https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties
The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with two DC ties, and has a DC tie and a VFT to non-NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico. There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only once in its history (after Hurricane Ike). On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links.[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2020/07/30/ERCOT_DC_Tie_Ope...
[2] http://www.caiso.com/Documents/ISOMaximumResourceAdequacyImp...
[3] https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
[4] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2022/07/20/ERCOT%20Monthly%...
Municipal grid gear here isn't rated for the ice burden like utilities in the north east.
It seems to stem from the 2021 ice storm outage, but that wasn't even close to the worst power outages seen in other parts of the US that are part of larger interconnects, so I don't see why it's special other than it's hip to hate on Texas by coastal elites like us.
So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of its installed capacity. Had it been producing at anything near its nameplate capacity then we wouldn't be talking about this now. But of course this isn't entirely unexpected, it was the predicted behavior.
OTOH, the reliable sources of power in TX has been getting squeezed for decades now. Many of them are only making money when the wind stops blowing. The rest of the time they are starving, so its no wonder they cut weatherization efforts (and lots of other things) because it costs money for something which may/may not happen. And you have to pay the NG suppliers to maintain a couple extra orders of magnitude in capacity and storage which sits unused most of the time, which again they didn't do. So the wind didn't blow, and the NG plants and producers simply failed to make up the loss because they didn't have the cash to assure their own reliability.
So, its basically what many people (including myself on this board) have been saying for a long time. What you have now is a game of weather predictions statistics dictating the reliability of the power grid. Its possible to win for years on end, and then boom perfect alignment of the stars and you fall back to non renewable sources which have been underfunded and not built out sufficiently to carry the full grid load. So you can play games with the statistics but solving the problem is an exponential cost problem unless you willing to just go build and maintain 100% of the grid requirements using carbon sources as backup.
The other bit of politics is that this is a proxy fight for "can government regulation be good"? Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing, but the thesis of Texas is that government regulation is bad.
Those people purposely signed contracts exposing them to the spot prices. They got exactly what they signed up for. Those people were few overall as well, by the way. Most people are on fixed contracts.
My costs went up a bit because my delivery fees are subject to change based on regulatory approval. But otherwise I, and many others, didn't experience absurdly high electric bills from this.
Now perhaps retail customers shouldn't be allowed to be directly exposed to the wholesale grid prices for their own protection, but it's not like these were people buying a perfectly normal electric plan who then got wacked over the head with a $16k bill.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/GoGriddy/posts/2740589872846248/
It's also clear that the people who ran afoul of this paid no attention to the wholesale price. I doubt they'll repeat that mistake.
Besides, how hard is throwing on an extra blanket, layering up shirts, wearing a couple jackets, etc.
A house doesn't instantly cool down, either. It may take a day or two for the temp in the house to decline. You'll still get solar gain through the windows, and some coming up from the ground.
It wasn't necessarily a fair gamble. It was determined after the fact that for 2 of the 3 days, it shouldn't have been kept that high. There's still questions as to why, and who stood to benefit.
As I recall, that $9000/MWh cost actually went primarily to power distribution companies, who, to my understanding, had been somewhat neglectful at making sure their systems could handle such adverse conditions... Which is a sort of 'insult to injury' in that a decade prior a similar situation happened.
There was a power company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy ) that offered wholesale spot rates to retail customers. As this was often lower than other retail prices and the customers were intend to be savvy of the demands they were putting on the grid (and turning off things when prices went too high), this lead to some rather large bills.
His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752. - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-b...
> Many of the people who have reported extremely high charges, including Mr. Willoughby, are customers of Griddy, a small company in Houston that provides electricity at wholesale prices, which can quickly change based on supply and demand.
> The company passes the wholesale price directly to customers, charging an additional $9.99 monthly fee. Much of the time, the rate is considered affordable. But the model can be risky: Last week, foreseeing a huge jump in wholesale prices, the company encouraged all of its customers — about 29,000 people — to switch to another provider when the storm arrived. But many were unable to do so.
