Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, officials say
texastribune.org
texastribune.org
... Nothing in this article seems specific to ERCOT's grid vs any random ISO seeing a demand/supply mismatch.
Not so, here. There was no need to be this close to the cliff.
I do not know the answer to this question. I know nothing about power grids. However, if they were following such a strategy, it's not surprising that they would end up disabling the system "seconds and minutes away from a catastrophic failure". That does not make the shutdown a last-minute precarious decision. It could be a preplanned response to a certain combination of failure conditions.
The article fails to disambiguate between "react quickly with a planned decision" and "react quickly after analyzing the whole situation from scratch". The latter makes the operator seem more heroic.
I agree with nimbius that some of the quotes lean towards the latter, but it would be better if the article removed the ambiguity.
>“The operators who took those actions to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this whole event," Magness said.
>"At the end of the day, our operators are highly trained and have the authority to make decisions that protect the reliability of the electric system,"
strongly implies ERCOT had absolutely no working plan to deal with this issue and instead relied on observance and skill of operators to save them from complete and total blackout.
CAISO is an example of how this should work. it has detailed and thorough plans for high winds, inclement weather, earthquake, fires tsunami and flood. If there is an ISO flex alert for customers to save energy or a blackout is planned, its generally forecast with days to spare. Operators and plants are shut down and restarted in a coordinated, orderly fashion with excellent communication and transparency. CAISO even takes into account climate change and will mail out free coupons for bagged ice for users in a shut-down area along with maps to cooling centers or warming centers if need be. http://www.caiso.com/
Another way of looking at it is that they implemented phase 3 of this plan:
http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/current_guides/53525/04-030...
"absolutely no working plan" would look different.... which is the point of the article.
> to deal with this issue and instead relied on observance and skill of operators to save them from complete and total blackout.
Sometimes the operators have to intervene to keep things running. In in big moments like this, and many, many, many smaller moments you never even notice.
"Highly trained and well equipped fire fighters save neighborhood from burning down"
In other girds electricity costs little more and produced are required to maintain excess capacity and prepare for larger fluctuations in demand and weather. It costs little more, but is more reliable.
No, as Democrats want that.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-woul...
Perry, who also served as the Secretary of Energy in the Trump administration, made the comment in an interview with Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
What enforcement mechanisms do the grid operators have?
I’m under NDA so I can’t go into detail. I can say everybody at the ISO’s are just trying to hang on. The do a fantastic job. They don’t control spending on grid infra.
> The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
Bringing up a grid from scratch from a total blackout scenario is such a time consuming process so you rather throw consumers off with no warning even in the coldest winter imaginable.
The problem was they could not import power from the Western grid (little interconnect capability for political reasons) and meanwhile El Paso and some border counties is humming right along because they are tied to the Western grid and not ERCOT.
In most houses you have a fuse box or breaker panel, this is to prevent the appliances from drawing too much current. Conductors heat up according to their resistance and the current applied to them, so if a circuit with 14 gauge wires suddenly has a load of 2000 watts applied to it, it will begin to heat up. If this load is applied for too long it can get hot enough to start a fire inside the walls of a house. This is why we have breakers - they will cut the circuit if it exceeds a safe level for too long.
Power grids don't really have breakers. They have complex control systems and highly trained operators to serve the same purpose. If transmission lines have too much current applied to them they can expand and sag, catching on other wires or structures causing damage and outages. Overloads can also damage substations and transformers for similar reasons (heat, thermal expansion). In this case, they did exactly what they had to. They cut the power to millions of people for a few days and saved their infrastructure from months of repairs if things went catastrophically wrong.
However, the total amount of power would remain the same, which means that the electrical current would increase to compensate.
The problem is that the amount of current increase is a square law increase compared to the voltage,
V = I * R
P = V * I
P = I^2 * R
So now you have equipment having to deal with the heat created by resistance (since nothing is 100% efficient), but way more heat than it can handle.
I'm not an electrician either, and my knowledge of AC isn't great, so I'm sure there are other reasons too, like the frequency is also effected if the generator can't keep up with the load, and that causes other problems
As they reach their capacity they start to droop quite a bit, which in itself can cause issues like touching something they usually would not.
Because HV lines are made from aluminum they loose some of their strength as they are heated up. Above 100C or so the aluminum anneals which means strength is lost. Now you just need some wind shaking those lines and the whole thing breaks. If you have reached that point you likely have to replace the entire length of the HV line.
Of course the cold weather counters some of this. But only to a certain point.
If just one HV line fails you now have to deal with the cascading effect as the current is load balanced on the remaining HV lines.
