Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis

theatlantic.com

65 pointspeutetre98 comments

"Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps."

You'd think that gas stations would have emergency generators. After all, they have plenty of fuel in storage. But most do not. New Jersey subsidizes backup generators for gas stations.[1] Florida requires a transfer switch so you can plug in an external generator and run the gas station, but doesn't require a generator be present. Texas? Can't find anything.

[1] https://www.njeda.gov/retail-fuel-stations-statewide-now-eli...

I was also very surprised that the Xfinity facilities didn’t have generators, which resulted in me (and most of the rest of Houston) losing internet two days after the storm even though we never lost power (our Xfinity “station” was located in an area which lost power). There’s an argument that broadband should be considered critical infrastructure, because when it goes down, the cellular networks also stop working due to congestion. That makes it nearly impossible for citizens to handle emergencies or for linemen to coordinate repair work.

They do for larger facilities like truck stops.. however those facilities prioritize diesel pump power

The trouble with some gas stations not having power during a hurricane is monitoring stops too and you could get water in the gas tanks from flooding

Semi-related: I went to the gym a month ago, and that block was undergoing a power outage. I tried to drink from the (refrigerated) water fountain, but it didn't work! That model is inoperative when power is out.

Huh? You'd think a water fountain would just keep working without electricity, because all it has to do is let water flow from the plumbing, which continues to work? And it just wouldn't cool the water anymore? But no, that design doesn't have a fallback; it needs electricity even for normal water dispensing!

It's a real head-scratcher why Texas, with abundant oil, gas and wind energy resources, can't build and maintain a hardened and reliable grid to deliver that plentiful energy to themselves.

uhm, a hurricane hit.

If only they'd had literal decades to build up hardened infrastructure. Alas, ..

Their population doubled in size over the last quarter century. Maybe that has something to do with it.

So what you're saying is they scaled too fast?

So half their infrastructure is less than 25 years old and it still wasn't built up to snuff?

It doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce...

That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t.

True, but it doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce...

That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t, at least from an eyeball perspective.

Anecdotally, plenty of areas with buried lines have outages still.

Yes, but only a Cat 1.

but the wind was crazy. rain only lasted but a few hours. but that wind was pretty intense. a lot more so then anything iv experienced

Cat 1 is up to 90 mph wind. That's not nothing.

We’d expect some power outage but when Category 1 hurricanes hit Florida, power is back on in 1-3 days. This knocked out 85% of Houston’s power and will take weeks for many customers to get A/C back on. Excess deaths are rising fast, and I know of many pets which have died already. Category 1 hurricanes aren’t supposed to cause this much damage. Most likely, Centerpoint skimped on tree maintenance, which led to excessively large damage.

IN the city. With sustained high winds for hours. And Houston has LOTS of big trees next to power lines.

"Well a wave hit it!"

Is that unusual?

oh yeah. At sea? Chance in a million!

sure. and a hurricane will probably hit every few years at this rate of global warming. You realize texas is right by the gulf of mexico, and the trend is stronger and stronger hurricanes every year?

Next you’ll tell me we couldn’t foresee this…

regularly trimming all trees around power lines, slowly moving toward underground power lines, etc is the way to go.

Hurricanes are not increasing in frequency.

And is this your same advice for California?

Everyone needs to bury their lines but it costs money.

Cali every year has to have controlled blackouts because it's so bad at managing lines, no hurricanes needed.

“not increasing in frequency” - is this a hoax then?

https://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/news/more-frequen...

And yes California is another state with a poor grid. 100%. On the bright side i see some action being taken to improve things: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-puc-power-line-u...

yes it is a hoax, NOAA tracks this and they haven't found any significant increase:

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

> There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.

They have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it. California faced the same problem in the past. Rolling blackouts led to the end of a governorship and to the biggest corporate scandal in history.

Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.

Ironic that the scandal was related to Enron, hailing from Texas.

