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Comment by i_am_proteus | Hacker News Reader

Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures.

All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

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> All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.

But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.

I've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.

Glad you are doing so well. There are a lot of people out there who are not.

"I wouldn't pay any more money to avoid this" is a remarkable low cost tolerance.

I would love to know just how much we'd be talking about per-customer. Ten cents over ten years? A dollar over ten years? Twenty dollars? More?

Without knowing that "I wouldn't pay any more" seems foolhardy.

Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.

> Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.

No, this is simply a baseless assumption made by you, with an effect similar to poisoning the well. I know people on medical devices, and one day of power loss per 30 years is absolutely acceptable to them, give that they arranged to have backup power.

California has rolling blackouts every summer (and winter) with power that cost about 3x more than Texas. Rolling blackouts also affect hospitals. I think OPs sentiment is that overall Texas is a better system. Compared to CA I agree.

Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be improved, but spending 3x more and looking more like California is a huge net loss.

It seems unlikely and reductionist to think that taking Texas' existing power system, and investing more money in reliability, would make it LESS reliable. But this is what happens when you compare two very complicated things (different states' utilities) and consider price of service to be the only relevant factor.

I'm not familiar with rolling blackouts in the winter in CA. And, in fact, I've never been part of a rolling blackout, period, in my 20 years in CA.

But the rolling blackouts that some areas experience now are by and large due to (fire) risk avoidance by the utility, not by generation issues.

When I was living in California (no, not a large scale event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small houses)...

The mother in law of the guy who handled the property would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and would have loved to have him sell it.

And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.

She didn't fuss about the RV after that.

If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill many people who depend on the consistent power to keep their medical devices working.

Isn't it reasonable to expect people reliant on powered medical devices to include a plan B in case the grid goes down? It's not like the grid is perfect. Even in high-reliability countries like the USA there are unforseen events.

Exactly, and it almost certainly makes sense for the few people who rely on them to get generators rather than to pay to improve the entire grid.

You can expect whatever you like. But the reality is that lots of people don't. Maybe they're short-sighted, maybe they're poor, maybe their backup plan wasn't tested to best-practice standards.

I'm sure everyone has seen the bit about half the country lacking a $400 emergency buffer. You can blame them for their own plight if it makes you feel better. Or you can blame a skewed economy. Or god, or me.

You're still left with a grid buckling due to underinvestment, and a future that's likely to demonstrate that this was just a warning.

It is a valid point of view.

It may be true in a lot of places that we should step back from 100% coverage as the cost is just too high, and it is better (cheaper) to put the resilience in housholds than in utilities.

But your anecdote is just that - a anecdote. We need to carefully weigh those options.

Elected politicians have a bad reputation for making these trade offs sensibly. I have heard it said (by a fictional character I think - no source) that (in popular opinion) the present trumps the future every time

Really it means that many many people end up paying for safety measures individually - if they can afford them. The total social cost is likely higher than building adequate infrastructure in centralized places.

Yes. It depends on whether individual house holds pay their own way or if the costs are shared.

I guess it would depend a lot of the local political culture.

Hey great. My blue-lipped toddler is very happy for you.

Hour 42.

Hey man, ignore the comment above, I hope things get better quickly and ya'll are safe, special the little one!

I get that cold isn't fun, but if that's something you're worried about, why not get a small generator or back-up heater ahead of time? We had a close call with this back in 2011. Unless you're really saying that you want to socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm.

All that aside, I hope y'all stay warm. I know many cities are opening warming facilities, so maybe check if there's one near you.

> socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm

This seems like one of the whole points for having a society. Ensuring basic necessities like this are covered at a marginal cost. But I guess the neoliberal capitalist haven of America thinks it's "socialism", and thus evil.

The real issue is frozen pipes which can be pretty expensive/catastrophic. As someone in New England, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't find a power outage all that big a deal--at least for a couple days. But frozen pipes can lead to $10K's of damage.

There's a .gif on Imgur - https://imgur.com/gallery/yvIAcvB

Its... yea. That's going to be rather expensive.

