should have only been named climate change, drastic wheather change or something incorporating your naming of shifting wheather patterns.
Nobody had a problem with it being "global warming" until the mid 90s when political interests made a culture war point. They would have done so regardless of how accurately the phrase described the phenomenon.
But the whole point of the article is that these events are not especially unusual, that they have happened quite a few times before, including several times in the last decade alone.
One problem with the Texas outages is everyone seems to be trying to cast it in terms of pre-existing viewpoints on environmentalism. None of them really fit. Clearly, the Texas outages weren't really caused by wind farms and attempts to tie them to that require quite indirect arguments of the form, "if they hadn't built wind farms they'd have built more gas plants instead". There might be something in that line of argument if developed further, e.g. if it's easier to 'winterize' gas plants than wind farms. But it's not there yet.
At the same time, trying to tie this to CO2 increases is also reaching. People who keep ignoring the poor track record of climatology look increasingly like the true "climate deniers". Here's just one fairly typical example of a prediction, an article from 2011 by a professor of atmospheric sciences:
"It is a particularly appropriate read as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011. While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer's unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011."
And from the article we're reading now:
"The earliest report I could find was from the 2011 winter event in Texas[14]. A very strong cold front hit Texas (and other parts of the south central US) bringing temperatures below freezing for over 4 days and winds over 30 MPH."
Maybe the difficulty the US has in funding winterization of the power grid is because professors keep telling them the future will be really hot and really dry all the time? Obviously if you're generous enough to these sorts of predictions then you can find ways to argue they're "nearly right", but it's too often taken to an extreme that leads to unfalsifiability. No matter what happens to the weather, it's always because of CO2.
Their last major event was 2011 for Texas so they aren't becoming more common. They did act on many recommendations from that event but no one would have predicted a storm of that magnitude. Similar to how the some Southern states suffered a once in 100 if not 1000 year flood in 2009 that has not reoccurred though similar declarations it was going to be common. Lets not even get into the doom and gloom after Katrina followed by the absolute lack of any storms for years.
As in, FUD only ends up defeating arguments because every dire prediction is bound to fail. You get real change by showing people what the benefits are to every day life not based on some biblical level type hysteria.
Texas is one of the leaders in wind and solar so I am not sure where you are coming from other than succumbing to the unfortunately common parroting of facts that don't apply to the situation.
So summary, Texas and the nation need to have a common and joined grid management program but for reasons of providing stability and growth. Don't lead off with telling people they have to have it because of climate change as too many will tune you out and for good reason, the conversation tends to hysterics and theater more than reality.
Without winterization, it doesn't matter if Texas is connected or not. With it, it doesn't matter either, because it produces and uses so much electricity.
If anything, it might be a blessing to the other states, that they are not connected to Texas at present. Consider the northeast blackout of 2003:
Texas is not shutting down train lines in Canada. We didn't implement our own winterization guidelines and now we face the consequences. That's how it should be.
The justification for Texas's grid goes back many decades and can't be assessed on the basis of an event like this -- that's recency bias.
> Without winterization, it doesn't matter if Texas is connected or not.
Why is this the case? It seems like if Texas was connected they'd be able to pull some of that missing 45GW power which might be enough for an hour of electricity every 8 hours which would be a total game changer for a lot of homes.
Would other states be able to provide it? I saw a post a few days ago showing that wholesale electricity prices are up 10x in nonimpacted states (California)
Yes. At the peak, Texas wholesale electricity spot-prices went up by 10,000% - 10x is child's play. What would have happened was non-essential use in California would have been priced out by desperate Texan households who'd pay almost anything to keep residences heated.
Yes - residential customers don't pay wholesale price (which is what I, and gp was referring to). I'm not sure why you're injecting residential pricing into the discussion.
Energy companies absorb the fluctuations, except for that one company that thought it was a great idea to pass-though prices to the customers. It was a great idea when the prices were low, but many of their customers will likely experience sticker shock on their next bill.
I'm just not sure you're applying the right kind of reasoning here. The question is, what do we learn from this event? One thing we don't learn is that Texas's disconnected grid was a problem -- it simply made no difference, because of the magnitude of the capacity loss. It might even have protected the surrounding states.
Going from no electricity for 2-3 days to just an hour of electricity every 8 hours is a total game changer. It allows you to charge your phone which reduces your health and safety risks suite a bit, not to mention an hour of heating can mean the different between a house that hits a low of 34 vs 44 which is a world of different in terms of cold.
Simply because the entire loss couldn't be replaced, doesn't mean some extra supply couldn't be if it was connected.
Arguing that the problem couldn't be entirely fixed, and ignoring the possibility of ANY help seems as I described, demanding perfection to ignore any possible improvement...
As far as a possible collapse of outside systems, the other connected systems seem to have done well enough for now.
> Without winterization, it doesn't matter if Texas is connected or not. With it, it doesn't matter either, because it produces and uses so much electricity.
Isn't this just more argument for perfection. Sure, if they completely and fully winterized every single plant, it wouldn't be a problem. But what if they did more than nothing to winterize but less than 100%. Then imagine they were connected as well. If they had simply done better at multiple things, they wouldn't have to be perfect at any one thing. And it certainly doesn't excuse them making terrible decisions on multiple things.
Sure, if everything in my house is 100% fireproof, I don't need a fire extinguisher. Sure, if everything in my house is made out of kindling, a fire extinguisher is going to be inadequate protection. But if I build my house out of relatively fire retardant materials and I keep a fire extinguisher, I am likely going to be ok. Perfection is the enemy of good, and is no excuse for just settling for outright bad.
Also, the exact same thing happened in 1989, 2011 and (less so) in 2014, and the recommendations that were made and ignored due to those events would have prevented the grid from collapsing.
I think Abbott is one of those right twice a day kind of guys, and in this is one of those cases.
The engineering side like to focus on the difficulty of stabilizing a grid with a lot of renewables. But this isn't really TX's problem since we have all these NG plants that spin up a few times a year and make their entire yearly operating budget.
But there is also financial destabilization because the wind generators are putting a lot of financial pressure on the entire system. None of those NG plants would have wanted to miss out on the last couple days, but they did because they are also operating at fairly thin margins because the wind has fairly low capital costs and just pumps energy into the grid when it feels like it, even when they aren't actually making any money.
If the price of NG goes up much, this will become completely unsustainable.
Frankly, I think what we need is a power demand tax/fee. If your a generator and you can't supply energy during peak demand times you get hit with say a 20% generating fee that get transferred to the energy sources that do. That would force the intermittent sources to at least pay for part of the peaking and base load capacity that has to deal with the intermittent sources flooding the market. It would also strongly discourage market manipulation by "accidentally" having a bunch of generation capacity offline at the same time.
You prescribed a solution to the problem and justified it with a single way the solution will work. When explained this way, it is obviously a bad way to justify something.
What is a vastly more interesting question is what is the most perverse set of incentives the proposed system could result in, or what are ways the new system could fail, sometimes you never understand these until implementation, and only at that point is it discovered that most problems are not simple.
Your entire proposition is founded on the axiom that the free market is the ultimate good in running efficient systems, but the free market is reactionary (a way to fail) and the free market makes distinctions between owner class people, intermediary class people, and customer class people (misaligned incentives are a way to fail).
Fundamentally there is a disconnect between who pays for a water pipe that bursts and who pays to weatherize power plants, so you end up with a terrible set of incentives. Unless every owner of a burst pipe can successfully sue the power company for losses, I can't see a situation in which the free market would win over a well planned/regulated system.
We went to the moon. We built nuclear subs. The world runs on American technologies which are a major output of our institutions. We are one of the few countries with clean water running into our kitchen faucets. Strong, responsible, accountable institutions have proven to make this country great.
There are multiple potentially valid ways to do better than last time:
- Guide the free market (your solution)
- Regulate customers (pipes must be insulated/buried)
- Regulate the producers (all power plants must be weatherized)
- Give regulatory authority to experts (like regulation, but lighter weight, and much more easily changable)
- Nationalize infrastructure
I am pretty unconvinced that the free market can offer efficient/acceptable solutions to disaster scenarios.
I don't disagree with anything you said, except that I don't believe regulations is a complete solution either. See CA. I also don't think you can sue the power generation, thats like suing the police, you won't inact any kind of reform and the costs are just going to be passed on to the consumers. At that point your just turning the power co into a form of insurance.
I tend to think the best way to assure system wide stability is to reintegrate the generators+transmission+retail portions to avoid all the perverse incentives. You know, the old public/CoOp utility model. Plus, the more you can keep politics and MBAs out of it, except to provide some guiding principals (aka lets try to reduce carbon, and keep costs low) the better off its going to be.
But realistically, politics in TX, so a solution that can be passed by the government is going to involve some kind of free market adjustment. Usually that is just to raise the power cap (now at $9000) further, but as recently proven it doesn't do crap either.
I said elsewhere let the engineers run it, but people assumed I was just talking about engineers, when really what I should have said is keep the decision making close to the people on the ground. If the plant operator thinks his plant needs some maintenance/etc he better not get overridden. Same with other bits, when the lineman noticed a problem with a pole, or an engineer runs a wind loading simulation and discovers a problem, if gets resolved rather than ignored.
Yeah, I think this highlights that it all comes back to accountability: there's no solution that works if we don't hold regulators accountable and the regulators don't hold the industry accountable. The people of Texas need to be organized and have a voice in this.
You missed a key point that was crucial in what is basically a cascading failure:
Texas (like other states) relies on gas plants for electricity plants (about half of them) and is also a gas producer. The increased demand on gas because of people heating their homes contributed to shortages. This then leaad to issues with gas production sites in texas that need power. This was then aggravated by pipes icing up (water vapor in the gas). That's a cascading failure. Wind power was also affected of course but not nearly as much as the gas supply issues.
Texas needs to reconsider its over-reliance on gas and diversify its grid. Ice proofed turbines are a thing. Solar is still a relatively minor part of production in what is obviously a state that has plenty of potential for that.
Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. If only to enable the export of the ample supplies of wind and solar it can produce normally. It's just good business sense. Then, it should probably start incentivizing people more to do sensible things like putting solar on their roofs, installing batteries in their homes, insulating their houses, and consuming off peak power (e.g. by charging their EVs). All these things collectively should make blackouts a lot less likely.
The business case for Texas's separate grid is local control, so connecting to the other two grids (it's not really accurate to say "the rest of the country") could present some real practical difficulties.
It's interesting to read your proposals because of the eco-targeted nature of them; but I think most Texans are going to interpret this differently. Forget batteries and solar panels; they're going to get generators and use diesel.
I mean in theory if they had winterized that number wound be zero, right? If I understood correctly the total demand was within the system’s theoretical capacity, but that capacity was not actually available due to the deep freeze.
