Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning
cnn.com
cnn.com
Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.
I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:
* Not enough employees at the electrical companies
* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically
* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically
* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)
* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's
* Other??
It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.
The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.
New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.
Regulations on the initial construction? In other words, plan ahead.
But no, I must have my 'Freeeeedooooommmmm'.
You can't force me to prepare.
But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?
Seems like everyone is ready to argue about how impossible everything is. Shrugs "guess it's impossible, we just have to go on like we've always have".
Bro.
Come up with a plan and a budget for your buried cables and sell it to the people of Texas who will have to pay for it.
Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/ho...
All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.
In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.
~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.
Maintaining underground infrastructure can be very difficult.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under...
They are not talking about Greater Houston.
For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area)
It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".
It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.
Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".
Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".
Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.
To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.
It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.
Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.
Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.
In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.
The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
"No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!)
"No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty"
"No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out"
It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones.
We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border
The quip is that two things made Houston possible: oil and air conditioning.
Groundwater (especially for coastal cities) and people drilling holes would be very problematic too.
Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.
If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.
If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.
When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)
There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.
Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/cen...
I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.
For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".
Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.
But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.
It's amusing and a bit scary that someone thinks the federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed.
However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.
Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.
Hypothetically, of course.
The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.
The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.
The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].
In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].
Maybe they can budget it in?
What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.
[1]. https://everytexan.org/2023/11/03/the-2024-25-texas-budget-t...
[2] https://abc13.com/texas-legislature-2023-state-budget-surplu...
How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.
The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.
On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.
There might be costs (checking before construction for example) and it being normal it helps.
Still, it seems like those parts of Europe (outside of Turkey, which isn't really in Europe) don't have large earthquakes, otherwise all those ancient buildings like the Coliseum and Parthenon would have completely collapsed by now.
I think $2.5 million is the high estimate, my city is estimating $1 million per mile.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...
https://www.centerpointenergy.com/en-us/corporate/about-us/c...
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/64650dded34ec179a83...
Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:
<attr>
<attrlabl>DTW23</attrlabl>
<attrdef>
December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
</attrdef>
<attrdefs>U.S. Geological Survey</attrdefs>
<attrdomv>
<rdom>
<rdommin>2.83</rdommin>
<rdommax>453.97</rdommax>
<attrunit>feet</attrunit>
</rdom>
</attrdomv>
</attr>Christchurch gets earthquakes instead of hurricanes: http://db.nzsee.org.nz/SpecialIssue/44(4)0425.pdf
No country is nearly as wealthy as the USA, but the USA can't afford to build a bullet train or replace decrepit bridges that randomly fall down.
Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.
Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.
I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.
In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.
If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.
I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.
Some people bring up the storm Ian in 2021. Winter storms are fundamentally different disasters. Cold snaps drive up local electricity demand sharply and this is the kind of thing that can stress the grid.
Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]
Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.
Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.
Why apologize. You're in the right place for pedantry ;)
Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.
What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.
I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.
I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.
Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.
Ding ding ding... so are they businesses or not? I didn't comment on whether you could make money as an electrician on them, but to imply the hundreds of thousands of businesses like what you just described above aren't _businesses_ especially considering they are on commercially zoned property is just silly.
I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect.
In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before.
Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg.
That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman.
The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously.
Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg.
Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be.
We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.
Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.
The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).
So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.
We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.
The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.
As to your point about it being an urban area:
The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).
I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.
Also, the water table is very high, and hurricanes completely flood entire areas, so transformers etc are often completely underwater. It's just not feasible to bury sensitive equipment when the entire area is under six or ten feet of water.
I've lived in Texas my entire life and there are aspects of it that I love, but I do have vague plans to move north once my remaining ties to the state dissolve.
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/07/12/texas-power-grid-hous...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1558514
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/060624_GD...
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/why-cant-texas-bu...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-15/climate-c... | https://archive.today/m8xjc
Comparing an “Bay Area typhoon” (very hilly) to low and flat Houston with a direct hit is disingenuous at best.
It’s also extremely expensive to mitigate, maybe it should be done, but the GP was hand waving it all away. Commenter even “disagreed from experience” and then cited a totally different experience.
Fires, earthquakes, heavy rains causing mudslides that have actually killed people: yes. Some very localized flooding around the Russian River happens all the time. The Guadalupe River in San Jose flooded a few years ago. But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
we don't have to prove the negative; you have to prove your claim.
Can you please take that courage over to the thread in question, where the cat seems to have gotten your tongue?
