The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
garrettbattaglia.com
garrettbattaglia.com
* 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.
Exactly. I'm not sure that even the new NERC regulations for winter weatherization go far enough. They seem to bring NERC standards closer to Texas'.
But if they had winterized that number would be a lot lower
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.
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?
Atmospheric co2 increase over time: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/2...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680
https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-low...
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.
"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.
Like most prophecies by religions do.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_co... Exxon knew since the 1970s
http://www.climatefiles.com/coal/mining-congress-journal-aug... Choice quote from this article in a 1966 coal journal:
> 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.
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.
https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-...
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.
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.
edit: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=TX#tabs-4
(click the electricity tab)
Being ahead of the game on wind doesn't make everything else they do disappear.
Stance on petrochemicals isn't a single dial that turns back and forth and affects everything you do in unison.
The answer to the question "where else in the US?" is basically "everywhere else in the US".
Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state.
They also dominate refinery capacity.
They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.
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?
They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold
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.
> Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy
> 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.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry.
Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.
And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.
'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil?
Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.
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.
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.
*(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)
Either that, or structure the grid so that wind and solar are used to power accumulative loads.
On/off in seconds as the sun fades or the wind drops to fill in for the missing power output.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not per capita, it isn't:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_North_Dakota#/me...
This is important given the shear size and consumption of Texas compared to other states.
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.
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
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 essentially an approximation for normalizing production (supply) based on consumption (demand). It tells us (roughly) how stressed the grid is.
Ok.
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.
So this person is taking seriously the idea of being a "leader in wind power", and exploring whether there's any merit to it.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/
Is this a tautology or this counterfactual removes texan capacity from United States total?
China: 236,402 MW
United States: 105,466 MW
Germany: 61,357 MW
India: 37,506 MW
Texas: 28,843 MW
Spain: 25,808 MW
The general public still does not get that climate change is a frickin problem that needs to be addressed asap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
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.
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.
Edit: And I just scanned the last week of posts and can't see mention of anything like that. You're confusing with user koolba.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53140069
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066882
but I'm sure that you'll be happy to tell me that the United Nations and the BBC are both extreme left-wing partisans.
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?
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?
One cold spell does not disprove global warming. While Dallas might be experiencing abnormally low temps, Jacksonville's seeing uncharacteristic highs (86F today).
[0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
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.
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.
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
a nitpick, but an important point:
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.
Checks notes, checks on venice and miami watches day after tomorrow, looks at Texas from hurricanes to ice
Which of the predictions are looking like they're not progressing?
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.
> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas
This is a ridiculous statement.
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-...
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?
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.
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.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/c...
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.
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.
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?
What are the possible explanations?
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.
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.
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 mean I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, there were kilometers of ice on my country.
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.
And we set records all the time. Many of them set in the 1800’s when climate change wasn’t an issue. Setting a record is hardly proof.
It should have only been named climate change, drastic wheather change or something incorporating your naming of shifting wheather patterns.
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:
https://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Texas-is-vulne...
"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.
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)
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
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.
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.
[sigh]
That's exactly what it used to mean. But then it wasn't warming and they had to revisit.
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.
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.
To me that doesn't justify the choice to be disconnected.
So let's say they might not have made up the entire loss...so what?
Making up for some of the loss would help wouldn't it?
That seems like using perfection as a justification to make worse choices...
The whole disconnected grid wisdom or lack of it seems unrelated to me as far as if winterization is being done well enough generally.
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:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
I'm not sure how expensive it is to weatherize the grid but I would imagine it to be very expensive.
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.
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.
But that choice is purely ideological, not practical.
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.
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:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-17/texas-was...
That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered.
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.
Here is a write up of that event:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/us-polar-vorte...
Not a single mention of blackout.
And the reason for that is the grid is well designed and has backup options that makes it resiliently to extreme weather events.
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.
Or are you saying these states have experienced short term blackouts?
I don't think there is an electricity grid in the world that is immune to short term blackouts.
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.
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?
I think not.
> 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.
https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693
(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.)
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.
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.