Let’s suppose your adding 200GW to an electric grid, lose 10GW to transmission losses and consume 190GW. Everything is nice and balanced.
Now suppose someone adds another 50GW to the grid, where does that energy go? It ends up as waste heat, but while a few KW here and there is meaningless at that scale 50GW will melt or burn some important stuff. That’s a rather extreme example, but generators are only designed to spin so fast etc.
Impedance losses for example are proportional to frequency, and a generator spinning faster also produces more waste heat etc.
PS: Many systems are designed to avoid this situation, but a prior assumption is this stuff has failed.
When the power applied to the generator shaft by the turbine is greater than the load placed on the generator by people’s lights and heaters, the turbine and generator speed up until the gas turbine backs off the throttle a bit to balance power out of the turbine in to the generator and power out of the generator.
If people turn on more lights and heaters and power out of the generator is greater than power in, the imbalance is made up from the rotating machinery’s inertia and it slows down. If the imbalance isn’t corrected by opening the throttle on the gas turbine it slows down until it stops rotating.
If the throttle is already wide open and demand exceeds supply the machines slow down until they stop and nobody gets any electricity, so they have to have some blackouts to reduce the load so that demand is not greater than supply.
Nothing should blow up though.
Something "blowing up" is only possible if every possible safety device failed.
Offhand I am not quite sure what the damage from off-nominal frequency operation is though - inductance is jwl - any impedances with a lagging reactive component will vary proportionally with frequency. a decrease in frequency will cause an increase in current. I imagine off-nominal frequency operation causes something to get hot.
I can think of at least a couple potential issues:
* If the grid frequency is lower than the frequency the machine is trying to turn, it's possible for the generator to jump forward and mechanically slam forward to the next pole.
* Some turbines have problems running too far off rated speed. (IIRC, torsional resonance issues.)
Pole slipping, a loss of synchronism, i would associate more with transient events such as large losses of load or generation that cause big changes in power flows as opposed to a sustained operation at 58 Hz. Loss of synchronism or pole Slipping should be protected against by out of step protection elements?
I guess it's also quite hard to regularly test this sort of safety mechanism end to end, so there's surely a fear that it wouldn't work.
My general read on this is that generation can trip off more easily than most kinds of load, so when reserves are low, they need to be more explicitly proactive about taking load offline. That In case a generator trips offline that consumes all the remaining responsiveness and takes the grid to a collapse. I assume what a total collapse looks like is every generator tripping offline in a matter of a few seconds or minutes.
Hopefully, though, there'd be enough ability to disconnect transmission lines to isolate the failure to a specific part of the grid. Back in the 2003 NY blackout, the failure was isolated to the northeast because NJ disconnected its grid. The last couple steps of this timeline are illustrative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq...
* ..,
* 4:11:57 p.m. The Keith-Waterman, Bunce Creek-Scott 230 kV lines and the St. Clair–Lambton #1 230 kV line and #2 345 kV line between Michigan and Ontario fail.
* 4:12:03 p.m. Windsor, Ontario, and surrounding areas drop off the grid.
* 4:12:58 p.m. Northern New Jersey separates its power-grids from New York and the Philadelphia area, causing a cascade of failing secondary generator plants along the New Jersey coast and throughout the inland regions west.
* 4:13 p.m. End of cascading failure. 256 power plants are off-line, 85% of which went offline after the grid separations occurred, most due to the action of automatic protective controls.
I know people that were working at PJM when that happened, and they tell stories of essentially continual announcements on the PA system announcing various emergency states they needed to respond to. Which they did.
> I guess it's also quite hard to regularly test this sort of safety mechanism end to end, so there's surely a fear that it wouldn't work.
Generators trip all the time. In fact, one of my first jobs was working at a TX based utility company analyzing the frequency disturbances that occur when generators trip offline. You can learn a lot about the way the grid responds by looking at the plot of frequency over time right around a trip.
I have literally never seen a large induction machine used as a generator, every machine larger than 300 kW I have seen has been a synchronous machine. If I've read about 600 different power plants, 598 of them have had synchronous machines.
Where in the world, what application, and in what age of installation are engineers choosing induction machines + power electronics over synchronous machines?
There's a discussion of the problems posed by loss of system 'inertia' here:
https://www.drax.com/technology/shock-absorbers-keeping-grid...
https://www.wired.com/story/how-30-lines-of-code-blew-up-27-...
The short version is, to a first approximation power generation requires power first. For many of the same reasons your house with solar panels is itself on the grid - your one source is not a reliable way to operate all the equipment on your home.
Another issue is that on a grid everything has to run on similar clock. The process of aligning the clock frequency takes time and you have to do it for every node.