We didn't need 100%. We needed to not be without power for days. The "rolling blackouts" turned into myself and others were basically sacrificed for the grid because the load shed requirements were too high to roll.
We don't necessarily need 100%, just enough to allow rolling blackouts to even be an option.
In Austin, they had to turn off power to ~40% of all customers pretty much as soon as the shortage began. Once they had done that, they could not implement rolling blackouts without also affecting critical infrastructure like hospitals (the granularity of the electrical grid is finite, apparently).
The result was that some people had power the whole time (or nearly so), and others had nothing for ~3 days straight. Obviously it would be preferable for everyone to have intermittent power 1/N of the time than for 1/N to have nothing at all for the duration of the shortfall.
From what I've seen, you cannot keep 100% of generation online. However, in a properly designed and winter weatherized system stations should be able to come online to pick up the slack. In the reports I've seen this seems to be a high rate of failure point leading to the issues seen in Texas this week.
I was looking into this and I am thinking that the solution is actually not to weatherize the grid but rather to have each home be able to be self-sufficient for a certain period of time. Perhaps having micro grids in communities and maybe having each home have either a generator or a home battery. We already have stuff like the Tesla powerwall. If the battery bank method is used then it could also possibly be used during summer months. Possibly a good idea to offer more generous tax credits to encourage people to purchase these technologies. Under this setup if a partial grid failure occurs then rolling blackouts wouldn't be a big deal.
I'm not sure how expensive it is to weatherize the grid but I would imagine it to be very expensive.
The thing is, rolling blackouts aren't a big deal. In an extreme event like these storms, having a power grid that can survive some loss in capacity with rolling blackouts is the goal. What happened in Texas was a complete failure of the entire gird over huge swaths of land leading to millions of people being without power for multiple days. Most people don’t need generators or powerwalls for a once a decade risk of some rolling blackouts. Most communities don’t need more expensive, less efficient micro power grids for the occasional rolling blackout.
It is less expensive to weatherize the grid so it can remain mostly functional in extreme events than to have tens of millions of households buy and maintain generators so they don’t freeze to death because the actual power grid was not properly built and maintained.
How does Canada’s gas infrastructure deal with this? I don’t know the details, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s possible to make gas infrastructure operate in temperatures like those found in Texas, even for months on end.
During the late 80s my dad ran Maxus Calgary office later sold to Kerr-McGee. So in Calgary the Texas temperatures would not even be considered cold. This storm dropped Calgary temps to the -20Fs with wind chills in the -55Fs (I did not even check the fields which are further north). Pretty common when I grew up there. Oil and Gas did fine.
I think the answer here is alternate capacity. Canada gets a relatively small portion (11%) of its energy from natural gas, with no province exceeding 21% (Alberta).
On aggregate, most energy generated in Canada is renewable.
Yes, but realistically natural gas is the standard for home heating here in Ontario at least (and I assume most of Canada) and our gas infrastructure does just fine through winter.
> I'd love to see the engineering proposal to "winterize" ... a thousand miles of supply pipelines.
That isn't really what's needed. If I understand the problems with the gas supply in these events, the issue is the wellhead freezing off due to the high water vapor content in the gas.
Easy to say "properly" winterized without going into the details on how one would insulate natural gas lines across thousands of miles which requires digging up gas lines to replace them or investing more in on going research on liquids that can be injected into the peiplines that are antifreeze that don't contaminate the gas also flowing in them. Alot of innovation is going on in that direction but it's still heavily regulated.
It's good the power grid is heavily regulated.
The tldr is texas isn't often covered with sleet and snow and has made great strides in renewable energy. Now that one ice storm has hit everyone is acting like every moment of the past ten years should have been spent preventing it when in reality it requires heavy regulation and taxes. Texans don't like taxes.
FERC was almost completely cleaned out when Trump came to power so the entire set of regulations is backed up by a few years.
In reality "winterizing" gas pipelines is an unsolved problem in technology and the more manual way required digging up thousands of miles of people's land and property to use tax money to put in new pipes.
Try going to a texans property and telling them the state wants to increase your taxes to dig up a gas line and replace it with a new one....
Texas has wanted to retain the ability to secede from the union and having their own power grid enables them with that independence but it is hard to tell without looking at a layout of the power grid if being connected to other states who were also freezing would have helped, which is a good time to add that having a layout of the power grid requires special levels of as needed access upon which bypassing is a felony atleast.
As someone who stared at the east coast power grid everyday for 5yrs doing power analysis and reliability studies on it, I never had access to the Texas power grid, but I'm amazed how many people on the internet act like they do.
As a full disclosure I'm an Electrical Power Engineer who specializes in wind and solar, electrical power grid and substation design and worked in electrical energy markets and power flow for four years after working for a renewable energy startup. I went into this field because I care about renewable energy, but I have also learned the system is heavily gained and renewable energy sources have their flaws like for example you know ice can kind of freeze solar and turbines over, as well as pipelines.
It's been very hard to have objective and we'll informed takes in this field with people who aren't working in power grid stuff because they assume if I have constructive criticism on how renewable energy policy could be better or has previously incentivized corruption then I am an evil republican who wants gas and oil to rule the world and we all die due to global warming.
Now is also a good time to mention the concept of global cooling. Due to this and not global warming Texas is probably in for a lot more cold weather and it makes sense to assess what "winterizing" power sources actually means, instead of just demanding it without any understanding of what that would entail what it would cost and whether Texans are willing to put their money where their mouth is given they are typically hands off when it comes to massively coordinating with state and local regulation more than they need to.
> Now is also a good time to mention the concept of global cooling.
Might I ask what major climate science organizations are endorsing this concept? Or are you talking about increased localized extreme weather, both hot and cold, due to global warming?
The head line of the article does not seem to match its contents.
The article spends 90% of the time describing problems in the Texas grid.
The only mention of the nation problem is this throw away line at the end:
> The issue of extreme cold weather and electrical outages is a national issue that needs to be addressed. However, after repeated failings it hasn’t really been addressed.
Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.
But to date I only know of two such events and both occurred in Texas.
To make matters worse the national energy regulator warned Texas this would most likely happen again:
Here in the Seattle area, we regularly have a big blow which knocks trees onto the power lines and vast portions of the power grid go down. While it happens to some extent every year, about once a decade it's a several day outage, even in the city. The last time it was 10 days. The power cables were down for miles everywhere.
And yet, everything gets rebuilt in place, the same way, the same risks. No engineering improvements. No buried cables (which do just fine in storms).
Most everyone in my neighborhood has some sort of generator, and we're well inside the dense part of the city.
Buried cables tend to have a higher lifetime cost, which is one reason why Seattle has stuck with aerial cables in so many neighborhoods.
West Seattle neighborhoods have more buried cables than most, and they're facing some very expensive reliability issues due to IIRC dielectric breakdown.
If Seattle wanted to squeeze better reliability out of their aerial transmission systems, they could move to a four-year tree clearance pruning cycle, like Portland. Last I heard, we're still on a five year cycle and every time changing it comes up, it's seen as cost prohibitive.
Is there any reason why Europe can do buried cables just fine (and has been for a good few decades), but the US can't? As I understand even new neighbourhoods in the US often have overhead cables.
I live in Europe, and in general we don't distrust the state, and we don't want to pay less taxes (we would like more efficiency managing them, though).
Interesting, somehow I never thought of that. Lowering taxes is just not a major talking point in European politics except maybe for certain types of taxes, or distributing them differently, but there are no big divides on this.
The situation is highly regional. Walter's experience is specific to Seattle, but he's right that each region has its own infrastructure problems. Denver metro area (my neck of the woods) has mostly buried power, but a long-term fresh water problem.
Buried infrastructure also tends to be down for longer. Above ground lines go down more often. But they're easier to fix when they do; fixing buried lines can be a nightmare.
As an example, a mall near me was without power for weeks after flooding destroyed some underground electric infrastructure. The flooding didn't even do any real harm to the mall! They just got unlucky: underground lines and other equipment that should be waterproof weren't, and they shorted out in such a way that a bunch of stuff had to be dug up and replaced.
In 2019, some contractor got lucky while doing drilling works and scored a hit on both the main cable and the backup cable connecting the neighborhood of Berlin-Köpenick to the grid - severing each of the three phases in both cables. Establishing the construction site, digging the hole and fixing the two 110KV cables took a mere 31 hours - and that includes 6 hours of setting time for the couplings used. This was pretty much the worst case scenario that could have happened. It's possible to maintain good uptime with buried infrastructure, as with most things it's a matter of spending the money to do so.
Also anecdotal here but I can't remember the last time power was down for a long time where I live in Belgium.
If I hear about issues it's generally extremely local or an issue with power generation (we're predicted to have more issues in the future due to our gov being idiots void of long term thinking when it came to replacing old nuclear plants)
So all in all I haven't experienced this being down longer issue (and yes flooding shouldn't be able to destroy underground lines and such.)
It seems we are generally unwilling to pay for a higher level of availability-- that the current level is generally speaking good enough. We prosthelytize that we must do better, but voting with our pocketbooks is another matter.
I'd have loved to be in that design meeting: "Look, we could just build a huge saw and attach it to a helo." - "Ok, sounds fine, what could possibly go wrong?
Just in the time I've been living in this neighborhood, they've restrung the overhead wires, with new poles, more than 10 times.
The street I live on has underground cables (the overhead lines go underground for my street) has never had a cable failure, though fallen trees have blocked the road. That latter gets straightened out by the neighbors, as many have chainsaws and always look for an opportunity to use them :-)
This is not a fair reading of the article. It actually discusses national winterization versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days.
That is a reasonable point, but it is only half the story when it leaves out regulatory capture (which certainly is not confined to Texas), the deliberate adoption or rejection of policies on the basis of whether they conform to a counterfactual ideology (climate-change denial), and the brazen attempt to shift blame for the problem onto policies that actually attempt to mitigate problems that really are happening.
Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing. It doesn't have anything to do with climate-change denial or the current governor. By allowing your evaluation of the situation to be influenced by that sort of thing, you are engaging in a kind of recency bias -- imagining that the future can cause the past.
All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities. That is not an adequate justification for the current situation. The idea that Texas alone is somehow constrained, by forces beyond its control, from changing with the times, is absurd.
Is Texas doomed by its history to live with the cold-vulnerable infrastructure that led up to these problems, on account of the way things were decades ago? Of course not - things will be fixed.
Texas's policy decision, to remain separate from the other grids, dates to the 1930s. It's not about being constrained, it's about this policy choice. ERCOT, the current organization that manages Texas's electricity, dates from the 1970s.
Trying to explain this policy choice in terms of the current political climate is ahistorical and a little strange. How could an informed person believe the current governor has anything to do with decision dating to the 1930s? However, that's the kind of explanation you were offering, and that's what I'm objecting to: this curious recency bias, so prevalent in tech forums, where everything that happened more than 10 years ago is not real.
