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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Austin resident here, who used to work in fabs.

Basically, there was a time (1980's) when fabs in Austin had their own power generation. AMD, which used to have its own fabs, had its own power for them. Then, they (not just AMD but everybody with fabs in Texas) eventually decided it wasn't worth the cost, and started using the regular power grid, because Austin's power had become more reliable. Obviously, as the percentage of solar, wind, and natgas has increased, and the percentage of coal has decreased, this reliability has been thrown into question. Also, the rapid population increase has also just meant a general problem of building new capacity fast enough.

My guess is that they have an eye on it, and it is also possible they will build their own power generation, but more likely they are just getting guarantees of some sort that enough power capacity will be built.

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The recent issues did not have renewable energy as the main cause. Fox News is entertainment, not news (by their own claim).

It goes without saying that, just because Fox News is saying it doesn’t mean it’s right. Partisan bickering in either direction isn’t a good way to educate yourself on the issues.

Renewable power throws a wrench in how Texas does grid planning. In every other ISO, there is both a capacity market, which pays providers to commit to making certain generating capacity available, and a generation market, which pays for actual electrical production: https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c.... In Texas, there is just a generation market.

Ordinarily that isn’t a big deal. Generators build adequate capacity so they can be in a position to receive payments for generation at times of peak demand.

Renewables break this down. They undercut traditional generation sources in the summer, but can’t be counted on to be there at times of peak winter demand. So last winter renewables didn’t fail in the sense that nobody was expecting them to generate much power begin with. But the natural gas plants that are irreplaceable for dealing with winter demand are dealing with reduced revenue because renewable sources are underbidding them in peak summer months.

It sounds like a free market working as expected. Maybe something important like this needs regulation to prevent optimization based on only one parameter ($).

In a functional free market customers who need reliable electricity would specifically pay for the reliability or guaranteed capacity.

Only if they are being told the truth. A functional free market requires symmetrical information (ie. both seller and buyer has the same information about the product). It is just a theoretical thing. But you can get closer to that ideal with regulation and strong buyer protections.

No, it does not.

Looks like the free market for power has decided that a few days of outages is not worth running extra power capacity.

Which might be right! But are the externalities all correctly priced in here?

There’s no “free market” for electricity anywhere in the developed world, including Texas. In the US, the grid is centrally planned by several regional transmission organizations. In Texas that’s ERCOT. An artificial market, a bid-auction system, is used to decide the actual price of electricity at any given moment. But in the case of ERCOT they concluded that, because outages prevent generators from making money during periods of peak demand, generators had adequate incentives to invest in reliability without a separate capacity market. And that worked fine for decades!

It’s not a choice of “free market versus regulation.” It’s a heavily regulated market. The question is only about the design of the regulatory scheme.

I don't think they can charge whatever they like. There are some regulations on the max price a generator charge for electricity, which we hit during the last freeze.

I heard about people paying over $10/kWH and having $15k bills for about 5 days of power. I know people who paid well over $1000 for the month and their power was out for much of the cold spell (~50%). I hear they're going to try and lower billing to less than $9000/MWh, but that's not going to encourage building proper infrastructure, and making gouging profitable doesn't encourage any of them to improve reliability. Why bother weatherproofing?

I'm reminded of Enron's "grandma Millie" comments.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/deep-freeze-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/weekinreview/word-for-wor...

The things is there really isn't partisan bickering on both sides of this issue in the first place. There is non-partisan reality where poor planning by non-partisan entity predictable led to service disruption. Even the failure of legislators is itself a non-partisan failure. Ordinary incompetence.

The only partisan bickering is the attempt to incorrectly blame renewables for the lack of capacity when in fact planned downtime, ordinary logistical failures, and failure to winterize are in fact to blame.

Everybody ought to have expected them to need that much power. Not every day and not every winter but everyone ought to have expected another bad winter to come round because they had bad winters in 1957 1960 1973 1985 2015 2017 2021. This includes 3 years out of the last 6.

They weren't prepared because they were short sighted, greedy, and stupid not because solar took so much of the profits and not because insufficient capacity had been built out for lack of such profits. Capacity existed and it sat unused or broke when it was most needed.

For me it was an incredibly laughable shift of blame to renewables. People tried saying wind power wouldn't work in the cold, when Iowa, MN, and the Dakota's make huge amounts of it year round. I'm not a scientist, but pretty sure they get much, much colder

Also 1989 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_1989_United_States_...

The Texas grid isn't run by stupid hippies who overbuilt solar plants forgetting they don't work in winter. It's run by "libertarians" who think that winterization standards are useless, and that's why nuclear plants, coal plants, and natural gas plants all failed when there was a freeze. This wasn't due to "reduced revenue" it's because the capacity planning didn't require winterization.