There are special plans to “black start” a power grid but if you didn’t prepare adequately for cold which happens every decade, you definitely didn’t plan adequately for black start which happens theoretically never.
Another cool thing that utility power plants can do is feed themselves - keep the pumps running, lights on, heaters running, coffee hot, etc in the power plant using the power from the generator in the plant even if it is not connected to the transmission system. Most privately owned power plants forego this ability along with black start and will have a diesel generator instead.
Imagine hitting your car accelerator to the floor in neutral - things blow up when spun too fast.
This was what was going to happen to parts of the grid, and then the now higher per unit demand would blow another item, etc...
They had to disconnect things so this didn't happen.
The problem here is the opposite - put your car in top gear, drive up a steep hill, and watch the thing lag and lag behind as it tries to keep up with a load its unable to support.
Maybe, when demand>supply they have to cut demand, but if you cut a whole chunk of grid demand is suddenly a lot less than supply and there is a spike elsewhere causing issues?
I know the frequency of the power supply fluctuates when the there is too much/little power. So if there is too much demand, maybe electronics that work at the correct frequency break at the new bad frequency? Or maybe power stations get out of sink and one pushes positive voltage when the other pushes negative?
Maybe it's a logistical thing: imagine if you have 3 neighbourhoods in a row ABC, and you supply power to A and C from high capacity systems, and power B indirectly from each side. Now, if you want to turn off A (rolling blackout), the operator might not realise that doing so means B has to pull all its power from Cs supply. So Cs supply suddenly sees a 30% jump and maybe the transformers etc can't handle that and catch fire?
Those are my guesses.
So, absent ways to support the full demand, the grid essentially slows down. You can see this if you look at the frequency of the current at the wall outlet - the nominal 60Hz will dip, and it will also dip across the entire rest of the grid. (In this case, across the entire state of Texas.)
The next thing you need to know is that the rotational speed of the generators on the grid are bound to the grid's operating frequency. The frequency lags, and so does the speed of all the generators and sychronous motors connected to the grid. (In this case, across the entire state of Texas.)
What happens then is that each generator with the capacity to do so will throttle up, try to hold the 60Hz, fail to do so, and potentially do things like jump poles. This is where a rotating assembly trying to maintain 60Hz on, say, a 58Hz grid, mechanically skips cycles, and jumps forward suddenly, and potentially catastrophically. It can literally physically destroy equipment.
So what happens instead is that the generator trips, goes offline to protect itself, and the overall load imbalance problem gets worse. This is why grid operators pay a great deal of attention to the amount of reserve generating capacity they have online at any moment. Some of this means the ability to turn on a generator that's completely off, but it's also very important that there be enough generation with the capability of throttling up quickly to deal with short term transient failures (like other generation tripping offline, etc.).
I very much hope that the critical equipment on Texas’s grid would trip to protect itself instead of catching fire. I also very much hope that ERCOT knows how to start their grid from a complete shutdown in a couple of days, not months.
This caused prices to increase by about 200x and caused electric generators in Texas to earn about an extra $10 billion per day.
This reminds me of Enron in California in 2000.
If you own 10 plants and shutting 3 of them can cause the remaining 7 to increase profits by 10,000%, it's not hard to see how that might influence your decisions.
This is market failure. The incentives magnify minor events into catastrophes.
[1] https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...
Texas didn't prepare properly. Perhaps because they didn't want to spend the money, or because the people in charge think climate change is not real and won't affect them. I wonder how many "100 year" storms it is going to take for the latter to change. Probably more than just this one, though.
It is especially ridiculous considering that many of these people doing the dancing are from California, and many of them have fled that state towards Texas, a place they now are demanding implement California-like policies. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
California has massive wildfires, rolling blackouts, and deaths as a result of these things every single year and has for the last decade. It happens, like clockwork, every single summer. And yet every single year the state throws its hands in the air, blames the federal government, and waits until next year.
Texas is facing a once-in-a-century black swan event[1]. If Texas got a storm like this every February for a decade, and continued doing nothing about it, then sure, maybe they could start looking to others (although literally anyone except the Californians) for help.
Until then I hope that everybody either proverbially picks up a shovel, or closes their mouth and gets out of the way. There are people suffering. Stop trying to extract joy from it.
[1]No. The storm that Texas saw in 2011 is not comparable to this. Yes, there were recommendations made on how to mitigate catastrophic temperatures like Texas is seeing. There are also mitigation strategies for things like: war, flooding, meteor strikes, hacks, earthquakes, and other "acts of god". It is simply not feasible to put ALL of these recommendations into practice.
This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.
[0] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm...
