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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.

The weather in Texas is in the single digits. The weather in Minnesota is in the double digit negatives.

Texas would not be in trouble "no matter what" if they had bothered to spend the money on winterizing their power plants. They chose not to, and this is the end result.

The roads shut down due to lack of snow removal is completely understandable - and quite frankly most people should be perfectly capable of surviving in their homes for a week if they have heat and water.

The lack of updating power plants so they can function in below-freezing weather is just straight incompetence. This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm. They have extended below freezing temperatures on a fairly regular basis.

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From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.

To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.

>This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm.

Not according to this professor of meteorology:

>“We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,” said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.

https://apnews.com/article/2-dead-texas-subfreezing-winter-w...

>From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota. To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.

I don't recall saying every state, I said Texas. Because this type of weather happens on a somewhat regular basis.

>Not according to this professor of meteorology:

I guess finding a soundbite from one individual isn't very interesting to me. The entire state of Texas was told in a report in 2011 after a similar storm that they needed to winterize their power plants and chose not to. If by "historic" you mean "first time in 10 years" - I guess? I don't really consider that "historic".

>Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.

Is Texas as a state poorer than Minnesota or something? What makes it unrealistic, other than laziness?

It's not more taxing on Minnesota to implement the infrastructure than anyone else

It's as unrealistic as it is to expect a credit agency to encrypt their data, because credit agencies don't get hacked

The most bizarre part is people referring to this as a once in a century storm. It’s more like a once in a decade or 15 years storm, seeing as similar temperatures were seen in 2011 and 1989. Things that happen on that cadence shouldn’t result in people freezing for days in their homes.

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