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.
Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.
California was very unhappy with their performance and now Houston is unhappy with them as well.
Wildfires are a particular cause, but it happens all the time for other reasons.
If the power is not on, for any reason, it's an outage. Period.
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.
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.
> They have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it.
So in other words, no, they can't.
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...
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.
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').
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.
Badly refereed markets in essentials aren’t a matter of if a market failure will emerge, it’s when.
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.
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?
unreasonable for houston i think it was. houston is i think the largest or second largest city in america besides a city in alaska.
The process has been ongoing for many years now. One way to incentivize it is to mandate high reimbursements to customers on outage.
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
That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.