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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

I hear a lot about how Texas is going to descend into Mad Max style powerlessness, but the data is not nearly as grim as the media seems to imply: https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/

Between 2015 and 2019, Texas didn't even make it into the top 10 list of power outages; and they're in #10 spot for outage hours per outage. In a state with extreme temperatures and large, unpopulated areas, this strikes me as extremely good.

I have no doubt that their power grid isn't perfect. No power grid is perfect. I just like basing my opinions on the facts and, currently, Texas isn't doing badly.

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Read the full blogpost. Texas is in the top 10 for most electrical downtown and this doesn't include 2020 or 2021.

Also, realize that all outages aren't the same. Thousands of homes scattered throughout Maine losing their power because an ice storm brings down power lines isn't that big a deal. Houses there have oil or gas heating, and town centers have more robust electric lines so people can wait it out there and still get supplies.

In Texas, the issue was the the whole grid went down and for two weeks. Hospitals, fire stations, grocery stores, ... were affected. There food and water shortages, and 250-700 people died because of it.

nit: Gas-fired steam is the only central heat that is capable of running without electricity, and steam is generally being phased out due to inefficiency. Oil requires pump/blower/spark, hydronic requires the circulator pump, forced air (furnace) requires the blower motor.

Most likely your backup heat is wood and/or a petrol generator. But you definitely have a backup plan to stay warm, as it being cold for months at a time means the question of outages isn't "if" but rather "when".

This is generally true. And I assume the reliably liberal Texas Monthly spares no opportunity to gore conservative oxen, so I expect this article does so with bias and glee. But Texas politicians have spent a decade laughing at the power woes of California and other over-regulated hellscapes, so the 2021 winter storm and subsequent outage was a bit of a comeuppance.

It turns out that power grids don't really care much about your political philosophy. They still require competent engineering and maintenance and planning and accountability. And that requires smart people doing their jobs with adequate resources, which isn't guaranteed whether you've voted for the deepest blue or the brightest red government you can get.

It's also worth pointing out that, if you scroll to the bottom of the article and look at the state-by-state data, Texas does worse than California on most of the power outage metrics.

I'm not a statistician, but if we're trying to collapse to numbers, a couple that come to mind are deaths due to power outage and total dollar cost of outage.

> but the data is not nearly as grim as the media seems to imply

1. That's not "data"

2. What you need to make a judgment on is whether Texas is positioned well to handle a tail event, not how it handles the odds and ends of unexceptional power outages that dominate graphs like that. The families of the hundreds who died last winter probably have some opinions about how well Texas handled the last event, handling which was extremely bad and closer than anyone would have liked to power grid "Mad Max." It's a question of how much they've improved.

I wonder how Texas looks if you add 2020 to the data and/or exclude the small portions of Texas that are connected to the national grids?

It might also be interesting to add 2011 and 2021 to the data. 2011 was the last time a major winter storm caused widespread outages in Texas and spawned the recommendations to winterize that were ignored and resulted in the 2021 catastrophe.

Presenting that particular link seems like nothing but a misdirection. I can't help but think this is a bad faith argument.

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