Houston, even. Though in an “Uno Reverse”, the current CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E in California and the CFO of Centerpoint also hails from PG&E.

California was very unhappy with their performance and now Houston is unhappy with them as well.

California still has PLENTY of power outages all across the state for a variety of reasons.

Wildfires are a particular cause, but it happens all the time for other reasons.

Rolling blackouts are not power outages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout

What level of Olympic Mental Gymnastics are y'all playing that blackouts are not power outages?

Well, the article mentions a rolling blackout is also called a rolling outage.

The word "outage" is literally in the first sentence of the article you linked.

If the power is not on, for any reason, it's an outage. Period.

this makes no sense - your statement literally made my brain hurt. i’m not joking.

It doesn’t matter if the power company stops supplying power intentionally for safety reasons. Residents are WITHOUT power.

Definition of power outage from wikipedia: “A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.”

Your comment is akin to saying i’m not in the dark if i intentionally flip my circuit breakers off. I’m in the dark, regardless of the intentions.

Except the rolling blackouts that California experienced were not due to safety reasons or infrastructure failures, but because Enron conspired to schedule (planned) plant maintenance at many facilities at the same time, in order to maximize profit (due to a loophole in CA’s then-newly-deregulated electricity market).

The recent “public safety power shutoffs” (which are not rolling blackouts) are also not due to safety reasons, but because PG&E was trying to blackmail the state into bailing them out against lawsuits for the fires they caused. It is a case of “well, shucks, since we can’t absolutely guarantee that our power lines will never start a fire with 100% certainty… I guess we have no choice but to turn off power for some of your constituents, who will be selected in such a way that at least one person in every county will be affected (and thus color the entire map red) but without significantly reducing the number of kWh we deliver (and can charge for) while doing so”.

In both cases, the power company was not unable to deliver power, but chose not to because they believed they could score political points by holding ratepayers hostage.

i didn’t know the full details on the california rolling blackouts. Thanks for sharing!

>> It's a real head-scratcher why Texas [..] can't build and maintain

> They have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it.

So in other words, no, they can't.

Sure, but it has nothing to do with the abundance of natural resources in Texas, nor is there any irony in the current situation due to it, is the point.

The irony they might be referring to is that Texans, as in, people in Texas, are challenged to maintain electricity distribution for their vast energy resources, whereas many other localities have the opposite problem: a scarcity of energy resources.

Right, but California took aggressive action to stop market manipulation. That was 20+ years ago. In the last several years the state has increased generation capacity, greatly increased renewables, and improved grid reliability.

According to a Department of Energy report, as reported by US News [1], in 2023 California ranked #37 for "the number of minutes of power outages the average customer experiences in a year". Texas was much better at #28.

People probably think otherwise because of availability bias, after that multi day outage that made headlines nationwide a few years ago. (In the same way that people overestimate the danger of plane crashes because they're rare but dramatic.)

1: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...

The DoE report on California is skewed by rural areas that suffer outages due to wildfires and winter storms. There have been no extended outages that effect large cities on the scale of Houston.

Do outages not count if they affect people in rural areas? Perhaps not, because they don't get reported.

Anyway, I'm not saying Texas' grid is great. It isn't. But California is well below average in power reliability.

> In the last several years the state has increased generation capacity, greatly increased renewables, and improved grid reliability.

It must have been truly terrible before.

Market manipulation is how these people get elected. How else are they supposed to stay in power?

And Oncor? TNMP? AEP Texas?

They're either all terrible stewards of the grid or Texans are all victims of propaganda, because all four of these have had extended outages following most severe weather events of the last decade (hurricanes, I'm willing to give a pass to, some, but we're also talking 'cold weather in winter has a very real potential to cause widespread blackouts').

Don’t forget those fuckheads at ERCOT. How many deaths are they responsible for?