I see you are still pusuing the ridiculous idea that Texas, unlike literally everywhere else on Earth, has been constrained* from upgrading its infrastructure on account of decisions made nearly a century ago.
*Denying that it is a constraint does not alter the fact that your argument, such as it is, depends on it being one.
What you posted earlier is ridiculous because you're trying to explain the Texas grid in terms of current political trends, like the decision was made in the last few years.
So, despite your argument being in tatters, you insist that something I wrote must be illogical, somehow? well, you are at least doggedly wrong, I'll give you that.
If you are tempted to post further (I am sure you are), I suggest that you first read what I actually wrote in my original post in this thread.
Unsurprisingly, nothing has changed. Not only are you arguing against a statement I did not make, but if someone else had said that, your response is nonsense because it requires that Texas, alone, has been completely constrained by decisions made 40-90 years or more ago.
Unlike you, I am not. It simply comes back to an issue that you have been avoiding for quite a while:
All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities. That is not an adequate justification for the current situation. The idea that Texas alone is somehow constrained, by forces beyond its control, from changing with the times, is absurd.
That is a very odd question, as it could hardly be clearer that the point here is that as there have been no special constraints preventing Texas from following the rest of the world's example in improving its energy infrastructure over the decades, your reply to my original point is irrelevant.
Texas was not constrained when they made the choice to develop an energy grid that remained separate from the other grids developing in the US. ("All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities.")
The point that is actually relevant here is that Texas has not been constrained from modifying its energy infrasrastructure, to make it more resilient than it has proved to be, at any time since then.
That is not a statement about policies, it is a statement of historical fact about electrical-supply grids in general. What part of that statement do you disagree with?
> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.
In 2014 the polar vortex brought power down across the Eastern Interconnection (citation 13) and again in 2018 (citation 10).
> That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered.
There currently are not standards for winter weatherization. In 2013 standards were proposed for this however they were rejected (citation 15). Finally in 2020 standards started the approval process however they wont be fully approved until November.
The grid didn’t seem so great back in 2003 when NYC took a dive for two days. It was amazing seeing the whole city just dead in the water. Shit happens, but fortunately our infrastructure is fairly resilient and we can recover pretty quickly from this kind of thing.
Full power was restored to NYC on the 16th. Yes, that seems about right - I stayed at my office for two days until a coworker commandeered a car that was in our parking garage (owned by a guy who was out of town on business) and gave me a ride home to Freeport. The city was pretty much paralyzed for two days. Some places might have done better but NYC was dead in the water for about two days.
> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.
Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri all had blackouts this week. The SPP had to stop sharing electricity with the Texas grid because they had no spare capacity due to dealing with their own power emergencies.
The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.
> So are you claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri have experience state wide blackouts similar to those found in Texas in recent days?
Yes. That grid operator did have to implement EEA3 load shedding (rolling blackouts). However, I should note that the Texas rolling blackout seemed to go wrong when they tried to bring locations back online.
Texas didn’t have a statewide outage. I live in Rockwall and our power hasn’t so much as flickered all this week. There were a lot of outages in outlying areas for sure, I think it impacted about 1/3 of the population here in some way or another.
You asked if extreme cold weather had caused problems in states other than Texas. It did, and I commented so.
But if you want to play “move the goalposts”, I’m not going to bother trying to discuss something with you that you obviously have already made your mind up on. Keep stubbornly believing what you want to believe, I don’t care.
So you are in fact claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri are experiencing the same 'extreme weather' blackouts as those currently going on in Texas.
For example Texas has seen millions people with out power for days, millions people with no running water for days, people dying because of the cold.
And the exact same think is going on in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri but no one is reporting on this in the news or on social media?
> Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.
That sounds like rolling blackouts, and looking at it deeper looks a lot like a few minutes worth. That's not great, but it's not the same as being without power for multiple days.
Looking in my area of the SPP, they were scheduled to be one hour long, "call us if your power is out longer, especially after 90 minutes."
That's just for residential customers, commercial and industrial customers were required to shed a great deal of their load; for half a work day according to one report I read of someone who what sent home yesterday or so.
Agreed not anything like being without power for multiple days. From what I've gathered so far, the Texas grid operator had the lack of courage required to shed load early before things get catastrophic. After the northeast blackout of 1965 which resulted in a lot of reforms, a common if not nearly universal final cause of these sorts of disasters.
You have suggested this twice as proof of actual rolling blackouts of any significant size, but for some reason fail to note that while SPP did order rolling blackouts to shave about 1.5% of the load within 50 minutes they rescinded this order and returned to EEA Level 2. Why fail to mention this I wonder?
(Just wanting to set the record straight, under the SPP region myself. Given what I've seen, I'm pretty happy with how they've acted considering it could have looked like Texas. I wish there had been more and better communication with the public about the importance of conserving electricity but it's not like I followed their Twitter feed at the time.)
I know there were a few cuts because that let them get the load down, but when I first heard of blackouts outside of Texas they seemed to be of the 15-30 minute variety. Did not know they lasted more than an hour anywhere.
comparable seems like an implicit part of the question? Cold weather caused problems in all states; Somebody surely slipped and fell down somewhere. That doesn't give information on whether their grids are better at handling weather changes though
Had Texas been attached to the eastern interconnect, and remained connected through 25-30 GW of shortfall, yes, rotating blackouts would have been spread across dozens of states.
The blackouts in the MISO and SPP areas were not as bad, but still had to happen to weather (pardon the pun) generator failures.
States like Minnesota and other northern states have had much more extreme cold temperatures than any of these Southern states--yet they haven't had this blackout problem. Why not? Because they seriously winterize their systems.
Not trying to be a jerk, but I’ve lived in MN and WI and can’t count the number of times we lost power in the winter - usually for somewhere between 4 and 8 hours, so no big deal, but it does happen. I never minded it, power outages are a great opportunity to catch up with ham radio friends, ha ha.
I agree. The only time I’ve seen a grid collapse was NYC in 2003. Fortunately I was able to sleep in my office and a co-worker had the good sense to raid the deli downstairs the moment the power went out. We dined by flashlight on salami and a bucket of cherry tomatoes. Good fun.
> The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.
Texas had huge parts of its grid fail and leave millions of people without power for multiple days. Other states had minutes long rolling blackouts.
They are both cold weather power problems in the way that getting a cut on your hand cutting a bagel and dropping a running chainsaw on your leg are both injuries. The significance comes from the severity.
"Over the last few days I read online people saying that Texas' power outages had been caused by Texas being on its own grid… deregulation… Not following national standards…"
And he goes into detail and discovers that this is basically the case. And sure, other providers in other states also have problem. Which means ... regulators should be more on the ball. So his summary is correct despite there being more details.
It's like someone can't comprehend that if corporations didn't systematically hamstring it, regulation could work, that regulation and leadership did work for a good fraction of the 20th century.
The article finds fault particularly with the national standards not being adequate, and specifically points out that the standards in Texas are more strict than the national standards. He goes on to give some details on the enforcement of those Texan standards. In this case, following national standards as opposed to Texas's standards would have led to an even worse disaster.
Your claim that being on a separate grid caused the outage is too strong to be supported by the data in the article, which is why he doesn't make that claim. Additional data could come out either in favor of or against your claim: although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized (edit:
txlpo78 points out that it was not fully utilized), we need solid data on whether Mexico and the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem.
No one is attacking regulation. Virtually everyone I've seen is in agreement that better regulation is necessary in this situation.
He's not speaking against all regulation, only a specific subset of regulation, namely federal. (I apologize for being unclear: I did not mean to imply that all regulation is accepted equally, merely that nearly everyone accepts that stricter regulation at some level of government is necessary to prevent future blackouts. Many Texans would demand state-level regulation but would spurn federal). I'm not sure why he even brought it up, to be honest. It seems irrelevant to the current situation. Tougher state regulations are a foregone conclusion, and the applicable federal regulations (such as those applying to gas suppliers) are not something Texans have any influence over at this time.
As a side note, Rick Perry is pretty much irrelevant to Texans AFAICT. Perhaps that's why he's making these unsolicited, strong statements.
You are correct that he held that position under Trump and bears responsibility for problems with federal regulations.
However, his strict anti-federal stance goes back many years. He did not adopt it or even emphasize it to make excuses for this situation. He's just like that.
Perry was governor in 2011 when it was undoubtable improvements were necessary if another freeze like that were to be mitigated to a greater degree rather than exacerbated like we have seen occur instead.
Present Governor Abbot followed Perry and Abbot is just the opposite of advanced.
He had plenty of time to improve the situation, whether it was regulation or ERCOT reorganization or any number of other details that ratepayers have already paid for for decades, no one else was in a stronger position to do something to make up for Perry's Bozoness.
I'd like to try to gently point out that this isn't a very helpful way to comment. Perry did make very strong statements that show hostility to federal regulation. I myself would not characterize it as "attacking regulation", but it's not completely unreasonable to. One should allow for that kind of difference in viewpoint—speaking from experience, quibbling about precise wording won't get us anywhere, so it's usually better to allow your opponent (or partner) a generous amount of leeway. (Sometimes there are exceptions, as defining something as a "riot" or "insurrection" can be the whole crux of an issue, but this is rare compared to number of times that debate over wording completely derails a discussion).
I agree with your statement in the sense that, as I posted above, he was only criticizing one specific type of regulation. But if that is your take, or if you have a similar point to make, you really need to spell out exactly what you mean. Your current comment comes off as "you're wrong" without any helpful explanation. But, as I explained, his choice of wording is not at all unreasonable. It's very difficult for anyone to know how you think he's wrong if you don't spell it out.
> although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized, we need solid data on whether the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem.
As a data point: the interconnects were not fully utilized, as the Eastern DC tie had to be severed yesterday because power emergencies in the Eastern US meant that grid had no electricity to spare.
Thank you for that data. Your other comment is very helpful too[0], although I look forward to seeing some good hard data. I've been a bit spoiled by how much detailed data ERCOT provides.
For reference, the Laredo, Railroad, and Eagle Pass ties are all connections to Mexico’s power grid. They’ve been at zero most of this week because Mexico is also dealing with major power outages along the border, and so they don’t have any electricity to share.
The North tie connects to the Western US grid in Oklahoma, while the East tie connects to the Eastern US grid near the border with Arkansas/Louisiana. They’ve been fluctuating between 0-600 this week depending on how much power has been available on those grids.
People are attacking texas' less interconnected system for being "independent" and others are pointing out more interconnections from places with no power to spare would not have helped.
Assuming there is a planned extra capacity/planned expected failure rate/additional set of regulations and guidelines, its not mainly the literal "connectedness" of the grids, but the "independence" part that is being attacked, specifically being independent from federal oversight.
The article definitely does not discover "...that this is basically the case.". It's hard to understand why you wrote that; it can't be based on a fair reading of the article.