> Katrina Tanner, a Griddy customer who lives in Nevada, Texas, said she had been charged $6,200 already this month, more than five times what she paid in all of 2020. She began using Griddy at a friend’s suggestion a couple of years ago and was pleased at the time with how simple it was to sign up.
I wonder how people survived freezing weather before HVAC systems.
> Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing
The Law of Supply & Demand is always in play, meaning price caps result in shortages. According to your post, shortages mean people will freeze to death.
Their houses were built differently, for one.
To that point, an article [0] published shortly after indicates that 61% of all homes in Texas used electrical heating rather than Natural Gas. While -yes-, you still typically need electricity to run a gas heater, the grid demands are certainly much lower compared to an electric heater.
[0] - https://ajot.com/news/texas-uses-natural-gas-for-electricity...
Every house I've lived in had a fireplace.
I think people who want prices controlled are thinking of doing it by controlling demand via rationing. Some people don't get all the power they want at any price, so others can get a minimal amount.
If someone wrote an OS that starved low priority processes of run time, you wouldn't say it was a law of nature, you'd say the scheduler should be fixed, right?
Is it meant to be a logical truth, independent of empirical facts? To me, it's a contingent fact even though it often is true. Nor do I see any reason to be certain that rationing which does cause some misallocation necessarily creates net harm.
Do you believe that markets can be evaluated based on some independent standard of appropriate allocation of goods and services?
It got politicized because it was so difficult for people there to handle it. When other places have power outages, the infrastructure and building designs make living through it much easier.
your head is out of the sand for the first time in years and you use your first breath to espouse things you have no clue about lmao
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
Also, that outage knocked out something like 25% of global PVC production for about a year, which interfered with basic infrastructure projects globally. You can’t build modern drainage or plumbing without PVC. Without drainage or plumbing, you can’t build buildings or repair roads.
Also, it was totally predictable, totally avoidable, a bunch of people died as a direct result, and the last N times this happened, they did nothing to fix it.
(Fixing it would involve winterizing their production facilities, which over half the planet has done every year for over a century.)
I'd rather my regulators copied ERCOT than what they are actually doing; I pay a lot for power because of serial gold-plating of infrastructure. Then maybe Australia'd be able to afford to manufacture something in globally significant quantities.
Not "fixing" things can lead to better outcomes for most people.
That would be much cheaper, and has the added benefits like prepares the community for all sorts of disasters.
This means people dying. To move people to a community hall you need enough transportation, clear roads, working communication, and many other things that are indirectly relying on power being available or the disaster plans working properly. (Which they sometimes won't) Also this would have to work for everyone at risk - not for the number of deaths we know about, but likely 100x that.
You can't ignore the effects of that once-a-decade failure and hope things will work fine.
Wikipedia tells me that something like 250 to 1,000 people died in the Texas power outage which was basically the worst conditions the state has ever seen. Assuming that the at-risk population was 100x that we're still talking numbers that can be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board which seems to roughly be the gap from Texas to California.
Raising power prices 33% will also kill people, they won't be able to heat their homes every year. I know people who have that problem right now, it is horrible. Even raising prices by ~10% to go from Texas to US national average will probably kill people. Someone will have to make hard choices between eating and heating if the prices go up 10% in real terms. Cheap power saves lives.
No, grids fail locally quite often and that's easier to manage. A large scale outage where you need to move thousands of people, and know who/where they are in the first place, with plans not fully tested for a decade at a time however is going to fail in many ways, especially when communication is also impacted. Maintaining the plans, training, supplies, etc long term is also not trivial.
Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
> be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board
There an assumption that it will be effective at scale. And that the price increase would be required. (I've seen quite a few sources saying proper maintenance would be cheaper than dealing with the fallout)
> Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
Actually it can. Coping without power for a few days is 100% something that a local community can do. There isn't a need for state-wide coordination although that'd probably help.
I mean, end of the day you're worried about a couple of hundred lives once a decade (and, for scale, hundreds of thousands of people die in Texas each year already - probably quite a few of which could be saved if power was cheaper!). The regulation is obviously not worth it, there are cheaper ways to look after cold people.
