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Comment by txlpo78 | Hacker News Reader

The Texas producers all currently exceed the national-level recommendations for winterization. Also AFAIK, the natural gas providers are subject to federal regulations (they are not part of ERCOT, unlike the generating stations that use the gas) and they still froze over, which was a huge contributor to the problem.

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.

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For absurdly obvious reasons (not all places have the same climate) there are no winterization standards. There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT.

This claim is contradicted in detail by the article, with numerous sources given. Do you have any sources for your claim?

I think the exact opposite of what you're saying is in the article.

>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].

Starting at the very next sentence in the article:

> 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.

> none of which were implemented by 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.

That's all well and good, except they didn't. So "requirements" should probably be in quotes.

According to ERCOT in 2019/2020 there were 80 facilities checked for the requirements. Some did fail and were rechecked in November. There were plans, however it seems that the plans weren't built for sub zero temperatures.

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