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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

And what was the financial impact of the blackouts that happened in the last few years?

During that event the solar was effectively zero, and wind was close to that. Plus too many gas plants were in maintenance or froze/broke, which caused outages. If Texas would have still been fully on gas/coal/nuclear, would there have been a blackout? If they would have invested more in nuclear, what would be the financial impact? Would it have operated better in the freeze?

There are trade off with every decision made. I'm trying to sus out of the state would be better off spending money in a different way.

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Like the sibling said, poor governance.

Wikipedia on the 2021 Text Blackout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis):

State officials including Republican governor Greg Abbott[13] initially blamed[14] the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. However, data showed that failure to winterize power sources, like wind turbines and natural gas infrastructure, had caused the grid failure.[15][16] Texas's power grid has long been separate from the two major national grids to avoid federal oversight, though it is still connected to the other national grids and Mexico's;[17] the limited number of ties made it difficult for the state to import electricity from other states during the crisis.[18] Deregulation of its electricity market beginning in the 1990s resulted in competition in wholesale electricity prices, but also cost cutting for contingency preparation.

The Wikipedia article mentions "The winter storm caused a record low temperature at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport of −2 °F (−19 °C) on February 16, the coldest in North Texas in 72 years.".

A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.

It might make more sense to just have warm shelters ready, rather than try and make the grid robust. Give the market a chance.

Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too. COVID springs to mind as something on a similar timeframe.

It was a total fluke and hit at least 2/3 of the state, most cold blasts don't do that. I was lucky and near a hospital, so my power only went out a couple of hours and I had 2 families (friends) come and live with me for 3 days or so. They cleaned out my larder, but honestly I enjoyed my time with them immensely. However, climatologists predict it will happen more often as the jet stream that usually keeps most of the arctic air out of the state is getting weaker of the years.

It also happened in 2011, and nearly again in 2014: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-power-grid-ext...

The market has abjectly failed customers in texes - but the utilities made off like bandits charging outrageous amounts each time.

The texes power grid is broken and the market won’t fix it. There is a reason the regulations they don’t want to implement exist.

> It also happened in 2011, and nearly again in 2014

Texas has cheap power though. If I were moving to the US for some reason, I'd consider Texas for it's cheap power then try to mitigate the risks myself. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean that changing it makes it better.

You're assuming that 100% reliability is the only acceptable outcome. It is possible 99% reliability and alternate mitigation is the best outcome. If people prepare for the power grid going down from time to time that will also prepare for other events and build up resiliency.

People freezing is really bad. Relying on a large and complex system working in extreme events is also bad, however. This is one for Texans to resolve for themselves, but there is a story here where the problem is actually the resiliency to the grid failing rather than the failures themselves. Cheap power + good emergency procedures is probably going to be a really cheap path, plus hit a whole heap of alternative disaster planning scenarios.

Texes has cheap power? https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2022/06/02/were-i...

I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.

Other states, provinces, and countries manage to deliver even cheaper power, consistently, without the grid failures and profiteering thanks to regulation.

People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.

> Other states, provinces, and countries manage to deliver even cheaper power, consistently, without the grid failures and profiteering thanks to regulation.

With similar weather patterns? Where are you thinking specifically?

> I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.

You feel that Texas' regulatory state is making it too difficult to extract natural gas? Because the article seems to me to be saying they need more nat gas. I disagree with subsidising nat gas for unrelated reasons, but I suppose if Texas has regulated to stop gas extraction I agree with you that they should change that.

> People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.

I'm saying that too, you might have detected.

> With similar weather patterns? Where are you thinking specifically?

Outlying parts of Texas that are serviced by the main power grids rather than a Texas only power grid? https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/texas-power...

> HOUSTON — Some parts of Texas that were battered by the winter storm of 2021 had relatively few homes lose power.

> They are primarily in areas outside of those supported by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the electric grid for 90% of the state and operates separately from federal oversight and regulation.

> El Paso County is one place to experience minimal power outages, despite getting battered by the historic winter storm.

> “We had about three thousand people that were out during this period, a thousand of them had outages that were less than five minutes,” said Eddie Gutierrez, vice president of strategic communications for El Paso Electric.

However, those power companies have connections that cross state lines and so are federally regulated and had to do winterization of their systems as mandated by the regulators... whereas ERCOT said "yea, well, maybe we'll do it - but you can't make us."