I worked with center point. They hired my company to do a digital transformation on their geospatial, work order and asset management systems. They were terrible. At one point our COO has to sit down with the VP in charge of the project and tell him what was going on. The VP has no clue what we were doing, what his people were supposed to be doing or why there were problems and the project was behind.

He has just heard from one of his mid level managers that things were blowing up and complained to our leadership which resulted in the meeting.

We were a pretty good company for doing contract work. Admittedly, we rarely made it past the"make it work" part of "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast" but that's the nature of contract development.

Our biggest mistake on that was relying on them to PM their own projects.

They assumed because they knew how to do Big infrastructure projects that they could handle software and technology projects too. Things only started to get better when we basically embedded our own PMs in their teams.

It's not all that much of a head scratcher. Texas prioritizes speed and cheapness in building. Nothing is built to last more than 20 years. The entire vibe of the state is that everything is provisional. It's an extraction camp the size of 3 Germanys.

I stayed at a hotel outside of Austin and it was on par with my first apartment out of college, smelling something like a blend of plywood and cockroach droppings. That was the most expensive hotel in the area, too.

n=1, there are plenty of nice hotels in Austin, stay downtown next time

I also stayed in town, but I am taking about immediately out of town.

A hurricane seems like a totally legitimate reason to lose power

Why?

Underground cables for the last mile wouldn't be subject to hurricane damage. I don't know how often long-haul high voltage lines get taken out by hurricanes but I suspect it is not that often.

Why build a last-mile power grid that can be so easily disrupted?

i read from some people in that field that it was basically unreasonable to try to fund for something like that. and that it wouldnt completely stop power outage.

unreasonable for houston i think it was. houston is i think the largest or second largest city in america besides a city in alaska.

Nordic countries mandate that private electric companies move their cables (last mile and between power stations) underground, even in rural areas to reduce likelihood of outages.

The process has been ongoing for many years now. One way to incentivize it is to mandate high reimbursements to customers on outage.

Do they mandate that is cities build on what is essentially a swamp?

Yes. Cables are fine submerged and all the rest of the installation is above ground.

Houston is built mostly on swamp with a high water table and routine flooding. I doubt underground cabling would be significantly more reliable and would be much more expensive to install and maintain

You can’t bury much power in Houston… they’d be underwater in the next hurricane. Underground lines means underground vaults and transformers too… Some areas of Houston are 16 feet or less above sea level..

https://en-us.topographic-map.com/map-wv2nh/Houston/

Bury a 8 foot transformer vault (they’d be deeper than that likely but just say 8 feet) And get a 10 foot storm surge and you’ve got 2 feet of water higher than the transformer vault… try fixing that! Above ground is the way to go there

They had massive amounts of help from west Texas and Oklahoma power people coming in. I drove through Houston yesterday. No gas and no traffic lights make some areas a real pain.

They’ll get it fixed up, after all Beryl did hit as a cat 1 hurricane… at least they aren’t below sea level like NOLA

The private sector is an unmitigated disaster on reliable base load power. Full stop across dozens of examples. Enron and the California grid is a conspicuous example, but it’s mostly lesser degrees of that anywhere.

Badly refereed markets in essentials aren’t a matter of if a market failure will emerge, it’s when.

I'm not usually an euroskeptic, but EU's directives on the electricity market would have been an excellent argument for Brexit. It's like the ptomelaic solar system: to make it match how the world really work, you had to add layers upon layers of additional rules, and in the end it's still wrong. The fact that my country used to use Copernic's system is make me feel even worse.

Is it though? They deregulated the industry deliberately removing rules around weatherization and reliability so energy companies could increase profits at the cost of reliability. They disconnected their grid from the rest of the country specifically so they could make those changes. It’s not surprising to me at all. Everyone who is paying attention could see this coming for years.

They didn't disconnect it. The Texas grid has always been mostly separate from the rest of the country.

