We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.
At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
Otherwise, it's cutting off a limb because of a papercut.
Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas, and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
Sure it's possible to learn from this, but the "efficiency" of that learning is predictably low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq...
I really like this minute by minute play.
> Estimated total affected people 55,000,000
Now this is not supposed to be a "NA vs. Europe" thing. So here we go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timelin...
Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :)
> In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout
It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss.... “The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.”
It’s just a question of cost. Regional grids could have more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare enough it’s not considered worth it.
From what I can tell, each DC tie to the Eastern Interconnect is 800MW max, while apparently the normal draw for this time of year on the Texas Interconnect is something like 45GW.
So those two interconnects can only provide 3.5% of total power usually being consumed by the grid, which was obviously not nearly enough for this Black Swan event.
I doubt this. That would mean a lot of power plants were taken offline as solar ramped up, and I doubt that enough solar to cool a house from 105 to 75 can heat it from 15 to 70.
Amusingly, Texas in this current crisis is halfway there: the handful of people who haven't had their power cut off are going to see gigantic power bills next month https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-urge...
I wonder what a similar cold snap would look like in the future. Long distance HVDC lines ramping up to full capacity. Strident alerts on your phone as KWh spot prices triple, then trigintuple. Water heaters and EV charges passing stop loss triggers and shutting off. A wood stove in every home. I see Texans in this thread talking about using space heaters, and boy will they regret that when they see the bill. Electric blankets and heat pads are dozens of times more efficient: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hard...
The inter-connectedness is actually what caused that. blackout, and what caused it to be so hard to recover from.
This way, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can write a report after the 2011 Texas cold snap that took down the Texas power grid. FERC can recommend that companies which generate or distribute power be required to verify that their systems are weather-proofed before every winter and before every forecasted cold snap. And Texas can simply ignore it.
In response to "why doesn't the TI join another grid?", I would have to ask "why don't the Eastern and Western Interconnections join together?"
No more than that.
To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black swan events happen, shit goes bad.
Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
Why do engineers seem to think that it's possible to do things at scale without politics being involved? A statement that boils down to "trust this group of people that I am affiliated with because we know better" is an inherently political statement, even if you really do know better!
What I'm trying to say is that electricity is a life/death situation, not only when it freezes but during heat waves too. We go to extremes to engineer airplanes (and we have recently seen how that can fail too). Weighing once in 80 year events as inconsequential and failing to properly design/maintain backup generators (Fukushima), or NG holding tanks/heaters or whatever it takes to secure the supply isn't generally the function of the guy doing the engineering unless he has been given some kind of financial constraint. Same at it was some bean counter who allowed the 737MAX to be sold without redundant sensors or decided to skimp on the training requirements to save some $.
So, who was it, who didn't size heaters on the wind turbines correctly despite turbines being installed in far colder places, or didn't build NG holding tanks sufficient to supply the peaker generators for any length of time? Most of those decisions come back to free market financial pressures that are prioritizing cheap over reliable.
The grid is a giant redundant system, designed to correct for errors on the part of individual actors. Its only when the system is systematicaly undermined does it fail like this.
Because they're only a stone throw away from physicists in when it comes to the "I know X therefore I know everything higher level than X" flavor of hubris.
It'll be interesting to see how the damage stacks up to a California wildfire season or an active hurricane season.
And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they need to compete for limited resources.
And the "free market race to the bottom" is why you have $1,000 computer in your pocket.
CA is nowhere close to a free market and is arguably worse than TX.
Nowhere do the engineers have a voice in what actually works. So of course they are both dumpster fires.
Edit: BTW: if you remember your history a lot of CA's power problems a couple decades ago were caused by free market experiments, which were promptly exploited by TX energy traders. The fixes haven't really helped CA.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/san-antonio/weather/2021/02...
That's my point. Other parts of the country have "colder weather regularly". Texas doesn't.
Pretending the black swans you've seen don't exist make it a black swan event when one finally pecks you