Yes. states the border texes have cheaper power without the grid failures and price gouging - an old map from before the unregulated utilities increased prices post storm https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-pay-in-elect...

It’s not a great set of maps but I wasn’t willing to spend more then 60 seconds doing your research for you.

Except Texas doesn’t have cheap power. Rather than paying money for peaking power plants that sit idle to handle unusual demand or unexpected failures, regulators instead decided to let power plants charge whatever the market will pay in extreme situations. Net results ends up with occasional brownouts without actual saving anything.

The state with the cheapest electricity is actually Washington where residential customers are paying 8.53¢/kWh. Those dam democrats happen to have a lot of dam cheap green power from all those dams.

Hydro is not an option for Texas; it is too flat.

Texas has huge shifts in elevation from over 4,500 foot down to sea level (https://geology.com/topographic-physical-map/texas.shtml) and even a fair number of hydroelectric power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hydroelectric_power_p...

What it’s missing is all that rainfall that Washington state is known for.

That map doesn't really contradict the "Texas is flat" proposition: it takes over 400 miles to rise 3000 feet. OK sure they could have decent hydroelectric near El Paso, if it ever rained there, but the dams listed at your link for the other 95% of the state have less generating capacity together (even if we count the capacity that rightfully belongs to Mexico or Oklahoma) than Wilson Dam in Alabama, which was built in 1924.

The Amistad Dam (254 ft) and Mansfield Dam (278ft) in Texas are roughly twice the height and therefore extract roughly twice the energy per cubic foot of water flowing through it as Wilson Dam (134 ft). Texas has 3 more dams are again taller than Wilson Dam, they just doesn’t get nearly the flow.

So, Texas as I mentioned has minimal hydropower because it lacks rainfall, but it also suffers because it lacks large out of state rivers due to that same huge west to east elevation drop. In fact if you look at it’s rivers they each have a relatively tiny watershed. https://texasaquaticscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/C...

The Rio Grand is famous, but was never very big and currently flows through some thirsty areas.

How does Texas fare in pumped hydro? Seems it's a great place for Solar and Wind (both onshore where there's millions of acres of desert, and offshore in the Gulf), excess production can be used for pumped hydro.

The cost to winterize the grid is.. relatively small, like the cost to winterize it would be exceeded by the cost of alternative non-grid generation and "warming shelters". You'd also have to convince people to go, and that's a larger problem - the largest killer during the outage was carbon monoxide poisoning.

I'd also note, the parts of texas that are not part of ERCOT didnt have wide scale outages and they are winterized.

The number of times I’ve heard [insert recent weather event] was a 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 tail event just in the last 10 years makes me really want to go to a casino

1:100 weather events are relatively common in the news. There is a lot of weather out there.

If there's 1000 different towns, you would hear about a 1 in 100 year event about once a month.

Wouldn’t weather of neighboring towns be highly correlated? I think Hurricane Ida alone last year brought a 1:1,000 year rainfall to over a dozen states if I remember correctly

> Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too.

It was the 3rd such event in 32 years. From the wiki article:

"In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state.[26] Many roads around Houston were impassable, and boil-water advisories were issued in several areas.[27] Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems.[28] At the time the blackouts and failures in the power grid were likened to those that occurred in December 1989, after which similar recommendations were made to the state government and ERCOT, which were similarly ignored."

So, first of all, as others have noted, events of this sort are happening significantly more frequently than that.

Second,

> practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance

Where are you getting this? I can think of many, many counterexamples.

Maybe you mean to limit this to utility regulators planning for outage resiliency? I'd be curious about where that came from. (Maybe inverting the rule of 72 and... something?)

Anyway, the simple fact remains that Texas has a small, inflexible grid that's been populated with low-margin providers playing financial engineering games rather than providing resiliency, and it needs a ton of work.

Even if you are correct that the minimax they've arrived at made sense in the past, it clearly no longer does.

> A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.

This is confusing the record for the pattern: the temperature was the lowest in 70 years, but Texas saw very similar storms (and worsening crises, through deregulation) in 1989 and 2011.

...practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance...

One hopes this isn't true for nuclear regulators.

The problem is what used to be a 1 in 100 occurance is now 1 in 10 thanks to climate change. The market had a change, and caused this - the externalities of the market driven process which drove carbon emissions over the last 150 years (and one that Texas specifically benefitted massively from) were not borne by those that benefited.