Edit: It's also worth noting that the wind turbines in Texas are producing a good amount of energy despite cold conditions there.
1. If it's not higher - it'll be at 0K since that's what absolute zero means, an absolute lack of generally useful energy.
Wait I'm not sure I'm following the plot.
This entire disaster was caused by the fact that none of the power generation in Texas is winterized. Then natural gas turbine power was suggested as an emergency fallback. Then it was brought up that natural gas had frozen in all the already existing infrastructure. You're suggesting that you simply winterize the emergency natural gas turbines?
Why don't they just winterize the normal power infrastructure?
> This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.
Solar, sure. Put some snow on it and it doesn't work. But wind works everywhere. Cold, ice, snow, doesn't matter.
I'm late reading this tab, but solar power works better in the cold and slightly better in snow once you clean the panels off - snow can be very bright, that's why you need snow goggles.
Some of the windmills froze, while others did not, and yes that was due to a lack of winterization (despite repeated recommendations to do so).
But natural gas comprises more than 50% of our power sources, and was also not winterized, and we lost a huge percentage of our power as a result.
So among our un-winterized power sources, natural gas fared the worst, which is relevant when deciding, for example, where to spend winterization money in the years to come.
Us Texans really need to focus on getting the people in charge out of office. I will vote for anybody that will work towards strengthening our infrastructure.
Hell I'd run on an infrastructure platform if I had any idea how. (And of course the means to run.)
I'd vote for fixing this first, everything else will follow.
I imagine we'll see an influx of people running on infrastructure in the near future, hopefully some of them will be doing more than "not wasting a good catastrophe".
But in terms of concrete economic choices, the popularity of services like Griddly seems to indicate that many quite explicitly choose low (instantaneous) cost over reliability/price stability. It's like airline tickets: everyone loves griping about seatroom or whatever but revealed preference is for low-cost offerings.
Put differently, as a non-Texan looking in, I guess I'm asking how hopeful you are that this zeitgeist can be capitalized on once you get down to actual policy and the inherent trade-offs you've got to deal with therein (and also when participants are warm and comfortable).
To be clear I personally would vote for you in a heartbeat, but the cliffs in support between vague positive overarching statements and concrete policy proposals in other areas don't leave me super hopeful.
If the past as shown us anything, it is nothing will change unless we can improve things for everybody. We've gotta make sure everybody gets something of value.
Changes have to be made at a local level to improve peoples lives and those improvements need to be advertised in a way that the people know what policies helped them out. Or what policies are hurting them.
Most people here just want lower taxes and more money in their pockets. Yet, they don't realize that while they pay for their share of the state bills plenty of other people/companies aren't.
Also, this is a regulation failure because the PUCT (or whatever it is called), which is under the purview of the Railroad Commissioner (an elected position), didn't make recommended winterization guidelines mandatory. Without this, the market favors the biggest corner cutting.
The hard part is getting legislation passed that mandates adherence to standards. Texas has prioritized minimal regulation and low taxation and "running on an infrastructure platform" means nothing if you can't get it enacted into law. Right now the TX regulatory climate is fiercely against these kind of measures and, terrible as recent events have been, I don't see it changing any hearts or minds in Austin. It's just not where the state government is at.
Abbot and the Legislature should resign, they did what Terrorists and Covid couldn't...they brought the state to its knees through gross negligence.
All that is required is to know there is a problem and to judge who is likely to have a workable solution if you seek them out.
Politicians don't know anything about technical issues. A good politician's strength is in knowing when to defer to experts and to judge who is a good expert.
"ERCOT has no idea how to do a controlled shutdown and cold restart."
My God, man, that's like Priority 1 of your job--have a plan to reboot.
What a bunch of morons.
ERCOT owns 0% of the power grid. They are a facilitator, and coordinator. All power generation in Texas is done on privately held equipment, and transmitted on private infrastructure.
ERCOT facilitates a marketplace where power and generation capacity is bought and sold, and they have the ability to tell all providers to shed load or do things with their infrastructure to support the grid.
The onus for implementing is on the utilities themselves. Some, did great. Others, were a dumpster fire.
Read the bloody About page and stop letting the press sell you the narrative that this is government mismanagement. This was just a case where there was not a cohesive distributed amongst all providers plan completely rehearsed.
I find the entire thing funny because you'd think ever since the Midnight Connection nonsense, there'd be a bit more inter-utility coordination, but eh... No accounting for the lack of effort put into becoming hyper-reliable.
I will say, in the towns I know people, the community has been rallying to support each other. I've been rather curious about the stark difference between the small townish response vs responses in the urban centers. Austin Energy has done a terrible job.