What the article shows is that:
* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.
* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.
* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.
* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.
It's unfriendly to the site to write the same comment verbatim in multiple places. Please just use a link or something.
I read the parent comment as grappling with the sort of basic thought I had reading this piece (I read all of it, because it's interesting): OK, NERC doesn't require Texas to winterize to the point of safeguarding against an event like this week. OK, other power suppliers in other states have outages. But none of the other states have giant winter blackouts like Texas had this week, and most of them have worse weather. It's hard to square that with the topic paragraph of this post.
>Feb. 15 at approximately 12:10 pm. While still under EEA Level 3 and after exhausting reserves, SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.
>Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.
I mean, like, maybe a simple threshold matter here is: did any significant area outside of Texas have to issue boil-water orders because they couldn't run water systems?
The issue with water systems in Texas is thar we have them terribly networked. Water for Lockhart's towers come from the next town over who shut down their pumps. Lockhart blew a main which brought pressure below what was necessary to push water to the testing site for certification of being safe to drink..
On the Electricity front, Austin Energy screwed the pooch, because they had too much of their capacity tied up in "essential" service branches. So they had to isolate the few non-essential branches with high downtime to effectively shed load.
You can give Texas crap, but at least let it be accurate crap.
I assume the subtext is that the answer to my question is "no, other localities haven't lost water treatment in their winter outages" --- those outages apparently not being severe enough to impact water delivery.
There were outages elsewhere, but not as severe and not as widespread. No one is saying that the NERC-regulated areas handled a 100 year storm without flaw. Just that they did it a lot better than Texas.
6.5% of the grid losing power for 3 hours isn’t great, but to claim that that’s equivalent to what’s going on in Texas is ridiculous. Millions of people have lost power in Texas for days. The city of Austin is running out of water because of this. It’s really, really bad down there.
I think the important thing to take away is every state needs to prepare for more extreme weather, regardless of current regulations. While the larger grids don’t require winterization, northern regions already experience cold temps and don’t need regulations to prepare for them. Whatever readies Texas for these extreme events is enough, whether it is regulations or proactiveness.
It's weird that the link provided talks about El Paso failing but El Paso outages were as far as I can tell limited to short term outages similar to most other parts of the country under similar conditions.
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2021/02...
West Texas near El Paso is not on the ERCOT grid and they winterized properly after the last big snow storm so it's absolutely possible to have been prepared for this in Texas.
Yes there is a lack of regulation around winter weatherization. However, this is not a Texas only problem, in fact the PUCT requirements for weatherization exceed the current NERC standards and are similar to the new requirements that should be approved in November. Also standards for weatherization were proposed to NERC all the way back in 2011 but they were rejected.
Yes, the lack of regulation around winter weatherization. Lack of regulation is a product of the broad trend to deregulation. California has suffered PG&E's despicable policies fueled by deregulation, that have also killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars of property loss. So it's not a Texas only problem. But it certainly is a behavior of Texas (Government, regulators and industry) problem just as California's problems are a behavior of California (Government, regulators and industry) problem.
Other grids certainly could do even more to harden their power systems against extreme weather events. But Texas is clearly suffering the worst and most prolonged outage of all the states during this cold snap.
Did you read the article? He explicitly stated that the NERC standards, if implemented, wouldn't have prevented the issues.
Corporations, corporations, corporations...... it really gets old hearing people blather on like this. Large, bureaucratic organizations, whether private monopolies, private companies, corporations, and yes, governments all have similar issues.
He cites in the article that these events all had precedents, but attempts to change the NERC rules were ignored/halted in the early 2010s.
Turns out that when you are a biased person who just reads the first few sentences and rejects the article due to the ensuing cognitive dissonance, you miss things.
You are completely correct. Regarding your first and last sentences, the C19 invasion of HN has normalized "Did you read the article?" style comments, though this is explicitly recommended against in the guidelines:
As an Canadian and ex power trader across north america (including ERCOT), I find the political interpretations of events very weird. Poor regulation and deregulation are not the same thing. Do you really think that talking about grid preparation for winter will get any anybody elected? The nuances of esoteric economic principles and advanced egineering are not cool topic which can be understood or debated through tweets and memes. The same can be said about a lot of tangible or intangible infrastructure. I think ERCOT-type failures will become the norm.
As a Canadian power systems engineer who lives and breathes NERC compliance standards every day (something I'd never ever thought I'd see discussed by the broader public) I find it bizarre that everyone is staking out their position on this based on political allegiances rather than focusing on analyzing the event.
There are also extremely broad misconceptions that Texas is somehow exempt from all federal regulation that are fueling people's motivated reasoning on this topic. NERC reliability standards are enforceable in Texas! [1] All existing and future NERC winterization rules apply just as much in Texas as anywhere else.
Yes, ERCOT messed up. Yes, there are big issues to be resolved here. Some of those issues are national in scope and some are Texas specific. But drawing a direct line from Texas being its own interconnection to this failure simply doesn't follow the facts for me.
The point is that politicians should be marketing themselves as leaders who take care of this kind of stuff so I as a constituent do not have to worry about it. They should be able to hire advisors who make sure they prioritize the right things.
Instead what we have are pols who optimize for fundraising. Which means you get the opposite.
> The point is that politicians should be marketing themselves as leaders who take care of this kind of stuff so I as a constituent do not have to worry about it. ...
They do (at least partly) market themselves that way, but they don't follow through because if you don't worry about it you're not checking if they follow through.
And there is a group of wealthy people who contribute money to reinforcing the idea that government (at any level) is incapable of fixing problems. Either through argument or by creating laws that hamstring the ability of members of the government to take action. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2019/11/15/can-com...
>Poor regulation and deregulation are not the same thing. Do you really think that talking about grid preparation for winter will get any anybody elected?
No, but I would hope this type of thing could get somebody unelected now.
I worked on energy trading systems in the late 90s. Everyone knew that the Texas configuration was a unique time bomb, but Texas wanted it that way. They wanted to avoid regulation and if you talked to Texans they liked the idea of being able to separate entirely from the nation.
I feel for the people who are impacted by this but they voted for this time and time again.
A further footnote here. Anyone involved in power generation keeps an eye on very long range forecasts. This current polar incursion was forecast nearly 60 days ago. Of course they might not expect it to intrude into Texas or be this severe but they knew it was a possibility. I guarantee that someone, somewhere filed reports on this not just for safety but also for profit.
Long range forecasts and data play a huge role in energy trading. Day traders are glued to the weather channel. The long range teams look at in-depth scientific reports and there are serious climate modeling systems that feed into contract calculations. I can imagine how much more complicated it is today and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to discover that a lot of “somebodies” placed some very sure bets.
Of course not everyone voted for this. Even in reliably red or blue states there are a lot of voters who vote against whoever won. By its very size Texas has a lot of democrats in it, just not nearly as many as it has republicans.
That being said, Greg Abbott beat his democratic opponent by 13.3 points, which is a lot. He won in 2014 by 20.4 points, which is even more. And while I personally doubt that this specific issue was a campaign point, it’s hard to deny that minimal regulation and a general attitude against interdependence weren’t major campaign planks. Does anyone doubt what Abbott’s position on power regulation or connecting to the federal grid would be? Are any of his voters under the impression that Abbott would regulate power more? Certainly not.
Does that mean Texans deserve this on a moral basis? No, of course not. But a majority of their voters continually voted for leaders that have led them to this place. It’s kind of hard to know what to do for them when they keep voting for people who seem to care more about vacations and Fox News hits than actually serving their constituents.
There are also a lot of people who don't vote for anything. Maybe they should and maybe next time they will.
In any case, ERCOT and the PUC have enjoyed bipartisan support in Texas for many decades. The GOP may have their hand on the controls right now but they're not the only ones to blame.
It was basically required reading for anyone in the energy sector 20 years ago, probably still is today. Maybe give it a read before you get too excited about what Texans are for and against.
Everyone? No. A majority? Probably. I think over long times and always voting for the same "feds are bad" and "regulation is bad" people you can infer that at least a significant part of the voters thought this was a good idea. Or at least an idea that was acceptable to them as part of the package they bought with their votes.
Voting for a governing body will always be a compromise. You have to decide what are the issues I cannot budge on and what are the issues I like but can live without and then find the best deal out of the available ones.
Energy trading isn't too different from other commodities, though it tends to be way more volatile. Most of the contracts are handled through ISOs (independent system operators) who handle specific regions, so it's not easy for a retail trader to get in on.
Overall it breaks into daily and long term contracts. Daily options typically trade hourly and cover generation and transportation (wheeling) costs. Long term plays are usually about securing rights at specific plants.
Personally, in a situation like this, I'd recommend taking transmission contracts on NG. Most of the Texas grid runs on it and the pricing is more stable than anything else. Also, in the event that a well head freezes up or the pressure drops, you can still get paid - or at least that's how it used to work.
"If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them,"
"Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
Looks like President Obama didn't just kill coal, but killed a lot of sick and elderly too. Under real de-regulation, energy is free.
It's not just frozen water in wells. It's also the seals. Oil has some viscosity, but a pipe from -9F to 120F is something I don't want to do.
This is why I don't like changing things. You don't see that Texas freezes over, the outliers that happen twice in the last 150 years. Any further regulation will go to graft and shoring up the defunded pensions of thieves and bullying criminal liars.
The solution is to look to our ancestors. Don't focus on the crime, the grievance. State it. You're were a victim. Move on. Focus on what's next. That's really what makes people free.
What this really helps point out is how frequently people voice their opinions on matters online without fully assessing the situation.
As a Texan, I agree that the situation is more nuanced than what's being presented on the news, social media, and on HN. It's important to look at the policies in place to fully understand what could have been done to prevent the current problems.
It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids. Heck, even friends of mine who are affected take whatever stance they already agree with. Deregulation is good! It's the GOP's fault! It's the windmills. No, its not the windmills!
I'm starting to internalize the idea that the news and the popular talk on social media is heavily distorted and based on what we are already biased to believe.
I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding.
That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc).
It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO.
There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Just a reminder the your junior Senator (among many others[1]) mocked California and our electric grid when we were hit by record wild fires last year. He also voted against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy because it only impacted blue states.
And maybe you should look up the timeline on when your state representatives ran to fox news and tried to blame the green new deal and windmills for the outage. I am sure the national discourse would be a bit more sane if it wasn't kicked off by Texas politicians spreading 100% FUD.
You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.
Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.
> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.
I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.
That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.
I never liked the meme, but this guy has to be a NPC. Seriously. I couldn't agree more with you assessment about the current news/discussion life-cycle.
Personally I think that the way news are produced and consumed fuels a vicious cycle that is more about tribes than information.
> and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
One side takes these issues very seriously. We have been fighting tooth and nail to address climate change, improve the nations infrastructure and provide adequate safety nets for when things go bad. The other side spends their time screaming about socialism and stolen elections.
