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Comment by ptcrash | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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...

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