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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Well that’s bleak but entirely expected. I don’t remember the Texas government doing anything in response to the last time their grid almost fell over last year other than crow about their independence

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Not sure why you got downvoted. As a Texan, that's exactly what happened.

Our state government will learn its lesson only when a series of major incidents start making companies reconsider their plans to expand or relocate to the state. Republicans may love their "independence" but money is also a language they understand very well.

Did that not happen after the last incident?

Exactly, If or once the situation gets to a point that requires scheduled load shedding (eg South Africa) I would suspect a lot of things would change pretty quickly. I can not imagine any 'side' in TX putting up with having no power for 2-3 hours, 2-3 times day - forcing a greater divide between the have's (businesses/homes willing to pay for generators) & the have-nots.

> I can not imagine any 'side' in TX putting up with having no power for 2-3 hours, 2-3 times day

If it's the side that you've disenfranchised then you don't really need to worry about it.

The State Senate actually came up with a good plan (on paper) for improving the grid. The implementation was then handed off to the Railroad Commissioner who then totally watered things down. There’s a good article about how it went down in Texas Monthly magazine. Lesson is that the Railroad Commissioner is a very powerful (elected) position in terms of energy, so worth paying close attention to that election.

Isn't it also the Railroad Commissioner who deals with things like oil wells? I think that came up in an article about old oil wells that were flooding ranchland with salt water in East Texas thanks to the practice of pumping water into oil reserves to boost pressure for active wells.

I'd love to understand how the Railroad Commissioner ended up responsible for energy.

It started by taking over regulation of pipelines in the 1910s. That seems like a logical step to me, but over time their purview has expanded to O&G plants and energy production. They aren’t responsible for public utilities, but a lot of the winterization plans were around upgrading pipelines that froze in the storm.

According to Wikipedia they haven’t dealt with rail since 2005, but it’s been a lot longer since the RRs were politically relevant to the office.

They are the head of oil and gas in the state so very likely. The history is complicated to say the least. They don’t even run the railroad anymore. It’s all energy related. The name of the office should be changed but the oil and gas companies probably want the office to keep flying under the public’s radar.

Now they really have to back that up with action. If things do break, it'll look doubly bad. If things don't break, but other parts of the country do, they'll look good.

We may soon see which way it goes.

> Plants are being regularly ordered to go into service, or remain in operation, and skip any scheduled maintenance.

If you don't schedule maintenance then your equipment will schedule it for you, usually at the least convenient time.

So true. Watch it happen right before election.

They don't need to look good though, they only need to maintain control. Doing a good job at things and winning elections based on earned confidence is one way to maintain control but not apparently the one they're going for.

No, not in Texas. They just redraw the maps so that they are guaranteed to stay in power, er, not electric power.

it takes a long ass time to build more power plants. winterizing the grid better doesn't help with more demand from heat waves.

Sure, but the message after the ice storm was “look, it isn’t cold here very often, who could have foreseen it?”, and some ham-handed attempts at blaming green energy (https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/abbott-republicans-g...) for bonus political points.

That’s a little harder to do with heat in Texas.

For reference for other readers, the situation that happened in Texas to cause the power grid to fall over was widely forcasted as a "once in every ten years" event. It was not an unimaginable extreme. Most other states plan or require planning for such events, either out of caution, or from direct harm caused by similar events

It doesn't take a long ass time to build new renewables. But it does take competent management to incentivize moving maintenance to the times of year that don't have heat waves.

How long to build out on the scale needed?

I am willing to accept they are trying to improve if I see it, but everything I saw out of the Texas government seemed to be a denial of any problems at all. The power grid is stressed in the summer under A/C load anywhere that is normally hot, which Texas is, so why weren’t they prepared for it?

I’m just comparing this to my region where the government doesn’t have an excuse for the power grid failing everytime it’s hot or cold and has actually removed utilities who had catastrophic failures[1].

I’m not judging Texas for having unforeseen problems, I am judging them for failing to respond to their issues

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosi...

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