85% of the people I know plus myself had over 24 hrs of contiguous down time.
The blackouts in the MISO and SPP areas were not as bad, but still had to happen to weather (pardon the pun) generator failures.
They’re very different problems to handle.
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.
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.
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.
*Denying that it is a constraint does not alter the fact that your argument, such as it is, depends on it being one.
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.
At this point, it would be better for you to acknowledge it is nonsense, rather than give the impression that you still cannot figure out that it is.
Are you uncomfortable supporting your position?
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.
A lot of people have focused on Texas's separate grid policy.
And do I really need to explain to you how it shows that your comment is irrelevant? I suppose I do, given that we are here. It is just this: since the beginning of Texas' grid (as you say, decades ago - almost a century) there has been plenty of opportunity for Texas to make not just its grid, but its entire energy infrastructure, more resilient. Far from my case being one of recency bias, the reality is that your reply to it suffers from the opposite fallacy - a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/led-lead/
The reason you "untroduced [sic]" it, of course, was "that that [sic]" it distracts from your backwards projection of current events, which is why your post is is utterly irrelevant to an analysis of what has recently happened, and, more specifically, is utterly irrelevant to the article you were commenting on.
And do I really need to explain to you why your points are irrelevant? I suppose that I do, given that we are here. It is just this: the article actually discusses national winterization standards 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. Far from my case being based on a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name, the reality is that your reply suffers from one that is well known and quite common among your ilk: recency bias.
You are now attempting to argue against, not what I posted, but an entirely imaginary reply.
At least it seems that it has finally dawned on you that the argument you presented in your first reply to me, which, in its entirety, was "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" is utterly irrelevant, both to the energy infrastructure / climate problem in general, and my specific post - though it took ten exchanges in which it was explained to you, multiple times, why it is irrelevant, for you to get it. We will see if you will have the integrity to acknowledge how utterly mistaken your original reply was.
It seems like you still don't get it. We will see if you will have the integrity to acknowledge how utterly mistaken your original reply was.
Well, it is certainly possible that they are irrelevant, but I see that you have given up any pretense of justifying that claim.
On the one hand, given how badly your earlier attempts to make that case went, I can see why you would want to avoid another try. On the other, as the person making the claims has demonstrated such a poor record on critical thinking here, why would anyone just accept it?
And these are claims, I may add, that you recently doubled-down on once again, as in this statement:
>Far from my case being based on a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name, the reality is that your reply suffers from one that is well known and quite common among your ilk: recency bias.
The thing about parody is that it doesn't work if the premise is false! And what premise was behind this version of your claim of recency bias? Explicitly this: "the article actually discusses national winterization standards 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."
For one thing, I had only just before pointed out that the fact that multiple states were unprepared does not excuse any one of them. Secondly, what sort of claim could both be an example of recency bias, and be refuted by the statement of yours that I have just quoted? For example, if someone said "only Texas was affected", it would be refuted by that statement of yours, but it would simply have been a false statement about a recent event. That would not be recency bias!
Your other basis for claiming recency bias is "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing", but as Texas was free to respond to more recent warnings about the inadequacy of its energy infrastructure, its failure to do so at that time is, of course, more relevant than the facts you quote about a much earlier time. This is not recency bias!
Wasn't it so Texans could continue to live in the fantasy world that they could secede from the US any time they wanted?
[0]https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-17/texas-seve...
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.
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.
We get the reliability we're willing to pay for.
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.
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.)
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 :-)
(Seattle neighborhoods have lots of trees!)
See https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/org/centrb/cbm/bilder/for...
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?
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.
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.
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.
> the Midwest went into a power emergency of their own, and ERCOT was no longer able to import approximately 600 MW.
for posterity:
DC Tie Flows
DC_E (East) -595
DC_L (Laredo VFT) 0
DC_N (North) -218
DC_R (Railroad) 0
DC_S (Eagle Pass) 0The 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.
Rick Perry specifically attacked regulation.
https://news.yahoo.com/rick-perry-suggests-texans-prefer-191...
