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Comment by solidsnack9000 | Hacker News Reader

The article definitely does not discover "...that this is basically the case.". It's hard to understand why you wrote that; it can't be based on a fair reading of the article.

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.

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It's unfriendly to the site to write the same comment verbatim in multiple places. Please just use a link or something.

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.

> But none of the other states have giant winter blackouts like Texas had this week, and most of them have worse weather.

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.

MISO, the grid that covers parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and more also had to do this: https://www.entergynewsroom.com/news/entergy-forced-initiate...

Texas didn't experience rolling blackouts. Texas had day plus power outages over 25% or more of the state. That's far worse than rolling blackouts.

I mean, like, maybe a simple threshold matter here is: did any significant area outside of Texas have to issue boil-water orders because they couldn't run water systems?

The issue with water systems in Texas is thar we have them terribly networked. Water for Lockhart's towers come from the next town over who shut down their pumps. Lockhart blew a main which brought pressure below what was necessary to push water to the testing site for certification of being safe to drink..

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.

I assume the subtext is that the answer to my question is "no, other localities haven't lost water treatment in their winter outages" --- those outages apparently not being severe enough to impact water delivery.

Yes, Louisiana and Tennessee: https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/article_3ed2a512-7... https://wreg.com/news/watch-mlgw-provides-water-update/

Looks like SPP is back at a "conservative status" rather than emergency status now, which is good.

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)

SPP went back to Energy Emergency Alert (EEA) Level 1 not long after 6 pm, just like they did 5 minutes earlier to Level 2 yesterday, Wednesday the 17th: https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/

I'm also in it, and have heard many reports of rolling blackouts earlier this week when it was at Level 3.

There were outages elsewhere, but not as severe and not as widespread. No one is saying that the NERC-regulated areas handled a 100 year storm without flaw. Just that they did it a lot better than Texas.

Other states had rolling blackouts, but to say that that’s equivalent to what’s going on in TX is patently ridiculous.

Wasn't the Texas plan to have rolling blackouts?

Yes, it was. And then the power production fell so low that they went from rolling blackouts to just blackouts.

I think the important thing to take away is every state needs to prepare for more extreme weather, regardless of current regulations. While the larger grids don’t require winterization, northern regions already experience cold temps and don’t need regulations to prepare for them. Whatever readies Texas for these extreme events is enough, whether it is regulations or proactiveness.

It's weird that the link provided talks about El Paso failing but El Paso outages were as far as I can tell limited to short term outages similar to most other parts of the country under similar conditions. https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2021/02...

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.

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