If you want to make an argument that it might be cost effective go ahead; I'd suggest that prices would be going to go up somewhere in the range of 10-33%. ERCOT responding by increasing standards on power producers is the usual brain-dead response that pushes prices up higher than what people would need to pay if they had a choice. Which is going to cause more damage and probably kill more people, it just happens to be deaths that the pro-regulatory types feel comfortable with ignoring because it isn't easy to name names.
You don't need to educate yourself as much as sit down and think through the second order effects of whether the situation is actually broken before asking ERCOT to 'fix' it. They are going to push the situation somewhere where the net damage will be more than it is now.
The reason it hasn’t been fixed is that the ercot market (which is an artificial, legislated thing) is intentionally structured so that the production facilities make unbounded profit during correlated failures.
I say “intentionally” because this keeps happening and the legislature explicitly refuses to fix it. There is no better proof than that.
One simple solution, assuming you don’t like legislating technical fixes, which I don’t like either, is to fine the shit out of them during correlated failures. For example (real legislation would hopefully be better):
100% of money in the market during months with more than a 10% peak outage would go to the game and wildlife service, or some other popular Texas thing, and they could establish criminal liability for intentionally curtailing production during power shortages. So, when this happens, costs go to max, and revenue goes to zero.
Or, they could just legislate basic 1800’s reliability measures.
Or, they could let all the idiots that voted these idiots freeze, but keep the industrial facilities online.
At this point, I don’t care. (Despite the efforts of some red state politicians to detain pregnant women, the US still has open internal borders, after all).
Anyway, I just want to be able to buy PVC the next time a line in my yard gets cut.
Nothing makes me give a shit about grid reliability in far off lands more than, well, a literal pool of it.
https://www.texastribune.org/2012/10/25/texas-regulators-act...
This time around they largely just reverted that previous action and returned it to the earlier 2012 proposal (~5k/MHw), and recently have been talking about basically having the state government pay to build NG plants. (although i've not been paying real close attention to where those bills went).
ex: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/13/texas-power-natural-...
NPR's podcast: The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... ... and the files for that appear to be missing... (if you have Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-p... ; Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2l3VBG6RfEGehHm7Y7HfF4 ; Amazon music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5d4dd6d6-bcbd-41a7-b418-7d... ). I especially suggest listening to the episode "The Fallout"
Texas set up an energy market that was to eliminate waste and in doing so set up their grid so that it was constantly almost at load shedding (as that has the least waste).
The problem is there were minutes away from a black start in which Texas would have been without power for an extended period of time - not days but weeks or months (and that the black start generators were also failing).
Practical Engineering:
* What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid? https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w
* What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage? https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM
And that when that happens, given the way that the Texas grid is set up, the rest of the country would be unable to help.
And as that "hip to hate on Texas by costal elites"... utilities were trying to charge Minnesota for the part of the cost of the Texas outage ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-ut... --- https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/08/11/utility-regulators-... ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgrid
If solar on rooftops (with batteries or EV connections) became really widespread in the US it may make some sense to be able to isolate communities from the rest of the grid to localize failures. Utilities would probably hate it but it could be really resistant to disruption.
I mean, I don't really understand why they'd hate it. I'd hope they'd embrace it. Deploying batteries for communities would allow utilities to still support things like net metering while also also allowing them to turn off grid connection for an area so the main lines can be worked on (without disrupting service).
It'd also give them a lot more time to address outages, even really severe ones.
Not to mention their ability to better control load and generation with rapid response batteries.
The risk of very high altitude "super EMP" nuclear attacks is the most concerning. If Taiwan were attacked, it would stand to reason that China would first create CONUS disasters against infrastructure without a direct, kinetic military attack. This would be most effectively deployed by EMP at very high altitude while simultaneously sabotaging infrastructure with hacking.
If someone attacked all the interconnects then the net importers would lose power or brown out while the net exporters would be just fine. (assuming the net importers are currently running power generation at capacity).
For the grids under load, if more capacity can't be brought online they'd do rolling blackouts while working to restore the interconnects.
There are far better targets for a coordinated terrorist attack if they wanted a larger impact.
I believe the 2003 blackout was basically a cascading set of load loss faults