As a side note, Rick Perry is pretty much irrelevant to Texans AFAICT. Perhaps that's why he's making these unsolicited, strong statements.
As in, he was the federal regulator who failed here. There's a self interested reason to bad mouth federal regulation to avoid blame
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.
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.
And Perry,
>He's just like that.
Even less advanced.
What's the opposite of advanced anyway?
I thought so.
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.
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.
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.
Not exactly true. SPP the grid operator for OK and the area immediately east of Texas did have to go to EEA3 twice and implement rolling blackouts
https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/
>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.
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.
At a press conference, a spokesperson said they had to cut 6.5% of load for 3h21m on Tuesday.
https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693
(Also under the SPP region myself, just in Kansas City)
I'm also in it, and have heard many reports of rolling blackouts earlier this week when it was at Level 3.
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.
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.
Instead what we have are pols who optimize for fundraising. Which means you get the opposite.
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.
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.
No, but I would hope this type of thing could get somebody unelected now.
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.
Not sure that everyone impacted 'voted for this', or that even the majority had an opportunity to vote on this issue specifically.
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.
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.
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.
Someone else posted "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26161121
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
meaning it would've been fair if didn't have democratic voters?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But one might just as easily say that this event is entirely consistent with "proof of no global warming" also.
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.
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.
Exactly.
Sen. Ted Cruz just was discovered flying with his family to Cancun because they lost power and water like the rest of us.
Had to return in disgrace a few hours ago and is currently still not able to offer a consistent excuse for abandoning his constituents.
https://abc13.com/politics/it-was-a-mistake---ted-cruz-tells...
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.
Definitely not good enough for Texas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.
Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1361693012225650688
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/8/24/21399396/republican-convention...
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.
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 fucked up ideology do you have"
"Method 10: Write an absolute piece of shit article on revue."
"I've read many stupid posts about de-googling ... But this one really amazes me"
"There are absolutely no words to describe the stupidity exhibited here."
That is just from the first few pages. This isn't reddit, I suggest you take that discourse over there.
Also, how did you go trough my comments and ignored everything else that did not support your hypothesis? You really are a NPC.
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.
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's the Bozos.
They're going to goof things up and they know it so they need you to be _tilting at windmills_ in other directions for distraction.
Does it?
This article was written by someone with no expertise, and the result of some internet searches.
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.
Yeah, by definition. Someone who has more knowledge in a subject is more reliable than someone who doesn't.
I'm not sure why you want to use layman as a measuring stick.
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.
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?
I think you're being extraordinarily precious about the criticism.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
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.
Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.
https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/08-16-11-report.pdf
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:
https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059...
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.
Edit: Here's a PDF of all the standards from NERC. Search "winter" or "ice" or even "cold" and you'll get zero hits.
https://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Reliability%20Standards%20Comp...
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.
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.
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.
These kind of blatant falsehoods should be inexcusable, but we're living in a strange world these days.
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.
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.
>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].
> 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.
The NERC recommendations are requirements in Texas. There is the requirement to plan for extreme winter weather events in Texas but not in NERC.
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.
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.
...That is until it happened.
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/TX/Austin/...
It's probably not that many of them who know it well.
If this kind of sentence isn't an example of why society is turning against SV/tech, I don't know what is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe...
> 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.
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.
I am not... "I am a software developer, and this is my best interpretation of the requirements I could find"
> The way it is written it seems like they just did a bunch of searches and found some information.
That is about how that went.
> Do they know enough to be sure they're drawing the right conclusions based on what they found?
Maybe? if you have other conclusions, I'd love to hear them.
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.
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.
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).
It seems like you lost power around 8 hours and your house didn't lose as much heat as others
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you had a charmed disaster; congrats.
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.
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).
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....
Likely a centennial project.
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.
Thanks for sharing it!
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)
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.
In power grids an interconnector is used to move large amounts of power between grids and if it can't do that then is not an interconnector.
The Texas grid is and independent grid control by ERCOT exactly for this reason.
It was always designed to be independent by the Republican government that has controlled Texas for the last 20 years.
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.
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.