When a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other earthquake hits - do we 'assign blame' in the same way? Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?
The attempts to rationalize this as a “once in a century” event are full of it. This nearly happened in 2011, and similar freezes happened in 1989. This is a “once in a decade” event, and those responsible for building critical infrastructure should have a plan for it.
The report in particular said that 67% of the lost capacity was directly attributable to cold weather, specifically frozen sensing lines, frozen water pipes, windmill blade icing, etc. A remaining 12% of the shortfall was secondarily caused by the weather, specifically plants running low on fuel. This leaves a remaining 21% for “other”, which presumably includes downed lines. I wouldn’t call that the “major” problem, not compared to the 67% caused by the plants freezing.
https://www.powermag.com/ferc-nerc-february-blackouts-in-the...
As far as 1989 being 30 years ago: it’s still within living memory. It’s not like we’re talking about the 1899 freeze or whatever, lots of people in Texas remember it! So far Texas has had power issues due to the cold in 1989, 2011, and 2021. I think by the point you’re having this every 10-20 years, it’s time to start planning for it, no?
"A total of 210 individual generating units within the footprint of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which covers most of Texas, experienced either an outage, a derate, or a failure to start. The loss of generation was severe enough on Feb. 2 to trigger a controlled load shed of 4 GW. Spot prices in ERCOT hit the $3,000 per MWh cap on Feb. 2, the worst day of the event. The following day, local transmission constraints coupled with the loss of local generation triggered load shedding for another 180,000 customers in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas."
that is not close to the severity of what happened over the course of this week.
"According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages 75% of the state's deregulated electricity market, the single-day record for demand, set in 2018, was smashed on Valentine's Day. And as the weather has gotten worse, the capacity to generate electricity has diminished: By Tuesday, per ERCOT's CEO, 45,000 megawatts of generating capacity was offline — up from 34,000 megawatts offline the day before, representing more than half of what the state typically uses in a day.
https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-a-majority-of-lost-pow...
Right, but I wasn't claiming that 2011 was as bad as 2021, which would be an obviously silly claim. I'm claiming that in 2011 the grid failed in a similar way to what's happening today, due to the cold, and that it was a failure of leadership to not learn from that and prepare (El Paso excepted). This is why I talked about why power failed in 2011, rather than talking about how long the outage in 2011 was or how cold it got.
Meanwhile I am saying that this claim you made is in contradiction with the official report:
> The major problems in 2011 were trees falling on power lines it wasn't core generation facilities failing.
The FERC claims that 79% of the lost energy production in 2011 was caused by either power plants failing directly due to the cold (67%), or indirectly as fuel production and transport failed due to the cold (12%). Between your unsupported assertion about falling trees, and the report produced by experts who spent six months studying the failure, I'm going to trust the latter.
Unless if you'd like to provide some evidence beyond happening to live in Texas in 2011.
Also, consider the fate of El Paso, who followed the 2011 report’s recommendations. They’re still experiencing some issues; some plants have failed and they’ve had to cut off gas exports to Mexico. But their lights are on. All in, you’d much rather be in El Paso right now than Dallas or Austin.
When the levees failed during hurricane Katrina, we blamed the levees and not the water, because we can plan for and prepare for adverse weather that we know is absolutely going to happen.
Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?
Definitely the analysis is important but this feels like moving the goalposts to divert blame away from the known lack of winterization.
Edit: Getting off-track here, but “Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?” For the record, that 10% also buys you other perks, such as 47 human lives so far. To intentionally tug the heart-strings, check out https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths where you can read about, for example, a little boy freezing to death in his home.
Have you seen the videos of hotels flooding after their pipes burst? Fixing that stuff isn’t going to be cheap at all. I would bet that those hotel operators are now going to spend a lot more fixing up their buildings than whatever reliable energy would have costed. Oh, and any damages building won’t be generating any profit until it’s fixed and everyone else is doing well enough to spend on discretionary items, which will take a while since every plumber is probably booked solid for months.
If the argument is “this went badly because of a lack of winterization because the costs were improperly considered”, I can follow that logic and agree. If the argument is “this went badly and this is an engineering problem for which cost-benefit analysis has no proper place”, I disagree pretty strongly.
Isn't this exactly what is missing?
Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?
It might well be, yes.
Regardless, how about .01% of the cost for an effective contingency plan? They didn't have that either.
No, cost-benefit-wise, it isn't: it makes more sense to buy a generator and have it handy. Even if you have to replace it every 10 years, you're still ahead. I'm not being entirely callous here, either: I live in Dallas and just lived through 3 days of intermittent power and heat and it sucked a lot. I'll be investing in a power generator in a few months (when they become available again). If half the homes in Texas had been able to switch to their own generators for a few days, the grid would have been able to sustain the remaining load.
The worse problem we have down here is water, and there's not a whole lot an individual can do about that: if we're going to collectivize the winterization of anything, I'd rather it be the pipes.
Definitely generators would have helped, but only to a point.
A state wide winter storm and sub-zero temperatures is pretty unheard of for Texas and so, yeah, things fell apart.
I'm also on a fairly major road in an exurban but not really rural environment. I'd probably feel differently if I were at the end of a country road in the middle of nowhere. I also don't have vulnerable people at home. The only thing I really worry about is my pipes. Other than that, I'll fire up the wood stove and get out the lanterns.
Some people have generators no matter what, but it seems a stretch to think you can't rely on your energy infrastructure a bit more than that.
The entire state of Texas was under a winter storm warning at one point. Texas is a very large state with significant differences in climate from North to South and West to East, having the whole state until a winter storm warning is unheard of.
Keep up with the maintenance; you'll probably want to try filling it with fuel, running it, and draining the fuel a couple of times a year.
Note: this is just for heating; don't plug anything else into the generator while you're heating---the peak startup loads make generators sad.
If you've got natural gas (uh, whoops) or propane, a whole-house generator would only be a few thousand more (not counting installation). (I've considered one, but we don't have either, which means either getting a propane tank and service or going with diesel, which has maintenance aspects.)
So the power companies saved a few million dollars and cost Texas a hundred billion.
This is a clear example of where an ounce of prevention would have saved a pound of cure.
edit: before anyone replies "but the water service failed!" then you turn off your water at the curb. and before you say "the city has to do that!" no they don't. You should have a key (from any hardware store) and know how to operate the valve.
That report, like this article, correctly identifies ERCOT's "energy-only market" as the underlying source of problems, in my opinion.
0. https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...
To call it simply 3 extra days of electricity is a bit disingenuous I would think. There are massive downstream costs caused by this disaster, not even including the loss of life. How many apartment buildings will need to be torn down to the studs to remediate the water damage? How many buildings won't receive proper repair and end up with residents suffering from the health problems living in those conditions would entail? How much economic output/activity has been suppressed by a weather event that other parts of the country would have/did shrug off?
And to venture down my own political rabbit hole, how much of that hypothetical 10% extra cost of electricity could be absorbed if the utility was public and the share of funds that go to profit instead went to expansion and upgrade of the infrastructure?
Yes, of course.
Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?
It is, but unexpected or rare events like "natural disasters" test our systems of emergency response. Disruption is likely in many cases, but if those systems fail it's important to understand why, and how our responses could be improved in the future.