Also, part of the power problem is frozen pipes - and not just water pipes: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/texas-pow...

> Operations in Texas have stumbled because temperatures are low enough to freeze oil and gas liquids at the well head and in pipelines that are laid on the ground, as opposed to under the surface as practiced in more northerly oil regions. The big question now is how quickly temperatures return to normal.

For nuclear... the cooling ponds froze: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-squar...

> First, Representative Gene Wu, Texas House of Representatives District 137, walks us through the “cascade” of problems that caused multiple generators to go out without back-ups in place. Including, water vapor inside natural gas generators that condensed and froze shutting down the machines and nuclear power plants whose cooling ponds froze, setting off automatic shutdowns. Rep. Wu also advocates turning off all non-emergency electronics to reduce the strain on the energy grid.

Imagine the fun of having those pipes freeze (this is the cooling loop - not the reactor loop so "just" power down the reactor - it's not the loop that deals with the water that passes through the core).

I have a colleague where an upstairs neighbor had a pipe freeze and leak because of a crack in the outside brickwork. Had to move out for a year. And, for many people, insurance won't really fully cover this sort of thing.

I often debate if I should get a generator for outlier events in a house.

Thank you for having a sane reasoned look at this.

People use extremely low probably exceptions to attempt to radically rewrite the way things are done.

Bad shit happens very rarely. Sometime the best action can be just to do nothing.

People are dying because of this.

This is not hyperbole:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/death....

Folks are dying as a direct result of these infrastructure failures.

If California is a guide, the "optimization" is for share holder dividends. PG&E in particular, in the last twenty years in particular, gutted needed repairs, a gutting which has lead to periodic shutdown due to different bad weather (high winds). I don't know the exact situation of Texas but if this is a similar situation, I would be unsurprised.

All of this is somewhat conditioned by advancing global warming, which known to lead to more severe weather conditions (more specifically, with the slowing of the jetstream, the polar vortex migrates South, has been doing so for the last few years).

In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down more and more for frequent high wind events.

I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent them from charging any more money for the service they provide, they are going to have to reduce risk elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service when fire risk is the highest or by doing more maintenance, whichever is least expensive.

There is little to no fine for stopping service during the high wind events.

The incentive pushes them to shutoff, its simply cheaper than repairing the grid.

It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation on themselves.

I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on to maintain a better than third-world power grid availability.

I'm not sure what you mean by "people expected".

The power companies muscled into place a system where they could scrimp in improvements and pocket the savings.

The disastrous result was devastating fires. The system of civil courts still existed so they wound-up liable for their despicable maneuvers and has to pay a bit back from gains. So their next maneuver was turning off their lines when winds got high rather than engaging in the now even great expense of repairing them.

PG&E is a literally criminal enterprise, found criminally (not civilly) liable for the death of more than 100 people (29 gas explosion, 85 fire, etc).

The well-known Judge Alsop rightly denounced their vicious chicanery but sadly failed to put them in receivership and forfeit the value of their shareholder's assets (IMO, shareholder assets should be forfeit and previous dividends clawed back but natural they can do that to people in nursing homes and Madoff shareholder but they can't do it to these shitheals).

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/05/28/regulators-appr...

> a highly consequential long-tail event

Hip jargon aside, planning for low-probability events was invented a long time ago.

Unfortunately, so were politicians, who will operate within the parameters they are given. If you want real resilience, you want better governance.

That "hip jargon" is concise, specifies characteristics, and clarifies meaning.

They aren’t that expensive, seeing as probably most states can operate their power grid at reasonable cost at these temperatures. They definitely aren’t expensive compared to the economic damage of an event like this every 15 years.

"Expensive" is all relative. If it costs say ... 2% of the utility shareholder dividend, would shareholders be ok with that?

Before this happened, what exactly were the incentives that led them not to prepare? Was it really an unforeseeable event? Was the risk understood but downplayed (like the oil industry with climate change)? The answers to these will hopefully come out in time.

They didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is back up and running again.

I wonder if that equation will change...

It seems like there is no shortage of scapegoats, so my money says "no".

Seriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo ring run out of a pizza joint.

