Comment by bigirondba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigirondba | Hacker News Reader

If any other state’s power grid got even remotely the level of scrutiny TX did, it would feel like it’s broken also.

As a former Washingtonian who moved to TX let me tell you all the ways WA was bad:

- most power lines and grid infrastructure in major cities like Seattle is 50+ years old and fails - constant power outages in storms - we had a massive dam on the Columbia develop a crack, and most of the other dams could do with reinvestment - Hanford and everything with it is a disaster - our “green grid” of dams is likely responsible for collapsing the native salmon population and with it, the resident orca populations and a bunch of other critically endangered species - power generation in WA is a crazy mishmash of public utility agencies all of which have more in common with the Adeptus Mechanicum from 40k than a normal government agency

I think if you went into most any states bureaucracies with a fine toothed comb it could feel apocalyptic. Truth is, WA’s system is pretty fine (dam’s aside) and the same seems to hold up for TX. It’s very rare for any system to survive contact with a generational event unscathed.

I can go on, but I mention this because the article is short on anything concrete, confuses (as another commenter pointed out) how power generation and regulation works, and it feels particularly bitter when TX is pretty ahead on renewables compared to say, NYC or Chicago, where most of these writers hail from.

disclosure: i worked in mechanical maintenance for a large midwestern power distribution company.

power isnt a 'good' or 'bad.' co-ops and collectives exist to keep generators and distributors and maintenance crews honest and on the level but at the end of the day cities say "we need power" and power companies are responsible for it. theyre also responsible for communicating risks like salmon collapse and, if thats acceptable to the city, then proceed.

texas has a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil problem where plants do not perform risk assessment and do not communicate it, instead pocketing the cash and giving a big beaming thumbs-up. Texas has decided that instead of a transparent and working regulatory agency that helps navigate things like storm coverage, MTTR, and low income assistance, a rubber stamp will do.

no grids perfect. cities often put off maintenance for decades to save traffic headaches, prevent water and other utility outages, and to plan around other construction work they might be doing. Texas is a different and very cavalier beast entirely though.

Excellent summary of the Texas situation.

I've lost power here in Maryland several times over the course of just a few years (usually during thunderstorms). And I happen to know that Pepco (our power company) basically has a "let hardware fail before we fix it" policy. A couple years ago we had a problem where plugging in a vacuum or turning on the disposal dimmed the lights in the whole house. We hired a master electrician to take a look and he concluded it was pepco's box outside. We reported it to pepco and they did nothing. 1 year later the box failed and we completely lost power until pepco came out and replaced something in their box.

So yeah, I seriously doubt many states could hold up to this level of scrutiny.

Michigan's Consumers Energy has had 14% of it's customers blacked out since Tuesday morning. 500,000 people across the state and it looks like another two days to fix it.

California’s grid management definitely has issues. I’m not very familiar with this grid management stuff, but I’ve read all CAISO’s reports on what happened in august 2020 that led to the rolling blackouts, and there’s some stuff in there that seemed pretty crazy.

The highlight for me is that CAISO’s day-ahead energy market had some features and “enhancements” such that it 1) ignored the constraint to make physically feasible schedules with enough supply to meet demand, and 2) developed schedules based on “virtual supply” rather than actual physical supply, and 3) develops the schedule based a bid-in demand figure that is consistently well below the actual demand. The result of this is that CAISO’s system generated mostly-binding schedules in which CA exported sort of a lot of power to low priority areas at the same time as CA was having rolling blackouts. I guess financial markets are generally pretty good for solving this sort of problem, but it feels like some optimization based on the real constraints would be useful.

http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid..., the whole thing is interesting, the issues I mentioned are mostly described in sections 4.3 and B.3.

My understanding of this may not be correct, so refer to that report as the source of truth, and please let me know if my description is not accurate.

I was in Seattle for about 7 years, and then about 15 miles west of Seattle for 20+ years. In Seattle I only had maybe two or three outages, only one of which laster more than an hour.

15 miles west of Seattle, there are maybe 2 or 3 a year almost always during high winds or heavy (for this area) snow. Those are usually fixed within an hour or two, but every few years there is a storm big enough to cause so many outages that it might take several hours for mine to get fixed.

I did have a 24 hour outage once when a tree took down a line on my street.

The important thing though is that none of these outages covered the whole region. They were all collections of local outages spread around the region, with plenty of places spread around the region where power stayed on.

In every case I could get in my car and drive a few minutes and find someplace where power is fine. The only time where it looked like that might be possible was the one with the tree down on my street, because the tree blocked the street. But there was a neighbor with a half loop driveway with the ends of the loop on different sides of the blockage letting people further down the street bypass the tree that way.

Most importantly, I've always been able to easily find a gas station somewhere that still has power. If I fill my tank and go back home I can stay in the car until power comes back on. Idling in the driveway with the heater running sufficiently to handle the coldest day, listing to the radio or using my phone charged via the car I've got over 24 hours of run time before I need to go get more gas.

I don't know how well that would work in summer since I've never checked the fuel consumption rate idling with the air condition on. Most multiple outages here are in Winter (storms) or Spring (wind) when heating, not cooling, is the concern. Summer outages are usually of the "transformer blew up" or "someone hit a pole and knocked it over" type which can get a repair crew assigned and onsite quickly.

The reason people are shitting on on Texas is that Texas shit talks other states power grids.

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