Some alternatives:
1. Engage in even more rhetoric (which is easily identified)
2. Pretend that you have not seen this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954874
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
Note:
- you and I are both Humans
- this conversation is "a situation"
You are now free to experience the many other surprising and delightful things that this life has to offer.
Yes, my bad.
But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
What we saw with the winter storms of 2022 and 2023 was nothing close to what Houston or even the NY area gets with a hurricane. Bay Area topography is hilly; most of the wind is broken by the Santa Cruz mountains. I'm in one of the SF Peninsula canyons that's known for being particularly windy, and we saw maybe 70mph gusts and 30mph sustained. A Cat 1 hurricane (like Beryl, Bob, or Gloria) has 75mph winds sustained with gusts up to 100mph. A Cat 5 (like Katrina at the height of its strength; it made landfall as a cat 3) has 150mph sustained winds and 200+mph gusts.
Hurricane Bob knocked out power to eastern Long Island NY for 2 days in 1991. Hurricane Sandy (also a Cat 1 at landfall, but a direct hit on NYC) knocked out power for 2 weeks. The problem is not unique to Houston or Texas. PG&E has plenty of its own problems, but the reason fewer poles went down our winter storms (and they still did go down; Cupertino was without power for almost 2 days) was simply because the wind was less.
Demanding the answer for specific storms is like demanding to know whether a smoker's lung cancer was caused by smoking. Maybe?? But we know in aggregate smoking caused an enormous amount of deaths. We can measure the number of smoking-induced deaths, and the number of climate-changed-induced storms.
OP said that specific storms are climate induced - there is no way of saying that a storm formed due to climate change when it would not have formed in the absence.
I don't want to look for papers right now. Ask them about the claim that "This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's", not me.
My point is that you definitely can prove (or disprove) it. Your claim that it's unprovable on purpose or something is not right.
Hurricanes in the US are basically flat [1][2][3]. The past thousand years have seen wild swings, but it's due to natural variability [4].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hurricane-landfalls-us [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5#Sec2 [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45112-6
What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.
In terms of wind speed, quite similar. A category 1 hurricane is only 74-95mph winds. This is pretty mild, as far as storms go. I've been through many, many category 1 hurricanes and it's not much of a storm. Things only start getting scary around category 3.
I have several friends who live high in the hills in the Santa Cruz mountains and they regularly see wind speeds in the range of cat 1 hurricanes.
During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.
All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/05/map-where-wind-reache...
[1] https://underscoresf.com/the-belated-weekend-catch-up-record...
[2] https://houstonlanding.org/these-houston-areas-received-the-...
Texas power, thanks to their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude, has shown itself to be woefully underreported repeatedly in the last few years.
People underestimate the heavy burden of a strong regulatory state. High standards and high costs. All in it the Texas approach looks to be pretty good even if it means you have to be prepared for an emergency. I actually lost power for 24 hours recently so I can sympathise; a widespread outage would be horrific for an unprepared person. But being prepared for emergencies is a much more resilient approach in the long term and better than the quite substantial risk of overregulating.
They have a very healthy attitude.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.
The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis triggered by some of the most stunning displays of regulatory incompetence so far this century. So I would accept that the EU is more regulated but I don't think that is the sort of point that plays well right now.
I would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!
No outage though, the crisis was averted, unlike in Texas where the crisis reliably hits every few years.
Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.
I've been keeping an eye on how the situation in Germany seems to be developing [0]. It makes for grim reading.
Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell! This is an inconvenience but for me power outage is a huge problem (especially 1 week!).
Energy consumption per capita: Down ~30% from peak & dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
Electricity generation: Down ~25% from peak& dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
A country with results like that cannot be said to have achieved success. It looks like a disaster in the making; this is the sort of result I'd be expecting to see somewhere like North Korea or out of some other backwards tinpot nation. From Germany it is a bit jaw dropping.
> Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell!
On the face of it that is an argument I have a lot of respect for - the problem is it doesn't jive with the figures I'm looking at, or the political rumbling coming out of Europe. If energy consumption is dropping by double digit percentages; then the impacts of those prices changes cannot be minor. They have to be serious enough to cause massively less energy consumption. So I'd say that is a convincing argument that the first order effects are contained but not really persuasive that the crisis is under control. The AfD isn't polling where it is because everyone feels comfortable and prosperous.
I'd rather take Texas' grid than whatever it is the German's are doing for their energy policy. Maybe Texas has a history I don't know about where their ability to produce energy is also collapsing, but it'd have to be awful fail to the extent that the Europeans (especially Germans) have managed over the last decade or two. From what I've seen, the Texas strategy is superior.