It will. You can bet on it. The Texas Legislature is currently in session (it only meets every other year). Maybe a quarter of them will have personally experienced this power outage and all of them will have a parent, sister, son, neighbor, friend who suffered through it. And while these people may not know much about same sex bathrooms, a lot of them know a lot about energy. When this session is out weatherpfoofing will not be "suggested" or "recommended", it will be law.

The issue is that the plants weren't built to handle these temperatures, and the deregulation and political climate in Texas makes it difficult to incentive those plants to make those changes. (Pre-pandemic) you'll see some random electric company setup outside of a grocery store asking everyone who walks in what their rate is, and offering to beat it.

Many of those places are calling their customers and telling them to cancel their service as fast as possible.

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-power...

Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy, so I feel sidelined by such comments.

>Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy

Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...

Seems like an unnecessary quibble. If everyone was using a "100% renewable" provider, would non-renewables be consumed?

It sounds like GP is saying that at current capacity, there isn't enough renewable energy to supply all of the demand 100% of the time.

But at this moment people aren't so whether it's actually helping the environment is debatable. It's like selling a vegan burger that's made with beef but claiming it's totally fine because that's offset by some other guy eating a plant burger.

Just an FYI, unless you’re off the grid you aren’t actually 100% renewable. I live in Texas and found this to be super confusing when I signed up for power for the first time. If you think about it for a second it makes sense that you’re getting the same energy as the rest of your neighbors and the grid is made up of many many different types of power plants. The “100% renewable” bit means that when the power broker gives a cut to the state that money is used to fund only renewable projects. Hope you learned something new today!

Think of it like you pay for grain harvested by well paid workers. But you don't get that grain directly. Instead all the grain harvested by everyone, even underpaid near slaves, is put in one big pile. When you go get your 5 pounds from the pile you are getting the mix from everyone, but the well paid workers are the ones earning the money.

That's how money works. It's a transactional abstraction. It doesn't matter how many times it changes hands as long as it ends up in the right place.

> Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal

That’s simply not true. The only people “litigating” do so in response to dishonest indictments of wind power.

IIRC solar panels are actually more efficient at low temperatures.

Wind farms have been freezing up in texas

Yes. That's their point. So have solar farms. And gas plants. And a nuclear reactor.

Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.

The people down the street from me in Houston are currently powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had to abandon our house.

Last year, I went on vacation to Alaska. Me and my friends airbnb'd an off-grid home/cabin in Talkeetna, about several hundred miles north of Anchorage. It was powered entirely on solar panels on the roof and right by the house. Water from the rivers. Granted, it had a wood stove, like most cabin/homes are in the north. Just want to chime in and say that renewables are absolutely very prevalent in colder, remote climates.

it isn't that big a deal to run a fridge and some led lights on solar pAnels. As you identified heating and cooling are the big energy users.

Miles north of anchorage? How many hours of sun were you getting? 3? 1?

I was curious so I used sunrisesunset.com to see.

Looks like at June 21 (picking a day around the summer solstice) sunrise is at 4:04 am and sunset is midnight. That's a nice 20 hours of sunshine.

On the flip and dark side, Dec 21 it is sunrise at ~10:30 am and sunset at ~3:30 pm. A sadly short 5 hours of sun. Ouch.

Solar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow isn't the cause of the deficiency today.

Texas is pretty large and their solar resources are way the hell out in Pecos County where it hasn't been snowing. This is actual ideal to have your solar power plant far to the west of your population centers, to handle the evening load peak. If Texas had California-scale solar power installations, they would be warm and happy right now.

In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.

Turns out you can actually design around that. Heck, my solar panels cleared themselves of the foot of snow we received (Idaho) without any intervention on my part. If necessary I could’ve gotten up there with a broom and ladder.

Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered.

As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself.

Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.

Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost.

But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.

I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean.

I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!

The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper.

Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.

If they're still producing any power, they'll have some self heating just through waste.

I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off.

After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water

Natural gas plants also had to shut down. This was a systematic failure to plan for cold weather,

i have solar panels in texas, snow slid right off.

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