If they are the facilitator and coordinators, then that's their damn job--even if the entities being coordinated are private. In addition, ERCOT are the only organization with the levers to pull--so that's where the job lands.
All you've provided a pile of excuses and deflections.
This is what caused the pileup to begin with--everybody going "<plugs ears> LA LA LA, WHAT YOU SAID WILL COST ME MONEY LA LA LA SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM."
Funnily enough, El Paso did just fine--perhaps because they actually had to follow some minimum maintenance standards for their grid. I wonder where those came from ...
So yes. El Paso got an easy time of it. Pretty easy to remidiate things when you can actually move people and equipment around safely. More at 11.
On the other hand...
Most of the population centers in East Texas are still hard frozen pretty much consistently since Sunday, with precipitation to boot, thereby complicating infrastructure response because you can't get people mobilized with equipment as effectively when they are worried about dying doing so. Further, you've got issues with water systems breaking down all over the place as well.
https://www.localconditions.com/weather-dallas-texas/75201/p...
Go ahead, compare and contrast to your heart's content.
So with regards to El Paso, no surprise there, they missed half the bloody party. Good for them. Last I checked, there wasn't enough extra capacity on the national grids either to make up for the shortfalls in Texas either, so while some mitigation may have happened, the same compounding difficulties would have emerged.
I'm not saying ERCOT makes the most sense to anyone out there, I'm saying you need to actually calm down and realize who actually does what. ERCOT monitors, they do not operate.
Their role stops where hands meet controls. They can order utilities to put hands on controls, but for each provider, how they do what they are told is out of scope for ERCOT as long as they meet their obligations. In the game of remediating the entire grid in event of casualty, they provide the line of communication and data stream so that all the providers can work it out amongst themselves. Power providers do not implement controls in some magical ERCOT control room, and train ERCOT personnel how to control the transmission and generation equipment every utility member owns, operates, and maintains. These companies are power companies; electricity generation and transmission is what they do. ERCOT is a glorified message passer and dashboard gazer. This is a theme in Texas. People own things, councils oversee coordination. Members are responsible for working things out between themselves using the council and information they maintain as the coordination point.
You can be as livid as you want about it. No skin off my nose. I'm here living through it, and observing the difference between different service providers in terms of how competent they are handling their issues.
Some do great, others have failed epically. That is the goal Texas set out for with the ERCOT Marketplace. A bunch of providers with heterogenous operating parameters, with the goal of bringing power to the state while staying in-sync enough to get the job done.
Market forces are going to crush some providers. Those who failed are either going to have to dissolve or remediate their operations.
Neither the Eastern or Western grids have been the most reliable when Texas has connected with them in the past, and those times when problems knocked out power for Texans when other States dropped the ball have left a poor taste for the approach in Texas.
If you don't like it, or don't like planning for the occasional hiccup when another human being makes an unfortunate compounding series of mistakes, I don't know what to tell you. Don't move here, though I think you"ll find most other places have the same problems in different spaces.
I can only call it as I see it playing out on the ground. Texas hates/fundamentally distrusts centralized public management. This is their answer to it. They even more dislike non-Texans butting in and telling them how they should do things. It is a cultural thing, and something a lot of people don't seem to understand. So, it is what is.
><plugs ears> LA LA LA, WHAT YOU SAID WILL COST ME MONEY LA LA LA SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM."
I'm saddened you think that's what is going on. It's sad to think that there aren't a very dedicated group of people handling a very dynamic situation to the best of their ability. I've seen people brought together and self-organizing in this crisis, which to me, restores a modicum of faith in the people around me. The uninvolved cheerleaders demonizing or exploiting the crisis for political aims, clicks, something interesting to discuss, and personal aspirations can go sod themselves.
Looking at anything other than what you have to work with does nothing to facilitate real change. You do you, but don't expect someone sitting in the middle of it to buy into hyperbolic rhetoric that denies the fundamental nature of coordinating independent actors.
Now let it happen again in the next few years, and I'll be right there with you pounding the drum of incompetence, but as far as Texas as a state, it's the resident's collective perogative to operate the way they do.
A.k.a. "government mismanagement".
If the Electric Reliability Council of Texas can't be assed to rehearse a plan to ensure, you know, the electric reliability in Texas, then it has arguably failed its mission. And likewise, if Texas' PUC and legislature can't be assed to provide the necessary oversight to ensure said "electric reliability council" is actually assed to ensure said "electric reliability", then the state government has likewise arguably failed in its responsibilities to provide that oversight.