Also, inadequate home insulation.

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/03/14/lik...

"Peak heating load in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas-managed grid matched the amount of generation that failed. Electric heating was nearly twice the load ERCOT had to drop. No vast heating peak, no shortage."

"Two-thirds of Texas homes were built before statewide home energy codes began in 2001. Half the state’s homes still leak hot or cold air and have little or no wall insulation, limited attic insulation, and low-efficiency single-pane windows."

Improving insulation would also reduce the summer cooling peak in power demand, and allow shifting of some of that daily load to off peak times by pre-cooling homes.

Twice as much capacity was taken offline from gas, coal and nuclear generators than from wind or solar.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...

In all cases it was because the infrastructure wasn’t hardened for the weather. This is something that they have now been doing I believe, although how ready they are will only be found out at the next big freeze.

Wind works fine in cold weather if you build it with the weather in mind. Cold states like Michigan have wind turbines and do just fine https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...

A more accurate thing to say is that turbines need to be heated in cold weather, which has an effect on their cost and operation efficiency.

In places where a deep freeze is unlikely it’s usually better just to shut them down in extremely cold weather.

As do natural gas and other energy systems, as demonstrated in my point that twice as much gas/coal/nuclear generation was turned off during the Texas feeeze.

All generation systems need to be adapted to the weather, Texas energy producers of all kinds decided not to, the blackouts were the result.

A nuclear power plant went down when it's lake froze. Coal power plants did the same. Natural gas fared better when the supply wasn't frozen, because natural gas turbines don't require intensive cooling that steam generation does. And yes, it's really ironic that steam generation had to stop due to lack of cooling on the coldest day of the year.

Wind Turbine gearboxes froze up (oil congealed, not froze) because they were too cold and also not winterized. They could have been but they weren't.

Solar could have powered some people's homes, but most home solar turns off when the grid turns off.

When it is overcast in Texas residential solar doesn't really generate an appreciable amounts of power. It is grid tie so despite what many people think they don't have any power in the case of the grid going out. I know of a few folks on co-op power that are allowed to have Tesla powerwall (or similar). But in that case they can't sell power back into the grid economically.

The reason why the 2021 freeze was so intense is that during the day we didn't get sun, we had cloud cover 24 hours a day. It's entirely normal to get freezing nights in most of Texas. But by 10 AM stuff is back up to a temperature that it's 40 F or so because of the sun. When we get days upon days or freezing nights followed by even just overcast weather, that is when it becomes an issue.

Not sure I'd blame the cloud cover over the polar airmass wrt intensity. I think we had at least a couple sunny days in Houston (I remember opening blinds to get as much free heat as possible) and still didn't get out of the low 20s iirc.

There's an NPR podcast series about that - The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power...

The issue is how they set up the grid and avoided any federal regulation. Additionally, the market structure that it uses is designed to be running as close to being a blackout as possible without actually blacking out in the name of "an efficient market".

What are you even talking about? We had that awful blackout, and it sure as heck wasn't renewables, it was the fossil fuel power plants and gas plants that provided for them. I hate to see it but you really should go look up the real causes of the blackout. It was winterization at fossil fuel plants (gas and electric) if you want the short version. It's not like we have constant blackouts. could we improve the grid? Of course and by a lot. Are we experiencing 3rd world power grid conditions? Not even close.

Solar worked fine during the winter storm.

Only if the house was equipped with a battery, which is not common. There’s a NEC requirement that solar power stops when the grid goes down to prevent power islands. The only way around this is a battery.

Also lithium batteries can’t charge in sub-freezing temperatures without permanent damage.

Solar isn't limited to homes, does Texas not have any solar farms on the grid? TFA doesn't clarify this.

There are solar farms in Texas, a bit over 8GW installed so far with several large projects planned to come online soon. I've driven past some pretty large solar fields out in far west Texas. It's an interesting scene seeing extremely flat lands all the way to the horizon filled with some randomly placed rusty old pump jacks, massive arrays of solar panels, and massive wind turbines in the distance.

If someone in Texass experiences a blackout, they can just go to https://comparepower.com/ and select a different provider, right?

The correct site is https://powertochoose.org but your observation of having a pseudo-choice of energy providers still stands.

Texas energy problems are not from technology but from poor governance.

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