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Comment by ptcrash | Hacker News Reader

Exactly; I'm tired of this being conflated into a ~political issue.~

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.

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If you read the report from FERC of the 2011 issues in Texas, I'm amazed anyone can see this as anything but a political issue.

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.

Depends on how you define "this kind of event". Rolling blackouts due to cold weather, as happened in 2011? Probably a once in every 10 years event... but also not exclusive to Texas. As others have pointed out, the other surrounding states which some have tried to make out were immune due to not thumbing their nose at federal regulations and being part of larger multi-state grids suffered the same problem, both recently and repeatedly in the past. The more widespread, specific to Texas grid failures? Those do seem to be a once in a lifetime event triggered by once in a lifetime weather.

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.

I'd encourage you to go find some historical reporting from the Feb 2011 cold snap. It becomes immediately apparent that it doesn't compare to what has happened over the last week. It might even occur to you that people citing it are maybe trying to mislead others.

I don't need a ton of historical reporting because I live in Texas and lived through both events. And yes, having seen my apartment drop into the thirties after three days without power, and seeing the effect on my city, I'm well aware that the current situation is much worse.

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.

What is a political issue is when political leaders lie to the public about the cause. "It's the wind turbines fault." "This is why green energy can never work."

These kind of blatant falsehoods should be inexcusable, but we're living in a strange world these days.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our lawmakers and politicians should be held accountable for spreading lies. That being said, I still believe that this is an engineering problem first and not a problem with the Texas regulations or the politics behind why Texas has its own grid.

It is a political issue. Texas refuses to regulate their grid to meet certain standards. They're so unwilling to do it that they purposely keep their grid separated from the rest of the country.

Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.

Which standards should they meet? NERC'S? That wouldn't have helped.

For your enjoyment, detailed recommendations from 2011, none of which were implemented:

https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/08-16-11-report.pdf

The East, West, or Texas grids didn't implement it, you're right. My point is that Texas' grid is getting called out when that report was ignored by everyone. It's a national issue, not a Texas issue.

Except the east and west grids have enough geographic variation where they are unlikely to have the same grid-wise problems as Texas with a much smaller grid.

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...

Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.

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.

Yes, those are recommendations that weren't implemented. Anywhere. The issues identified in 2011 for Texas caused issues in the Eastern Interconnect in 2014 for the north and 2018 in the south. In 2018 many of the same recommendations were made and finally NERC has started the standards process however they wont be approved until November.

This report talks about how areas in Texas NOT covered by ERCOT did invest heavily in weatherization after 2011: https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059...

And the NERC report for the south east failure in 2018 talks about how many of the same issues identified in 2011 were still issues outside of ERCOT. See around page 92 in this: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/07-18-19-fe...

NERC doesn't have winterization standards. It has reliability standards that tend to require winterization. Texas would not be in step with the generation standards without more significant winterization, therefore they'd have to improve their systems to meet those standards.

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 technical issues are not confined to Texas, but it is Texas politicians who are leading the politicization that you object to.

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