It's pretty simple really. Before deregulation and the total privatization of Texas' power grid, the utilities were required by law to spend part of their income on reliability so that all the elements of the grid had reserve capacity for emergencies. Backup generators, extra insulation for fuel pipes, fatter cables, more workers to trim trees and repair damage, etc. When I was a kid in Texas in the 70s, the grid was extremely reliable.

Since deregulation the reliability incentive is gone. Any utility CEO that spends money on reliability will be pummeled into oblivion by Wall Street. It's all about maximizing profit now, and that means every part of the Texas grid operates right on the hairy edge of failure. The plan was that competition would provide some incentive for reliability, but that was always fantasy. No home in Texas has two sets of power lines coming into it from two competing companies.

We all know what enshittification looks like by now. Texas is where enshittification meets the power grid.

Because the wealth of the state is being raided and hoarded by for profit companies instead of benefitting the people living there

It’s fascinating watching my former city and state from a distance. I get vibes like when watching NHK talking heads smiling and reading TEPCO press releases in the foreground while Fukashima #3 explodes in the background.

It will be fine.

I get it, though. I remember when Fukushima happened, I (living in the US) fell for those talking heads, hook, line, and sinker. To me, none of it seemed like all that big a deal, based on what I was hearing from them. Boy was I wrong.

https://archive.is/GnzTQ

> “Why did so many CenterPoint power lines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away?”

Why not put power lines under ground, like other countries do? It's probably more expensive, but large scale repairs or rebuilds several times a year do not sound cheap either.

More expensive is an understatement, I think it costs like 10x more to put them underground. It's also very difficult and disruptive in dense areas where there's all sorts of pipes and cables already there.

That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, and some of their network is already underground, but the reason it isn't universal is that it genuinely is very hard to do.

Well, still less expensive than power outage i.e. economy outage. Losses must be enormous, logically you should be happy to pay 10x for underground cables.

Logically, yes. But that's seldom how things go. Burying the wires would be a major capital expenditure. Bonds need to be issued, depending on the municipality, voters may need to get involved. Shareholders, where applicable, don't like it.

Yes, the cost for repair is high, but that's part of the operating budget, and each instance of repair is much cheaper than the cable-burying project, so the cost is "amortized" in a weird way that seems more palatable.

Meanwhile, the utility isn't held responsible for the economic costs related to the outage, so they don't care about those costs. Even in California, where the utility has been found liable when their infrastructure starts wildfires that kill people, they still aren't doing massive cable-burying projects.

I don't agree with it. I think it's stupid and short-sighted. But there are reasons. Most of them start with "c" and end with "apitalism".

In rural areas, battery backup might be cheaper than upgrading the grid. Or at least that’s what they plan to do in Vermont.

The last estimate I saw was $2B. This event is likely to or already has exceeded that in losses.

It's not cheap. Neither is this repair cycle.

Trenching is very expensive especially when other lines are in the ground.

I heard an interesting suggestion to double or triple every #X poles for stability so one fallen tree does not take out so many in a row.

Modern installation of buried utilities in urban areas is often done with horizontal boring these days. Minimal damage to roads and other infrastructure that way.

Houston is doing this for new developments but it’s infeasible for existing neighborhoods because there’s already a bunch of other stuff underground there and its a very slow and expensive process.

The correct way to handle above-ground powerlines is to perform regular maintenance on any trees growing near the lines. Centerpoint skimped on this expense and it resulted in 85% of Houston losing power.

I think is a huge part of it. I saw a Houston area news channel interviewing locals and some said that they had requested clearing from Center Point energy on the property months/years before anything would ever get trimmed. Austin linemen who agreed to travel down there said they were told to pay for their own meals and hotels (aka no per diem available) when they didn’t -have- to go there and were trying to help sent by Austin Energy. Who is going to volunteer to go under those terms?

I'm in South Texas (not Houston though) and same - I had trees growing into the power lines in my alley. I put in a request to trim them and was basically told nicely to pound sand (I think they said something like they might get around to it in six to twelve months). I ended up paying a trimmer to take care of it, but I don't imagine that everyone in my (lower-income) neighborhood can afford that.