The point I am trying to make is that this is not a "both sides" problem. One side is taking these issues very seriously the other refuses to even engage in a conversation about them. Obamacare is a perfect example of how this played out. The legislation literally originated as a Republican proposal, but Republicans refused to cooperate and instead trotted out the "death panels" talking point. And here we are 12 years later, and they still don't have a replacement plan.
If you are actually interested in hearing about the solutions that are on the table you can get a rough idea by visiting Biden's energy plan[1]. These are very real proposals, with broad democratic support. But to get any of this stuff passed, it will likely require input and support from Republicans. And unfortunately, I have little to no faith that they will come to the table on this. I hope I am wrong.
Winterizing natural gas power plants isn't mentioned once in Joe Biden's clean energy platform. He also didn't mention anything about weatherizing natural gas generators in any of the debates.
Death panels and the ACA have nothing to do winterizing with natural gas generators.
There is a bunch of strong evidence that climate change is man made and real. There is much less evidence that climate change is causing more extreme cold events, or specifically had any influence on this polar vortex.
And wind did slightly worse than coal and natural gas generators when it comes to stability over the last week, so it's definitely not a savior.
There are a million opportunities to argue about the ACA or climate change. But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
Btw I voted for Biden, but the Democratic platform has very little focus on weatherizing natural gas plants.
It is a high level policy agenda, not a 10k page regulatory document. There are literally dozens of references to making infrastructure robust to the impacts of climate change, for example:
"Americans deserve infrastructure they can trust: infrastructure that is resilient to floods, fires, and other climate threats"
If we are going to criticize Democrats for not explicitly discussing an extremely niche grid infrastructure issue in their platform, maybe we should also criticize the fact the republicans didn't even bother to publish one this past election cycle[1]
> But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
What is there to argue? Texas failed to adequately winterize. They should make sure to fix that. End of argument.
Our Junior senator that peaced out to Cancun with his family this week(during a pandemic)? Yeah, he is always in our thoughts.
It was pretty gross reading about these guys going on national conservative networks playing national GOP politics spreading FUD about renewables... From under a bunch of blankets on my phone because it was 41f in my house.
If you think my reply was attack, then you are probably blinded by your own biases.
I left a substantive and truthful reply. Here is another synopsis in case it helps: Certain Texas politicians are notorious for poisoning the well when it comes to public discourse. And in this very specific example, they literally went to fox news and other outlets and blamed the issues on GND and windmills. At that point the Texas power outages were barely blip on the national radar, but their lies on national media kicked off a firestorm of headlines to counter their lies.
They literally started this. But folks keep blaming the media, and keep blaming the libs. Wake up. If you disagree with anything I said, a substantive reply is welcome. But if you are just going to cry about being attacked, go somewhere else.
What is it you think "they" started? You're really all over the place with these replies. I don't think anyone here would disagree that it's absurd for Texas politicians to blame issues on GND, but had they not done that, it's not as if Texans would be any better off. I can tell you're not a fan of Cruz, but I think the point myself and the GP are trying to make is that there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
They walked away from the negotiating table around 12 years ago and are nearly entirely focused on playing up the culture war games rather than actually doing any sort of governing.
And yet there is a fun little internet subculture that insists both sides are at fault, the media is at fault, tribalism, etc...
> there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
I disagree. Blue side has been warning about extreme weather events due to climate change, about how unprepared our infrastructure is. Red side has been oil money == good, deregulation == profits. I don't think there has ever been a disaster that has so vividly highlighted the contrasting platforms and priorities of the two parties.
> I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor.
In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
> if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”
Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.
Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
> Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
This seems like the sort of belief system that inspired the story of King Canute and the tide. [0]
> Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.
I understand that a lot of people only care about justifying the expropriation of wealth. But it seems you’ve forgotten to include the part where the expropriation is actually justified on the basis of promises to do something good with that money.
Can you point me to a specific current federal regulation that would’ve prevented this issue? TFA posits that there aren’t. So, you’ll take money to enforce a non-existent regulation?
The trivial proof of the GP's statement is that there are regions of the world and the US that regularly drop below 20F and have a functioning electrical grid (say, for instance, Alaska).
That's not proof at all. Building grid infrastructure that can function below 20F in regions that reach that temperature regularly is easier in important ways - in particular, if a new piece of infrastructure gets built that can't cope, the problem will happen early on and either get fixed or worked around, whereas somewhere like Texas can build up decades of new infrastructure that can't cope with the cold before anything happens to demonstrate that.
Huh? The various law making entities in the US are not always making maximal use of their power, it doesn't make any sense to wave your hands in the air and say that they can only do the things they've already made laws for.
Was King Canute making maximal use of his power when he ordered back the waves, or could he have deployed his army to the beach to reinforce his edicts?
Require that the power companies in Texas winterize their equipment. Done.
The electric company in El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT, did spend heavily to winterize their equipment after the 2011 cold snap. El Paso did not suffer outages this year like the rest of Texas.
Producing heat in the winter is a solved problem. If power companies are not applying the known solutions to a recurring problem, then apply state force to require them to do so. Done.
>In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs. Your post is doing exactly that. Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years, that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
> It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs.
Government is not separable from the beliefs of the people who inhabit it and participate in its processes.
> Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years
Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
> that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
Well if people disagree then I feel it would be better for them to discuss. But it seems like there’s this perception that there is no room for reasonable disagreement and that’s what I was pushing back on.
We can agree that the grid needs more investment and still have differences of opinion on how to generate that investment.
>Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
> The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
> For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
For some reason the people who want to spend more money on publicly funded projects insist on casting aspersions rather than introspecting on why they’re always dependent on expropriation for basic things.
>The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.
> Texans preferring to go cold and starve than suffer the burden of regulation or government. This was not the philosophy of Texas governance succeeding as planned, it was clearly a monumental failure.
Authoritarian government also has failures that result in millions of deaths; I’m unsure how you can be so confident that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises.
To be clear this isn’t about the object-level issue of preferring starvation under one ideology to starvation under another. This is about the inability of other people to comprehend that anyone could possibly feel differently than they do about who starves you to death.
> None of us are trying to die for the glory of a sociopathic libertarian ideal.
None of us are trying to die for the glory of a psychotic marxist ideal but we still pay taxes.
> that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises
These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions, the other survives on the basis of economic values extracted by threats of violence. The pathology is in forcing the people who want to benefit from consensual interactions to support a system of coercion.
> The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions
So goes your theory, but not in actual practice. For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way. Which is equivalent to what you would have had to do in the first scenario anyway - both scenarios end up with people who devoted their lives to being independent from the electrical grid being fine, and those who didn't freezing.
The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
> For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
This is true.
> You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way.
This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this. Being subjected to violence if you decline to participate is the opposite of consent.
> The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
I agree with this and I was unclear. I mention consenting interactions because many of the people who oppose increases in the scope of state-sponsored activities prefer to source their necessities from markets. I’m aware that the tentacles of the government are long and broad and no part of the economy (least of all power generation) is free from this interference. There was probably a better way to express this in this thread.
> This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this
I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws. Similarly, the IRS doesn't have a cause of action if you deliberately earn less to pay less taxes (there is no "capitation" tax). So we can call those things consensual in a similar manner as signing up with a privately owned electric monopoly - all have narrow paths whereby you can technically go your own way.
In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
> I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws.
It sounds like you haven’t done much research on this but anyone who has tried to opt out quickly discovers that these things exist. For example, in many municipalities it is illegal to occupy a dwelling that is not served with electricity from the grid. Having discovered this myself because the power company refused to sell me power, because they couldn’t confirm my identity, because they only way they were willing to confirm my identity was through a credit bureau asking me about my credit history, of which for some reason they had no records, (respectfully) I’m unwilling to do the unpaid labor of searching the internet to prove something I know very well from personal experience. Suffice it to say I rented a house and was unable to legally occupy it for a week because I had to get someone else to call the power company and turn on the lights. There are laws that prevent people from opting out.
> In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
Well, considering the Texan senator who is currently planning his return from Cancun was involved in spreading lies that ultimately led to an attempted insurrection against the US government... I think people are a little sick of Texas politics right now, and Texas losing power on large scale for a major weather event for the 2nd time in four years is a nice reminder of the local attitudes about climate change and the failures of Texan libertarianism.
It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids.
It's as if ... being affected by this terrible doesn't make someone an expert on situation since whatever is happening with the grid is quite far from those affected.
But it's not like there being differing opinions means that truth and falsehood cease to exist. Someone is lying, specifically Fox News and the governor of Texas are about alternative energy. Some policies really were problematic. etc.
And I'm sorry the diverse people of Texas have to suffer this. If one policy makers were the one who had to freeze in the dark but that's life.
In each media interview he gives a different shade of the story as he tries to walk it back. He's got to be lying in at least all but one scenario he explains it as.
I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.
Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters. We have multiple large metropolitan areas but we also have massive rural regions that tend to outweigh when it comes time to vote.
I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance.
If you look at the red vs blue divide nationally, this is quite literally the perfect storm for blue team to yell at red team "I told ya so". Intense weather due to climate change which red team denies, loving the idea of an independent grid that cuts you off from other states, being against federal regulations but asking for federal aid, and having one of your senators fly to Cancun in the middle of it. I could go on, but all of this happened right after talk of succession was trending on social media.
I also believe a lot of online activists are hoping to capture the energy and anger over this event to "turn Texas blue" as they have been wanting to do.
> I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance.
Consider that Texans have a well-earned reputation for talking about secession from the union, Don't Mess with Texas, etc. In some ways the dynamic between Texas and not-Texas reminds me of the dynamic between USA and not-USA.
> turn Texas blue
People have to realize that there is not really red states and blue states. It's urban-vs-rural, and whether a state turns red or blue has everything to do with the growth of metropolitan areas, not some shift in political values.
Don't Mess with Texas was simply a highly effective ad campaign from the '80s aimed at reducing littering on Texas roadways by the Texas Department of Transportation.
You're not wrong, but red team is not exactly wasting the opportunity to score political points either: Rick Perry and others saying "See? Wind power + green new deal bad".
That's true, I am just more exposed to the Twitter and Reddit coverage, which is decidedly blue team. There is absolutely a bunch of red team folks trying to use this to their advantage. However I will say that I don't think red team is going to be as successful as blue team in this event.
I laugh at both color-teams, and heartily encourage Texas and any other states who so choose to secede, but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming. How much deeper would the snow have to be, and how much further below zero would the temperature have to be, before we could call it "weather" rather than "proof of global warming"? In general I think "intense weather" is supposed to signify hurricanes.
You should familiarize yourself with the polar vortex, the impact that ongoing climate change has on its now semi-regular collapse, and how this leads to massive cold fronts pushing south in the central region of the US. What is changing due to atmospheric warming is the frequency and magnitude of these events. Maybe do a bit of basic research next time before revealing your ignorance.