On top of that, when attempting to do rolling blackouts critical gas infrastructure froze and so gas supply plummeted. The gas plants weren't able to generate their capacity because there wasn't enough gas to burn.

So, I wouldn't know, because I haven't watched Fox News in many years. The best low-emotion, technically informed analysis of "Snowpocalypse" is probably this one from "Practical Engineering", made by a San Antonio-based engineer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM

The outages were not from any one "main cause", except perhaps "Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't ready". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep operating.

The most recent issues for which the Texas electrical grid was in the news for, the near-blackouts earlier this month, were specifically because of unpredictably low wind speeds in west Texas which reduced Texas's expected wind generation from ~20 GW to under 2 GW during the periods of peak demand. For context, peak demand in Texas is around 80 GW. Taking 18+ GW off the table is a huge blow. 18 GW is more than the entire electrical demand of most US states.

Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.

"near-blackout". Isn't that another way of saying that they matched capacity and demand almost perfectly?

https://www.ercot.com/ gives you some idea of what's going on in TX at any given time. One neat thing about summer is that peak demand also tends to be because of AC use which also correlates with sunshine. Works for the summer at least.

I would like to point out that the New York Times has made the same claim very recently too (in the same context, a defamation trial).

Events like the Texas blackouts rarely have one sole cause. Reliance on renewables was clearly one factor out of many.

It's actually not a meaningful factor AT ALL. Where renewables failed it wasn't because the nature of the technology but because of failure to winterize.

It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

Texas has more wind power generation than any other state in the US by far. Texas is all aboard the wind train. It's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to win. But that doesn't change reality.

In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind generation. On your average summer day, wind generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the day.

Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is still significant demand while solar generation is dropping.

Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we (humans) can choose to burn more oil and create thermal generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.

> We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal.

Pumped storage hydro works very well in many places. You can store as much energy as you can store water, and you can bring a lot of generation capacity online fast. Those facilities are pretty cool engineering projects. Texas hasn't got onboard yet AFAIK, but they've got enough land that they could maybe (water's a big factor, too) make it work to offset downtime of their wind and solar.

edit: I think Texas's largely go-it-alone strategy with their power grid might be pretty strategically misguided, but making it work could at least be an interesting problem

> It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

This could have been a really good comment if you hadn't started it out this way. Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.

>Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.

We're talking about different events. The Practical Engineers video is talking about the 2021 winter storm, and in the midst of that storm there were republican talking points about wind failure. That's a different event than the one I am talking about in my comment, which is the general unreliability of renewable energy as witnessed in the current summer where lacking wind generation _really is_ a huge factor in the threatened blackouts, but posters like the one I was responding to are still pretending like any decrying of renewable energy is fake news. Sometimes it is fake news, and sometimes its reality. It's important to recognize the difference.

Or they could simply setup connections and agreements with states west of them, to supply power later into the evening

Setting up connections to other grids isn't simple or the Tres Amigas project might have been built.

There is nothing but incompetence and greed keeping Texas from having as good a grid as the rest of the US.

You mean the rest of the US that has been facing widespread threats of blackouts this summer?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypnja/majority-of-us-power-...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/31/us/power-outages-electric-gri...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-rene...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-u-s-bl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/02/blackout-...

I'll agree with you that there's greed and incompetence all over Texas's politicians and state management. But it isn't unique to Texas. We have a widespread societal problem with our electrical grid that transcends state lines.

Renweable energy was not the "main cause" because it reliably fails to generate adequate amounts of power at that time of year and so the grid was entirely reliant on other generation (mostly natural gas) to fill in the gap. Basically, it wasn't the fault of renewable energy because everyone knew it was useless anyway.

I have no idea why natural gas was third in your list. Texas's power issues are entirely predicted by natural gas power plants failing (or voluntarily shutting down because of price spikes).

My understanding is that the Texas grid issues are largely due to increased population and lack of a capacity market. Texas has been hitting record high demand again and again in the past few years. Aggregate demand went above ERCOT's worst case projections during the recent heat wave.

They also do insist on having their own grid - separate from the rest of the country.

It's true, but they are able to buy and sell power from the eastern grid (my understanding is it's less efficient, because it goes to DC and back to AC at the interface, but it does happen normally). They weren't able to buy any power a year and a half ago, because the eastern grid needed theirs for the same winter storm, but presumably during summer heat waves it works better as long as points north aren't all running their air conditioners nonstop as well.

The low natgas line pressure was also related to the fact that points north were using more than usual as well. In fact, one of the responses to the power outage was to stop all natgas flowing from Texas to Mexico. So it's not only the power grid, but also the natgas lines, that connects Texas to points outside.

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