I mean tbf the linemen are making like $120/hr (double pay) so its probably still worth coming here. But it’s not a good look for Centerpoint and shows what they’re focused on.

night number 6 here. really sucks. slept one or two nights this week hopefuly three soon. https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ most have power now though

my father was born and raised in river oaks, houston before ac. summers were hellish, with little sleep at night.

I feel like having a power outage due to a hurricane isn’t that unreasonable? I mean in California in 2019 the power went out for significant periods of time because it was too dry.

It's not so much unreasonable as dangerous. Like much of the coastal south, it's extremely humid and heat is a problem for all but the best in shape. All modern housing is built for AC, and not breezeways or clearing heat.

its expected forsure. happens every time but i think the outrage and noise is because a few reason. Houstonians have had many natural disasters in a row now people are just tired and frustrated first and foremost and have been bottling that up.

they want to outrage and have someone take responsibility. the city is blue but texas is red. many democrats have been upset at leadership and sees this as another failure. whether theres truth to it im not sure im not too knowledgeable in politics but to me it seems a lot of people outside the state has been calling out texas as well. i can see that influence with local democrats here.

also the rain was very weak, usually power wont go out for this long. but it kind of felt more like a strong tornado that ran through the city.

it kind of makes me sad to see people using this for politics, and outraging and what not. i mean i dont think we really know if centerpoint was negligent and at fault yet. but again im not too knowledgeable about the company i just pay them monthly. compare this to harvey where everyone was so eager to help someone. but i understand im so tired too. really am

85% of Houston lost power. That absolutely does not happen “every time”, especially for a category 1 hurricane. Some power loss, definitely. But not to this extent.

The Texas freeze killed/damaged a lot of trees that were just ready to fall on lines, and evidently Center Point Energy is awful at keeping the trees/branches trimmed back from where they can easily fall on lines/transformers

What does the power situation in CA, which has been very stable lately in SoCal, have to do with Texas?

There’s some argument that Centerpoint spent 50-75% less on tree maintenance[0] than some of its most direct comparison companies. This category 1 hurricane knocked out power to 85% of Houston customers, which is significantly worse than recent-ish stronger storms. A category 1 shouldn’t knock out 85% of the power in Houston - that might be more acceptable for a category 3-4 hurricane. Please also see some of this[1] discussion which includes experiences during past worse events where power was basically restored after a couple days.

0: https://archive.ph/2024.07.12-151510/https://www.khou.com/ar...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/houston/comments/1e1oapb/i_just_spo...

While it was initially a Cat 5 off the coast, it was a Category 1 hurricane by the time it reached Houston and degraded to a tropical storm before actually leaving Houston. As much as I'm willing to recognize that severity is relative, if any city in Florida lost power as completely and for as long as a result of a Category 1/tropical storm, they'd be ridiculed into next century.

And of course this isn't a one off event for Texas either. This is a symptom of a much larger systematic failure of the state's energy grid (which notably isn't connected to and refuses to coordinate with any of the other state grids).

They still have plenty of space for bitcoin mining though apparently.

Millions of tiny generators roar to life

Imagine the noise pollution

I feel for all the residents of Houston, but there is no more deserving place to be wrecked by climate change.

really? how so. i feel like the people are really nice for such a big city. or do you mean geography wise

I think GP is using "place in Texas" as a proxy for "climate-change deniers". When, of course, most cities -- even in Texas -- are liberal-leaning, or at least politically diverse. So it's just a vindictive thing to say that also happens to be uninformed and lazy.

Regardless, it's pretty shitty to wish community and economic destruction on people (not to mention high probability of injuries and deaths), even if they've bought into the conservative propaganda machine wrt climate change.

Houston is an industrial city, primarily for oil refining.

Regional flamewar is not ok here, regardless of region, so please don't post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com