In the Midwest we call it a “cold winter”, they’ve been happening with regularity for a few hundred years. On the upside, the coyote hunting gets great once the temps get around -15 or so, just don’t forget your pack boots and down long johns.
> but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming.
Of course no individual event is "proof of global warming", but this is entirely consistent with it.
This points out the huge failure in communication about climate change, but this is in fact exactly the sort of thing you would expect (and why "global warming" is such an easy term to misunderstand).
Short story is there is more energy in the atmosphere (i.e. heat) and it has to go somewhere. One of the places it goes is into higher variability in weather patterns, more energetic storms, changes is stable weather patterns. So that absolutely includes lower winter lows, as well as higher summer highs. Most of the modelling shows events like this winter storm growing in both intensity and frequency.
So far from the contradiction you (seem to?) see, it's pretty much what is expected.
The isn't the first time it has snowed in Texas. When it happened 150 years ago it wasn't "due to climate change" (literal quote from parent). This time it is. Warming enthusiasts undermine their argument by trying to have it both ways. They should ignore weather, and emphasize average temperatures.
Nobody is trying to have it both ways (what is a "warming enthusiast, anyway?) People someone articulate it poorly, but unless they are really confused they aren't saying that literally this data point is "due to climate change", but that seeing more unusual weather patterns is likely due to climate change. The first is a category error, the second is a decent interpretation of available data.
I woke up to a snow on Feb 15 is "just" weather. If I live in Austin, it was pretty weird. If I live in Anchorage, pretty normal. The difference between those two statements is not about weather, but about climate.
One lesson of climate change is that our past experiences of weather in a place are often going to become poorer and poorer predictors of next months weather. The fact that change involves a global warming phenomena tells us that both the weather and the changes in it are likely to get more intense.
> I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.
Californian with family in the Midwest - lots of folks are too dense to realize there are people on the other side of natural disasters when these horrible situations are happening. That prejudice happens to some degree, I've lived it =/
Regardless of politics, best of luck to you and your own.
As in, Texas has a fair blend of both parties but get perceived as being "red". With the current political atmosphere, people tend to want to make issues political. What this article is trying to point out is that this was an engineering problem, not a policy problem.
> It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids.
The people who started publicly adopting passionate (and quite obviously false) stances despite not knowing (or worse, knowing but adopting the false stances anyway) about electrical grids live in and have responsibility for Texas, the crisis, and the response to it. And that's what turned it into a tribal, partisan political issue.
You Texans don't like that, you should consider it next time you find yourselves in front of a ballot. Or sooner; effective political engagement requires more than voting.
It is like that because of social media and news outlets that basically produce "confirmation bias" news that has no other intention but to reinforce one's own existing beliefs. Both sides do it so it is not a partisan issue. This is what I think is actually behind the reason that the USA is so divided now and each side of the debate is so entranced in the typical political discourse.
The author did more research than the common layman. From my perspective, the author fully assessed the situation. Do you have reason to believe the author hasn't done enough research?
Does doing more than "the common layman" make the conclusions reliable?
I don't have any conclusions, mostly because I'm not confident in a layman's random few searches / ability read them in the appropriate contex could provide much in the way of conclusions.
Not totally but more then other posters on HN that were making claims without research. The NERC report will be totally reliable but that will take 6+ months. And if my conclusions are wrong, they're wrong and I'll update my blog.
> I'm not sure why you want to use layman as a measuring stick.
I made this post as a direct response to previous HN and Reddit posts where the layman were forming conclusions. I did not see a single person quoting or referencing a single standard to back up their claims. I went out looking for something to back up claims and this is what I found. I formed conclusions off this and included them.
If an expert was to tell me I'm wrong and show me what I missed I would be happy to update my blog.
I included the first paragraph just to show that the post was not an expert opinion and was what I found after some research.
Well to be clear, I was asking someone else why they would want to use layman as a measuring stick.
I don't know who you personally talked to or their knowledge level either.
I'm highly skeptical the internet sleuth method of "I did some searches, I have a handful of links, now someone has to prove me wrong." How many times have we seen that come up short?
The North American Ice Storm of 1998 (also known as Great Ice Storm of 1998) was a massive combination of five smaller successive ice storms in January 1998 that struck a relatively narrow swath of land from eastern Ontario to southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada, and bordering areas from northern New York to central Maine in the United States. It caused massive damage to trees and electrical infrastructure all over the area, leading to widespread long-term power outages. Millions were left in the dark for periods varying from days to several weeks, and in some instances, months. It led to 34 fatalities, a shutdown of activities in large cities like Montreal and Ottawa, and an unprecedented effort in reconstruction of the power grid. The ice storm led to the largest deployment of Canadian military personnel since the Korean War, with over 16,000 Canadian Forces personnel deployed, 12,000 in Quebec and 4,000 in Ontario at the height of the crisis
Be careful about early reports: for example, the claims an entire nuclear power plant tripped, and that it was due to a lack of weatherization. If you drill down to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission report https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... (go to the bottom) only one of its two reactors tripped due to at the time of the report unknown problems with two feedwater pumps. The weather is of course a likely cause, but whatever it was it didn't affect the other reactor.
It all boils down to utilities not thinking they needed to protect wellheads from these kinds of temperatures in Texas. I get how that can happen, many of you make the same mistake with outside faucets. I spent the past few days with rolling outages, I would love to find a way to blame this on government, but mostly i blame the weather.
The Texas state government made a systematic effort to avoid producers being subject to regulation that would have prevented this.
The regulations exist because it is possible to imagine an event like this. Large enterprises that many people depend on should be robust and reliable and not be subject to the kind of mistake a single individual might make.
The Texas producers all currently exceed the national-level recommendations for winterization. Also AFAIK, the natural gas providers are subject to federal regulations (they are not part of ERCOT, unlike the generating stations that use the gas) and they still froze over, which was a huge contributor to the problem.
Then throw in the fact that power producers all over Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were all struggling with power production too, despite the fact that they are all of course regulated federally by FERC, it doesn’t seem like the national regulations were a magical solution here.
Is it possible that more stringent regulation will help avoid repeats of this in the future? Yes. Would the existing federal regulations have prevented this situation if ERCOT was subject to them? It doesn’t seem so.
For absurdly obvious reasons (not all places have the same climate) there are no winterization standards. There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT.
According to ERCOT in 2019/2020 there were 80 facilities checked for the requirements. Some did fail and were rechecked in November. There were plans, however it seems that the plans weren't built for sub zero temperatures.
I think the exact opposite of what you're saying is in the article.
>Why didn’t these plants have a winterization plan? Because it wasn’t required
>1989, the PUCT (Public Utility Commission of Texas) issued several recommendations and guidelines for winterization of power plants and gas wells
>What has been done since 2011? Not a whole lot. A request for a new standard was issued to NERC in late 2012, however a few months later it was denied.[15] Also in 2012 NERC put out a set of guidelines for developing a plan for winter weather[16]. In 2017 NERC put out a special reliability report on the relationship between gas and electricity[17]. Finally, after the 2018 event NERC received another standard request that was approved[23], however it won’t be finalized until late 2021[18,19,20].
Starting at the very next sentence in the article:
> From what I can see, ERCOT has more restrictive rules in their Generator Winter Weatherization Workshop than NERC[21]. All generation stations must have plans for emergencies, address abnormal weather, critical failure points, weather design limits, alternative fuels and testing[21,22]. ERCOT reports that there were 80 spot checks done in the 2019/2020 season with 71 being gas plants and 6 being black start gas plants. 23 had to improve and would be reinspected in early 2021 the rest passed.
This directly refutes your claims that "there are no winterization standards" and "There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT." The inadequacy of NERC is irrelevant to ERCOT.
It's not just Texas. it's the entire south and sometimes more. In the NERC report from the 2014 polar vortex, it looks like 20-30GW were lost due to fuel shortages even in the north east.
Exactly; I'm tired of this being conflated into a ~political issue.~
Edit: Sorry, let me specify. I'm tired of this being a Texas-only political issue. I agree that politics are at play but this isn't localized specifically to Texas' grid.
If you read the report from FERC of the 2011 issues in Texas, I'm amazed anyone can see this as anything but a political issue.
The setup of the energy market in Texas makes it pretty much impossible for providers to adequately weatherize their equipment. The only way for this to happen is for government to mandate adequate preparation for this kind of event.
And while this kind of event is obviously rare, it is only "once in a lifetime" for the very shortest of lives. The 2011 FERC report called it a "once in every 10 years" event, which is uncannily accurate.
Depends on how you define "this kind of event". Rolling blackouts due to cold weather, as happened in 2011? Probably a once in every 10 years event... but also not exclusive to Texas. As others have pointed out, the other surrounding states which some have tried to make out were immune due to not thumbing their nose at federal regulations and being part of larger multi-state grids suffered the same problem, both recently and repeatedly in the past. The more widespread, specific to Texas grid failures? Those do seem to be a once in a lifetime event triggered by once in a lifetime weather.
Either way, the widespread narrative where Texans suffer through this every ten years because they're right-wing morons who have the government they deserve whilst the rest of the country happily avoids it thanks to their superior government doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all.
I'd encourage you to go find some historical reporting from the Feb 2011 cold snap. It becomes immediately apparent that it doesn't compare to what has happened over the last week. It might even occur to you that people citing it are maybe trying to mislead others.
I don't need a ton of historical reporting because I live in Texas and lived through both events. And yes, having seen my apartment drop into the thirties after three days without power, and seeing the effect on my city, I'm well aware that the current situation is much worse.
But a huge reason the situation now is much worse is simply due to the duration of the cold - without power and heat for days there were a ton of second-order effects, primarily burst pipes everywhere. Yet the power system failed very quickly, early on Monday morning. And a huge reason it failed is because none of the recommendations were followed after 2011. And systems that did follow those recommendations (e.g. El Paso, not on Ercot) fared much better.
I have no doubt the historic breadth, severity and length of current cold snap would have caused lots of problems, even if we were well prepared. But on the contrary, I find the misleading ones are the ones claiming this was a "totally unforeseeable" and a "once in a lifetime" event to deflect responsibility for a complete lack of preparation.
What is a political issue is when political leaders lie to the public about the cause. "It's the wind turbines fault." "This is why green energy can never work."
These kind of blatant falsehoods should be inexcusable, but we're living in a strange world these days.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our lawmakers and politicians should be held accountable for spreading lies. That being said, I still believe that this is an engineering problem first and not a problem with the Texas regulations or the politics behind why Texas has its own grid.
It is a political issue. Texas refuses to regulate their grid to meet certain standards. They're so unwilling to do it that they purposely keep their grid separated from the rest of the country.
Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.