Not an excuse, per se, but it makes sense things were stretched. Personally, I live in Illinois, we use nuclear power and have to say I'm very pro-nuclear. Wind can stop, solar causes a lot of environmental damage (mining, producing, shipping, etc). Nuclear has minimal risks and produces a lot of energy for minimal pollution. I'd love to see some deregulation (still keep safety) and investment.
For reference, you can see energy costs yourself
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
And production:
I too am pro nuclear. While nuclear isn't perfect, we have to take steps in the right direction. That means, investing in energy research, building from the best options we have now, and planning to build better things in the future.
Additionally - a lack of regulation heavily failed Texans. There are ways to weatherize wind turbines to operate in the cold properly but Texas long ago stripped these away.
This is a tragedy and many folks in Texas are feeling a lot of pain right now, it's not the time to guilt over politics but it is a good time to realize that moving forward social services do need more a reasonable level of support.
Since this state is so divided between the rural and urban areas, the democrats have to find a way to address the issues of the rural populace in order to heal the us vs them divide.
I really feel for people living in red states who are trying to make everything better for everyone - most people give up and just move elsewhere but you can make change happen.
There is also the fact that Texas isolated itself from the national grid purposefully, which is worth reflecting on after this event.
I agree that we should move on from that to helping our fellow Americans asap however.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2021/02/17/texas-republicans-mocked-ca...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-0524...
Talk to a right leaning person and they will tell you that the rolling blackouts in California are due to the fact that the electrical grid is too dependent on renewables, and the forest fires are due to too much environmental regulation. They will probably indicate that the Texas storm was a 1 in a 100 year storm, so there was no way to plan for it, it was a black swan.
Now go talk to a left leaning person and they will tell you the Texas electric grid is too dependent on nuclear energy and de-regulation of electricity is the root cause. The storm might have affected the poorer neighborhoods, so it was yet another example of systemic racism. They will say the Texans need to stop electing people that dont believe in climate change.
Of course there is probably some truth to both, and both sides can actually have valid points, but 99% of the US doesn't seem to understand or speak with any nuance anymore - and it's a huge problem. They re-tweet, re--gram, and re-post content in fits of confirmation bias, only skimming headlines on clickbait.
[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Texas, by contrast, has close to zero 'large hydro'. It's not clear to me that 'large hydro' is a non-renewable', certainly it's a lot different from most non-renewables, and it's not carbon dioxide producing. If you take that into account, then from (coal/natural gas/oil/nuclear) California has more like 53% of energy while Texas has 80%. That gives a little different perspective.
Compare, e.g., with this list, which includes hydro as a category of renewables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...
Sure you can, people plan for far more rare occurrences. It costs money and will and nobody was willing to spend any. It is a tradeoff but saying you cannot plan for it is nonsense.
And you expect them to quietly turn the other cheek? Actually, I'm amazed at the amount of restraint I'm seeing.
Personally, if I had been Biden, I would have made every single Senator and Representative of Texas come to the White House and perform dogeza before approving the state of emergency declaration for Texas.
Of course, that's why I'm not cut out for politics.
2. People in states who are acclimated to this kind of weather being snobby. This is annoying, but common in any scenario. I have friends who live in Alaska and I live in Chicago. Two years ago I was bitching to them about hitting -20 degrees Fahrenheit and having issues with my furnace. Their responses were jokes and screen caps of their weather history. I will say though I saw a lot of this at first, but people seem to be understanding that Texas woefully unprepared and that the dunking on them right now isn't helpful.
Many many Texans are not very envoirnmentally consciencious. It's very much a climate change disaster and many Texans felt insulated from such a global change.
To be clear shadenfreude is in poor taste but there is also a lesson for anyone who feels that climate change is other peoples problems. What is happening is awful and Texans deserve all the help the US can give.
I started calling the party "Soviet" way back in the Bush (or "Bushevik") era, and it's only gotten even more so since then. While the official party platform is quite different from the old USSR, the whole "the party platform dictates the facts of reality" thing is similar. I predict it will only get worse. Qanon is in the process of taking over the party.
It can have only two outcomes: the victory of an irrationalist / anti-realist Qanon party and the ensuing collapse of the country, or Democratic single party rule which may lead to the same... due to what happens when you have single party rule.
also, Texas is a leader in wind power. it produces more than any other state and more than most countries.
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.
We're #2 in the US for solar[0], #1 for wind[1], and #5 for nuclear[2] with roughly 25% of our power coming from wind alone.
Unfortunately, since weather like this doesn't occur very often (every ~60-100 years), the wind turbines aren't weatherized as they are in Canada and elsewhere. When half of that went offline on Sunday morning, it fell to natural gas to make up the difference. When the temperature continued dropping, the gas flowed more slowly and couldn't keep the right pressure levels, removing roughly a third of that production.
