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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

"the most resilient part of TX power grid"

A roommate of mine once quipped on something: 'that's like saying my crap smells better than yours'.

Feel free to correct me, I'm not an expert, but Texas runs its own state-only independent grid, it got completely pants in the ice storm a few years ago, and at the time a lot of articles said the Texas grid is fundamentally less resilient that other power companies. Is any of that wrong?

However, Texas is loaded with sun/desert and I believe a ton of wind resources, so it has that going for it for next-generation industry.

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> However, Texas is loaded with sun/desert and I believe a ton of wind resources, so it has that going for it for next-generation industry.

Surprisingly, you got to thank George Bush for that

He made renewable wind and solar energy a major part of his energy policy when he was Govenor of TX. [0].

In 1999, he passed a law mandating Texas to get 2,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable energy by 2009. This helped spurt the entire renewable industry in TX

[0] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/29/70295/george-w-b...

I mean, you might be able to thank Bush for the investment, but I think we should not start thanking politicians for the sun and the wind, haha.

Why's that surprising?

Because the Bushs are a family of oil types

They actually started off in the New York City publishing industry.

McGraw Hill was founded by the Bush family before they decamped for Dallas in the 1920s.

"oil types" is a stereotype. Stereotypes don't generate genuine surprises, only surprises compared to the stereotype.

Rhetorical flourish.

The laws of physics suggest an area about the size of Texas is all the bigger you can make a grid. AC is much better than DC for areas of that range, because you can adjust voltages with a cheap transforms. However if you get too large and feed the grid from multiple places, there gets to be a point in the middle where power from one end is driving the grid negative while the other is driving positive.

You can get around this with DC, and grids do interconnect with DC power, but that requires more expensive equipment.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The Eastern Interconnection is far larger than the Texas Interconnection and it's connected via AC. Are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection has inefficiencies due to its size? Or are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection isn't fully synchronized somehow?

I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a synchronous system (1967-1975) to learn more about the difficulties with scaling interconnections. It mentioned frequency oscillations causing voltage variations close to the East-West connection (p11), which sounds like the issue you're describing. If that is the issue though, then Texas isn't the size limit for a grid because the Eastern and Western grids exist and are far larger.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8594689

About is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes you can go bigger than Texas size, but Texas is still big enough.

> it got completely pants in the ice storm a few years ago

Right, in 2021... and in 2011, and in 2003, and in 1989... :p

Lots of places face challenges with reliable delivery during massive storms. See NY earlier this year.

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