NERC doesn't have winterization standards. It has reliability standards that tend to require winterization. Texas would not be in step with the generation standards without more significant winterization, therefore they'd have to improve their systems to meet those standards.
Edit: Here's a PDF of all the standards from NERC. Search "winter" or "ice" or even "cold" and you'll get zero hits.
Yes, those are recommendations that weren't implemented. Anywhere. The issues identified in 2011 for Texas caused issues in the Eastern Interconnect in 2014 for the north and 2018 in the south. In 2018 many of the same recommendations were made and finally NERC has started the standards process however they wont be approved until November.
The East, West, or Texas grids didn't implement it, you're right. My point is that Texas' grid is getting called out when that report was ignored by everyone. It's a national issue, not a Texas issue.
Except the east and west grids have enough geographic variation where they are unlikely to have the same grid-wise problems as Texas with a much smaller grid.
The very west (i.e. El Paso) and east parts (Beaumont) of Texas are not covered by the ERCOT grid, they invested heavily in weatherization after 2011, and neither of them are experiencing anything close to the catastrophe in the rest of Texas:
Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.
My family in the area lost power for more than a day. And as another anecdote, my friends in Lubbock (also not part of ERCOT) were powerless for two days.
I’m in Austin, and while things indeed seemed worse here than either Lubbock or Beaumont, they were still quite bad in those places, too.
Every region prepares for what they are likely to face. Florida prepares for hurricanes, California prepares for earthquakes. If a hurricane hit California, or a large earthquake hit Florida very bad things would happen.
Likewise the average in February high/low temperature for Austin TX is 65/45 F. They had no reason to prepare for a prolonged deep freeze that dipped as low as single digits.
Your average is correct but the wrong metric. Austin has several times in the recient past got this cold, or so close as to be in any reasonable margin of error. When planning you need to ask about the expected range not average.
Yeah, that's a good distillation of what's going on. I think people have severely looked over just how significant this weather was and why it was really reasonable for engineers to not anticipate this situation.
What we really need to be reminded of is that this was caused by global warming stifling the typical northern jetstream. As long as global warming stays a problem, we will need to anticipate these types of extremes across the entire US.
I think it's more like the mainstream media downplayed just how significant and unusual this weather was for nakedly partisan reasons - specifically, to feed a bogus narrative that this happens every decade and Texas just doesn't fix the problem because they're a bunch of right-wing anti-government morons. It's hard to overstate just how awful and corrosive the current state of the US media is. I've seen people elsewhere insisting that their Texan acquaintances must've been brainwashed because they think this was a once in a lifetime occurrence. (Which it was.)
Not a Texan, but stuck in Fort Worth and Dallas since Sunday, making tomorrow the sixth day in a stationary truck. I think it was Tuesday that the truckstop was without power along with traffic lights, but only for 12 hours, in Burleson (off i35W) whereafter no further outages were observed. I finally unloaded today (7 miles north) where the warehouse was without power while a construction crew repaired a broken pipe and the ensuing damage. Many backroads are iced, warehouse lots are skating rinks, but highways have one or two drivable lanes. I'm parked outside a shipper in Irvin which was unattended today but seems powered. Many places seem yet to resume operation. Of course, this is through the lense of a single trucker hauling a 53' trailer which limits where I can go and most notably, park. I'm going fucking bonkers though, and all without a cent of pay. Obviously many others are enduring worse.
> As an aside I am not an expert in the grid or electricity, I am a software developer, and this is my best interpretation of the requirements I could find.
If this kind of sentence isn't an example of why society is turning against SV/tech, I don't know what is.
Really? Why? I figured it would be something like "I make surveillance equipment for a living" or "I am the reason you see ads before your favorite content" or maybe "I caused a genocide and am the reason you can't talk to your uncle anymore."
It's kind of a hot take at this point, and in a vacuum what the person is saying is, if anything, laudable -- he's announcing his own subject matter ignorance/inexperience and making a go of it as an autodidact, etc. Humble!
But in the current context, this looks a lot like a lot of other, more famous attempts to disrupt or solve age-old, difficult problems using technology or software ... Problems that turn out to still be tough once the software-savior has put the solution on the market and absconded with the money. I think parts of society are starting to read a bit of arrogance in this approach after 20 years of big tech swallowing us whole.
I don't get it. The post says even the NERC regulations are insufficient to prevent this situation and that Texas (ERCOT) may have even higher standards. I don't see any suggestion that a tech company or even technology in general would solve this problem. Just an admitted non-expert pointing out that the current best practices to not adequately prepare for this situation.
Having read the article, I didn't see any suggestions towards a solution... just clarifying which regulations would have helped/stratified the problem.
Why do you have an issue with a non-expert clarifying that he's not an expert? I prefer people call out their own ignorance as apposed to implying expertise they don't have.
Threats that cross wide areas incur different costs than ones that are localized. This isn't stressed in the NERC report. Tornadoes are a problem but tend not to take out a large number of plants all at once. They're localized. Freezes are large-area events and hit many plants simultaneously. So protection against freezes is required for the system even if it is not economic for each unit.
This is a nice overview, but I disagree with the dismissal of the root cause:
The interconnects to the East and West coast grids do not have enough bandwidth to provide electricity in a true crisis. This is intentional to avoid federal regulation. As pointed out, there would still be issues caused by a complete lack of winterization in Texas—rolling blackouts would still be likely—but humans would at least be able to keep their homes above freezing and not have to resort to heating their houses with propane grills.
That is the difference between a major inconvenience and a crisis. Life and death.
The thing is, Texas winter weatherization standards exceed the NERC standards. Effectively the guidelines that NERC put out have been codified by the PUCT as requirements that are audited every year.
Not relevant. Since the operating philosophy is that industry "knows what it is doing" and doesn't need to suffer the burden of regulation, they should demonstrate such competence regardless of any lackluster standards. An isolated event is forgivable but this has happened before with no effort to fix the issue.
Good write up with some minor technical inaccuracies. First they are spelled "peaker" as in they cover peaks above the base load as base load generation is slower to ramp up or down. Second there may have been frozen wells but natural gas does not go directly from the wellhead to the peaker AFAIK: well gas has other hydrocarbons in it and those along with excess moisture are extracted. These extraction plants create a buffer and there are also sites where natural gas is injected underground and stored for later sale when the price is lower than the producer wants.
Natural gas at the burner tip is supposed to be one million cubic feet (MCF) is one million BTU (MMBTU). That consistency is required. I'm not sure why wellheads freezing would be an issue if there's enough gas in storage to cover the demand.
> Second there may have been frozen wells but natural gas does not go directly from the wellhead to the peaker
I agree that the natural gas does not directly go to the station. However, from what I could tell in the NERC documents they referenced it freezing at or close to the well.
> Natural gas at the burner tip is supposed to be one million cubic feet (MCF) is one million BTU (MMBTU)
I'm guessing you're referencing "14.8 Bcf of natural gas production was lost". If so, Bcf comes directly from the NERC report in reference 14.
No I wasn't referencing that report. I was explaining why gas has to be processed before use and it's not a straight line from wellhead to burner tip.
If you look at this report you'll see 28 Bcf was pulled from non-salt storage and 61 Bcf from salt storage between 2/5 and 2/12. But that still left 233 and 593 Bcf respectively in each storage type. Far more than the 14.8 Bcf loss mentioned in the report.
Is the person who wrote this knowledgeable on this topic?
The way it is written it seems like they just did a bunch of searches and found some information. It reads like you see when we'll meaning internet sleuths find data, but often don't understand enough to interpret it with enough context.
Do they know enough to be sure they're drawing the right conclusions based on what they found?
I'm really not sure the general conclusions are so much wrong (about winterization), there may be events elsewhere, but that doesn't mean what happened in Texas also isn't what he seems to try to refute.
> The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip.
Fair enough, and fresh this morning I read the whole thing beginning to end, and that level of detail isn't required from your very high level overview of the whole problem.
You are also to be congratulated because while you started with the "Texas is bad" narrative like 99.999% of the US Left, you discarded it as soon as your research revealed a different story.
Texan here, living in a suburb of Houston. This was a really unique week, but not that bad I think. Everything was totally covered in snow Monday through Wednesday, which was super-weird for Texas. My power was only out on Wednesday, 9am-6pm precisely. Pretty sure it was a rolling outage because it died and came back on the hour. Our water comes from a neighborhood well shared by about 10 houses here. That means when we lose power, the pump stops and we have no water. Our heating is natural gas, but lack of electricity to run the fan motors means no heat.
When the power failed, neighbors went door-to-door making sure everyone had enough food, water, and blankets. Some people had indoor fires going and invited others to come and stay warm. One neighbor had a backyard pool and he let us come in with buckets and take back some water for flushing toilets.
Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts. Most of the roads were covered with ice on Monday/Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed.
Grocery stores had lots of empty shelves, but plenty of food, too. Safely driving to one was the hard part. Again, 15mph is pretty much your limit unless your car has AWD, winter tires, etc. I saw some photos showing huge lines to get into stores, and that was misleading-- it's probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they'll be open 12pm-5pm, but then not actually open until 12:30. When that happens, people would line up and wait (or wait in their cars). With dangerous road conditions keeping non-desperate shoppers away, I never saw the stores get overcrowded.
Overall, things were pretty okay as far as I saw. I feel like some of the media reports were focusing in on the worst of it and gave readers a very wrong impression of how the average Texan was faring. To be fair, though, it would really suck if you broke a leg or otherwise needed medical care on Monday.
[EDIT] Couple things I forgot to mention- There was another neighbor who had a generator that she was using to run an electric heater and heat up a single room in her house. She invited her neighbors to come and spend the night there if anyone was too cold, but power came back before the night came. Also, we had every faucet in the house dripping water-- this was enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I saw some burst pipes spraying water when I was driving on Monday, but they seemed to be in "abandoned" businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren't dripping.
Also a Texan here, it sounds like things weren't particularly bad for you. My power was out 36+ hours including during the 14-degree weather overnight where we all huddled in a room with the warmest blankets we could find with no electricity. I had pipes burst and I'm looking to rip out carpet that smells moldy because I couldn't air it out, heat it or vacuum it. Internet service was restored recently, maybe 60 hours after it was lost. Everybody I know in the Houston area lost power for at least 36 hours and 2/3rds of us had pipes burst
Thank you for sharing your story, and I'm sorry it sucked so bad! Let me just ask one thing-- are you saying that people had faucets on and dripping and the pipes still burst? We have plenty of shallow-buried (or even above-ground) pipes and dripping all the faucets was enough to prevent bursting.
Yes, Texan here, our neighbors had their faucets dripping but lost power/heat for 30+ hours and pipes froze and burst in the ceiling.
Several factors involved—- the pumping stations lost power so water pressure fell to a trickle. Also homes in Texas are not insulated well-enough to withstand the extreme cold and prolonged lack of heating we experienced.