To be fair, your criticism would be more useful if it was built on facts.
0 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/solar-energy-produc...
1 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-...
2 - https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/nuclear-generation-...
It's quite bizarre to read this a day after the Texas governor literally went and blamed renewables [1] [2] when in fact their renewables have been performing better than their (far more prevalent) nonrenewables. [3]
And while frozen wind turbines have contributed to the state's energy crisis, that type of energy has only slightly underperformed against published expectations for winter output. Natural gas, the state's dominant energy source, has provided drastically less energy than expected, according to experts and industry data. "Wind was operating almost as well as expected," said Sam Newell, head of the electricity group at the Brattle Group, an energy consulting company that has advised Texas on its power grid. "It's an order of magnitude smaller" than problems with natural gas, coal and nuclear energy, he said.
[1] https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1361868404534112257
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-0524...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fact-check-renewable-en...
Now please re-read my comment and find where I criticized wind or any renewable.
You can say "omg a politician said something bad!" all you want but it a) ignores the data and b) doesn't lead anywhere productive.
Personally, I'll stick with the facts and data.
Please re-read mine and find where I suggested you criticized either of them?
> You can say "omg a politician said something bad!" all you want but it a) ignores the data and b) doesn't lead anywhere productive.
This wasn't just one random politician, this was the governor. Other prominent Texas politicians have also been bashing renewable energy for a long time too. Hope I don't need to find you quotes of this, but let me know if I do. How is it productive to ignore their blatant hypocrisy and let them keep spreading such awful disinformation to people? Do you really think they like to expand renewables and these quotes are just accidental gaffes others pick on? You don't see a pattern? To me it seems these officials are anti-renewables but still failing to prevent movement in that direction due to complex incentives and incomplete control.
> Personally, I'll stick with the facts and data.
You can be anti-something while still having it. Like so many people are anti-2nd-amendment but it's still there due to forces outside their control. Pointing to it doesn't imply anything about people's stances.
With regards to the governor, Texas is a little different. The Governor serves year around, according to their term but mostly applies policy and sticks within the budget that the Legislature (only serves every other year) sets. In past terms, the Legislature have expanded renewables quite successfully (as noted above) and I hope that trend will continue.
Or you can focus on "omg a politician said something bad!" but I hope I don't need to convince you that what politicians say and the policies they implement are often unrelated.
No worries, though I actually have no idea what you're referring to. The only part of your comment that I can remember replying to was that single quote from you (which is still there). The subsequent edits in my comment were just adding links & expanding on them and trying to summarize their relevant points succinctly. It must've been a misunderstanding since that wasn't the intention of anything I wrote.
> With regards to the governor, Texas is a little different. The Governor serves year around, according to their term but mostly applies policy and sticks within the budget that the Legislature (only serves every other year) sets. In past terms, the Legislature have expanded renewables quite successfully (as noted above) and I hope that trend will continue.
Great, I hope so too. Again, this means some of the vocal ones have limited control. I don't know the power (ha) vs. size of each faction, but I'm not under the impression this is happening without a fight: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex...
Not for long. Renewables are already being blamed for this (regardless of whether it's accurate or fair) and the politically expedient thing for Texas Republicans to do, in order to to be seen doing something, is to cut funding for green energy in favor of greater investment in coal, oil and natural gas.
The various power generation approaches have different strengths, weaknesses, and risk profiles. Despite this week, it's rare to have a situation where multiple are greatly impacted at the same time.
Can someone lie and tell Texas Republicans that nuclear power is really really dirty so that they subsidize it to spite the Democrats?
Trolls are still a thing, this is what they do
Edit: As other comments are pointing out, poor planning is not unique to Texas [1]
The polarization and alienation worsens just as empathy becomes more and more important to facing the massive ecological problems at hand.
The schadenfreude I feel is at the blowback these same politicians are getting for their idiotic statements:
- Ex-mayor Tim Boyd forced into resignation after saying "if you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising!" about his constituents? Hilarious!
- Gov. Greg Abbott getting raked over the coals for blaming his failures on California? Keep it coming!
- Sen. Ted Cruz being called out for previously saying "California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity"? Inject that right into my veins.
There are lots of good people in Texas. There are also lots of decent, hardworking, well-meaning politicians. I'm not enjoying these nice people having to suffer. I am very much enjoying the self-inflected suffering from the handful of visible idiots in charge.
This seems like something that would be very bad if applied to everyone. Perhaps I'd get hate for saying this in 2021, but I'd prefer a society where no one enjoys anyone else's suffering, no matter how much they dislike that person or feel that they 'deserved' it. I want a world with less suffering for everyone, not more.
Some people deserve it. He's one of them.
But seriously, we're pulling for you to get through this and fix the underlying issues. I don't want to see my countrymen suffering from entirely avoidable reasons!
Politicians are elected. If the people don't approve, they have a recourse. People pile on Texas (or insert favorite punching bag of the day) because the majority (or plurality in voting) asked for these people to represent them.
A huge portion of Texans are enduring an artificial catastrophe who did not vote for any of the politicians who caused it. Although I feel bad for everyone going through it, I feel especially bad for them.
When California had wildfire disasters, Trump actively impeded efforts to provide relief, and Texas politicians openly attempted to delay federal aid.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Biden immediately activated FEMA, and NO national Democratic politician to my knowledge is arguing that Texas should not get immediate relief. And I completely agree that Texas SHOULD get as much federal relief as possible.
But as far as hurting their feelings go? I mean, during the wildfires, Texas politicians like Ted Cruz were very happy to mock us, so what's the issue, really?
I'll go on the record and say it's fine to use Ted "it's sunny in Cancun" Cruz as a punching bag right now.
The issue is the schadenfreude regarding the people who live in Texas. Individuals have very little power over their state, and are suffering the decisions made by self-serving politicians. The country is cracking under polarization, and rather than come together as a nation, we're using this to widen the chasm. It's tragedy upon tragedy.
Ok, fair enough. What's the conservative's olive branch here? What are they doing to come together as a nation? Or is that just code for "we know we lost the election, but we want you to give us everything while we give up nothing anyway"?
I don't know about "deserve", but if you don't want to get hit by lightning, don't go golfing during a thunderstorm.
Texas had a similar storm in 2011, and there was a report about what should be done: ERCOT decided to ignore it. Meanwhile, some places that are not managed by ERCOT decided to pay attention:
> El Paso is not apart of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a major grid operator that controls about 90% of the state’s electric load. El Paso Electric, which oversee's the electricity from Hatch to Van Horn, said the Borderland is apart of the Western International grid.
[…]
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
Meanwhile, former Texas governor (and previous Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry:
> "Rick Perry says Texans would rather be without power for days over more federal oversight"
* https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-woul...
H.L. Mencken once said: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
The people running the show now, and for the last few decades, in Texas is supposedly what 'the people' want (notwithstanding over suppression).
Of course, it’s not just Twitter that has this effect. Political commentary shows on TV and radio have been doing this professionally for decades, newspapers did it before that, and politicians probably invented the practice. I do think that social media, by drawing from such a large sample of posters, can find more extreme takes phrased in a more compelling way, and deliver them to people are weren’t event looking for political content.
For example, Rick Perry, former Texas governor and Trump administration Secretary of Energy says “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business." [1] It seems to me that many Texans disagree.
I get that Republicans are theoretically in favor of small government and minimal regulation (although you wouldn't know it by the way the Federal bureaucracy has expanded under Republican presidential administrations). There is a certain sort of logic to that position, which I won't delve deeply into, but I do want to acknowledge. But, if there ever was a place for government regulation, a public utility that serves the entire state (the Texas power grid) is certainly one of them. Republicans are doing themselves no favors politically by saying things like this while millions of Texans are out of power, and basically making caricatures out of themselves.
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[0]: Just for the sake of fairness, I will mention that PG&E is not great on this front, either, but they're not the subject of this article, after all.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/18/rick-perry-t...
Technically correct yet hypothetical bullshit.
Earlier in my career I worked in this industry designing automation equipment. A substation has more than enough protection relays with redundancies designed to shed load, turn on auxiliary cooling, trigger systems down the line, etc. The automation is far from rocket science, and reduces to comparing against thresholds and protecting the equipment or circuits as appropriate. Logic that matters defaults to a disconnected state, such that if the safety itself fails then the system is put in its most conservative mode, even if that means stuff turns off.
It would take work and massive negligence to override multiple layers of automation (software, firmware and physical connections), so based on the information provided I'm not giving the operators here any special credit. No blue ribbon to the guy whose job was to watch a circuit breaker trip.
Large equipment that's hard to replace was at one point designed and certified against IEEE and IEC standards applicable to the global industry, with high safety margin, modeling harsh (to a point, catastrophic) operating conditions. Far beyond the requirements of consumer electronics. And there is no reason to believe a manufacturer capable of this scale (think ABB) would design/build/test a substation transformer from a playbook intended for a global market, and then execute to a lower standard because the customer is in Texas.
For clarity, I am not referring to small stuff. Power pole transformers will occasionally blow up. But those get quickly replaced or bypassed without months-long outages.