It was somewhat thermodynamics too— their house was a smaller 1-story house, ours was a larger 2-story house and retained heat long enough to weather the freeze before power came back.
I was dripping a faucet in every room with water, and also making sure the hot water(tankless) lines were getting some movement.
Was super worried after the reports of water supply issues that the pressure would drop and the pipes would freeze while I was sleeping in my 41 degree house :/ Fortunately we are in the lower elevation zone so it never dropped more than a quarter or so(pressure or flow, couldn't tell).
Yes several people who had faucets dripping still had pipes burst. Mine were the first to burst and the friend who came to help me out later called me to say his burst later in the day. This is somebody who lived in Indiana for a while and is familiar with freezing temperatures and lives in a newer construction (house built around 2010)
It seems like you lost power around 8 hours and your house didn't lose as much heat as others
I’m in Austin and I have to agree. The media and especially social media would have you believe that the literal apocalypse happened this week (if you dare, go read r/Austin and witness how many people are having ragefits insisting they are going to actually die if Adler doesn’t personally restore their power ASAP). This situation has been very bad, especially in terms of property damage (broken pipes etc), but it still has been an easier situation than something like a hurricane or the floods in Houston, yet I don’t see r/Houston turn into a harbinger-of-doom support group whenever a hurricane hits.
I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.
> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.
That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.
“They turned the power off for many and just left us in the dark” is hard to reconcile with “Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out.”
I mean, yeah, Mother Nature rode in and fucked things up pretty good. But it’s been known for years both how to prepare for this and that it’s been needed (see the FERC report about 2011). There’s pretty clearly someone to blame, and it’s the grid operators, regulators, and the politicians and voters that enabled them to cut corners this hard.
Did you misread my comment? I didn’t say this event was due to Mother Nature, and the entire second half is specifically about how the Austin Energy grid is mismanaged and victim to cut corners.
Well in Austin they shut off every non-critical circuit for nearly 48 hours. There are still over 40,000 people that haven't had power since Monday. Most of south Austin has no water because of burst water mains.
I think most people are understanding of the fluke weather and wish the infrastructure was better weatherized. The problem is some really horrible leadership at all levels. Austin Energy said the were going to do rolling blackouts, ERCOT told them to shed more power than they anticipated and could not do the blackouts, Austin Energy only communicated this after the fact so no one was able to make preparations for a multi-day blackout. Austin Water saw water demand spike 250% and noticed that their entire reservoir was draining away due to leaks, they put out a boil water notice and then turned off the water 30 minutes later. Like Austin Energy, not giving people a chance to prepare. People are basically begging them to stop putting out vague hopeful statements and give a real assessment of the situation. Also disaster relief has been slow in coming, luckily neighbors have stepped up for each other, but the government getting supplies to the most vulnerable have been terrible. Texas has a disaster every year, it should be good at mobilizing help, but few people were getting the water they needed for their children, insulin, fresh batteries for oxygen pumps or blankets. These are the same supplies that people need during hurricanes so there is really no excuse on why these aren't going out.
>Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.
I couldn't find specific instances of Texas load shedding devices having issues. However, there were instances of things like circuit breakers failing open in very cold weather. This was probably another cause of these very long outages.
> Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.
The load shedding requirements were too high to roll the outages. In San Antonio us unlucky lot were just cut off more and more frequently until there was nothing; for days. This was actually confirmed by CPS and ERCOT.
It's not quite a national issue. There have not been regional issues in the Midwest, despite it being considerably colder than Texas, for longer (the average daily temperature in Minneapolis was 0 °F or below from the 6th through the 16th).
You might want to check with your neighbors to the west and southwest. The Southwest Power Pool which covers most of the Dakotas and by eyeball 2/5ths of Iowa has not had a fun time starting Monday 10:08 am https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/
I can report from further south of those states we've had rolling blackouts at times, although they didn't hit me personally. We've also move one level down in Energy Emergency Alerts each of yesterday and today shortly after 6 pm, another neither of those to Level 3 where you must shed residential loads.
There's a difference between not having enough generation to meet extreme load and having 35 gigawatts of power drop out of service.
It's also clearly that case that lots of operators are able to run reliably in extreme cold weather (of course they do that because it's a fact of life and not because of weatherization regulations).
Rolling blackouts throughout the Southwest Power Pool (SPP https://spp.org/) are very much a regional issue in the middle of the country.
I'm using that qualification to avoid your insisting you're still correct because the SPP is mostly to the immediate west of the Midwest; I wonder what you'll come up with next....
They knew how to fix this after it happened in 2011. El Paso fixed it. ERCOT didn't. And the reason their small number of wind farms had issues, too, is that they didn't winterize those either.
The problems are modern US capitalism/anti"socialism" problems.
Most people do not want to pay for anything that might be more useful to others than themselves. Predictably when things go very wrong, this bites _everyone_ in the ass.
Regulations are usually designed to provide some minimum standard, some predictability. Whether they are rules that say banks cannot invest deposits or utilities must build in higher level fail-safes, they are requirements which cost the companies some profit. Naturally the companies fight those requirements.
When those companies are allowed to pour money into political campaigns, they naturally help elect people who will return the favor (by fighting regulation, or even deregulating).
So yes, it is a nationwide problem. But it is more of a Red-state problem, because those are the places which fight hardest against measures that protect and benefit the general population.
You forgot about the trees and the above ground power lines!
As somebody who grew up in California but has been living in oklahoma for the last 13 years, I can tell you that honestly this cold front is seriously exceptional, I mean we've had some pretty cold winters but atleast I haven't experience anything like this.
It's so cold the water is freezing in the lines underground. Its so cold I can actually walk and ice skate on my salt pool right now. The snow is so high in some places that if you threw a cat into the middle of it you know that it will die because there is nothing it will be able to do to see to know which way to go in order to get out.
I mean its absolutely crazy how exceptionally cold this winter was.
And the reality is this.
1.) it's only lasting 4 days and the last time it was recorded being this cold in the midwest was 100 years ago. (which btw it got even colder in oklahoma than it did in texas and we didn't lose power, just food for thought)
2.) It's not a national problem because the coasts don't get as cold. The coldest day in recorded new york city history is -15 f and that was on February 9th, 1934. The coldest day recorded in LA is like the low 40 f, but here in Oklahoma City we've just about hit -15 degrees EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE THE THERMOMETER WAS INVENTED.
Like i said we are used to being cold, but we've never actually experienced anything like this before.
3.) Being connected to the coastal grids would mean that if we actually had to use it, we'd end up being forced to saw off limbs in order to pay for it. That is just how capitalism works and therefore we find that it's better for us to be independent because in exchange for having to suffer a power outage every now and then, at least we understand that when we pay for energy here it is going to energy companies who create energy here, who employ people who live here, etc etc.
The midwest doesn't have the same economic opportunities as the coasts have, nor do we receive the same kind of "federal government assistance" when it comes to these matters regardless of which party is in power. Out here poor people vote for lower taxes, because that is the only way they are personally going to see any of that money actually make it's way back to their bank accounts.
4. The problem with winterizing is that you can really only do so much. The issue is more of an implicit limitation of physics than any individual companies negligence out here in the midwest (because as I pointed out, were used to getting cold weather like this every year and it's never been a problem on the scale of a state of emergency until now).
The problem is that if you have to raise the temperature so that you can actually produce energy, you have to use most of that energy you produce to raise the temperature and keep it up, and when you also have a bunch of people who need to use that energy to keep spaces like homes that don't help produce energy, you can see how this situation becomes quickly and increasingly insurmountable. The reality is that energy companies out here know that when they don't do their job well, people out here die.
If your argument is that greedy oil men don't care enough about "grandma baptist" dying to ensure they go above and beyond to ensure our power grid is prepared to "weather the storm" frankly you don't understand that one of the many unwritten rules of capitalism is "It's not considered good business to kill your customer.", while I understand in places like Silicon Valley (be cause like i said i grew up there) the general belief is that Government is king. But out here Business is king. And so while it might be advantageous for a politician to kill off a bunch of old people. It is not advantageous for a business to because in Government you need 75,000,000+ votes to fire the boss. In a corporation you only need like 10 votes to kick out a crappy CEO.
And while there are millions of reasons why it makes sense for us to keep firing our politicians. There is really only one reason why a board of directors will fire it's CEO. And thats because they stop earning. Like I said blackouts aren't good for business, and if you want to argue whether keeping energy surpluses artificially low in order to jack up prices is a problem, then sure let's have that discussion. But lets not pretend that people on the coast are on team "cheap energy" here and lets not pretend that's because they don't know that's the only thing we have that they desperately need.
All im saying if you isolate the politics from the underlying economics and science, you will surely find that nobody's head deserves to roll for this. (unless you can catch mother nature)
Lets get back to the basics here. If Texas was connected to either the East or West grid, would it have power right now? Yes.
Edit - Texas can only access a tiny fraction of energy reserves due to weak connections to the East and West Grid. Imagine those connections were stronger or direct. I'm sure neighboring states will suffer too. I'm applying general knowledge of distributed systems, I'm not going to act like I know the specifics of the US power grid. If you go it alone, in any system, there are consequences.
No. As I pointed out in another link, there were too many outages for transmission to cover it.
For example, California "only" has 10GW of north-south transmission capacity. TX lost nearly 45GW. Even if it was part of the East or West grid there wouldn't be the transmission capacity there to cover such a loss, plus the states closest to TX which were "connected" were also having major outages, which would have put even more strain on it.
TX does have HVDC interconnects to other states too, but I believe imports to TX were significantly down/zero over this crisis.
Exactly. The DC ties with the other grids are small and can only import <1 GW, but even if they were larger it wouldn’t have mattered much in this case. TX was pulling 600 MW from the Eastern grid but even that had to be shut off because Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri etc were all under blackouts too. The other grids had no spare electricity to share.
TX also has ties with Mexico, but those were useless too because even Mexico was hit hard by this storm and had blackouts all along the US border.
If you read the article, you would see that there's a strong chance they still wouldn't have power. Texas' grid currently exceeds the requirements set out by NERC for winterization.
If you're defining a couple houses as having power, sure. If you're talking about recovering the entire customer base? Not a chance. Power Distribution grids have been running on margin for years, if not lowering capacity. Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about but you still need to post. I don't understand why. Care to share why?
There are limits to how much you can distribute. AC does weird things when you try to power too large an area with several power sources, which is one reason for Dc interconnects. Too large an area and you can't synchronize the cycles.
Maybe. Oklahoma, and other surrounding states have been dealing with rolling blackouts but on a smaller scale. I would wait for the NERC report on this.
The 3 separately controlled grids have been around a lot longer than 20 years. Blaming politicians doesn't really solve much. The regulatory boards are not Republicans or democrats, those representatives are in the US government.
* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.
* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.
* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.
* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.
Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.