> ...and this is a problem for industry...
Also, just to point at this one more time - that industry is a big part of what makes Germany prosperous. You need industry to enjoy an industrial-era living standard. Problems for industry aren't something off in the distance people can ignore.
As a side note, some of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains in tools/processes.
The way Germany got there is by enabling their eco-fascists that clearly are against any kind of progress, related to science or not. They have a mindset right out of the dark ages where any risk taken for a potentially better life is not worth it; in general, they would rather have humans go back the way of the animals (preferably others before them, like it always is with those type of peoples). Since the 80s they have been fighting nuclear power pushing Germany into expensive but still unreliable renewables that need to be supplemented by heavy use of coal (and energy imports, suddenly France's nuclear seems pretty good when they need it in the winter).
To be clear I am not against renewable, I think they are now a great tool for cheap peak electricity generations to supply some process we couldn't do as cheaply otherwise (like air-conditioning or car battery charging) but they absolutely need to be associated with a reliable energy generation for the hard times to at least meet the baseload demands. The current numbers make any kind of large-scale battery a ridiculous proposition (without even talking about the costs) and overbuilding renewable is not just costly but still is a no guarantee proposition while requiring absurd level of investments. Just as an example, in the winter Germany still use almost 40% (39.56 last January) of fossil fuels for their electricity generation. And that's before talking about heating needs, because Germany always had high electricity prices, very few of their homes use electricity for heat, unlike France wich is pretty much the reverse. What Germany does, is use even more fossil fuel for heating (typically gaz but also fuel) and that's on top of their peaker gaz plant needs for just electricity.
To match just their electricity needs, they would need at least twice their current installed base of wind turbine and it's not even clear they wouldn't have blackouts (at least some hours) if they couldn't rely on neighbor's grid imports.
This costly and unreliable installation base is precisely what got them to those prices and the worst is that they try to politically force everyone into the same nonsense. Until recently where it became clearer to the French that nuclear was clearly not optional considering all the other choices and risk associated (much worse than the nuclear boogeyman) they have dominated EU's political trajectory and enforce some stupid anti-competitive rules, especially against France, to prevent them from winning and dominating with their superior choice.
I really hate Germany for this, they may not have won WW2 technically but with the EU they have very much won in spirit. Leftists are now confused people don't really want EU anymore even though they are some clear indicators of ideological domination by some that lead to pretty bad outcomes in the long term.
Just the other day my grandma told me about some recipe that she doesn't do as much anymore because electricity being much more expensive, they now are pretty costly to do. It's ridiculous and clearly a regression but as long as everything fits the ideological narrative it's alright, I guess. Recently I read about how Germany's future looks pretty bad with their industries leaving or becoming uncompetitive because of various factors (energy price being one, immigration another).
But as you can see, they will fight you for this, with all the ideological power something as close to religion as it can be.
Although I note that we seem to be agreeing; none of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains. Efficiency gains cause consumption to rise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). If efficiency is rising through all this, that means bad energy policy is actually causing even more damage than it superficially appears to.
The above comment should not be grayed out, yours should.
You are placing your political fantasies above reality on the ground.
It is absolutely factually correct to describe Texas political and electrical administration as - anthropogenic climate change denialist
- corruptly in thrall to fossil fuel, including 'natural' gas plant expansion where the actual grid is the issue
- averse to integrating with the electrical grid from nearby states, as others do, and averse to standards and standards compliance.
The number of people moving to Texas and your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic.
And
> we don't need no regulamazations
Seem at odds with one another.
The CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E and the CFO of Centerpoint came from PG&E as well. So you're more right than you know!
Tell me your uninformed, without telling me.
(if you want a swimming pool, dig a hole!)
EDIT: ok I looked
it seems there are two kinds of lines - transmission lines and distribution lines.
Distribution lines can be buried, but it might not be good in hurricane prone areas that are prone to flooding.
transmission lines are hard/expensive to bury, since the insulation requirements are technically challenging.
The hurricane seems to have taken out some large transmission lines in addition to distribution lines.
I wonder if maybe redundant lines might be cheaper than buried lines?
> The inquiry report also said, "Internal expertise in 110 kV assets was not maintained at a sufficient level"
It's almost as if you put public infrastructure under the control of people who only care about collecting short term rents bad things happen.
Other comment California has underground transmission lines. And yes sometimes they fail. Had a smaller one oops in my old neighborhood in San Francisco a few years ago.
PG&E is spending about $20b to underground 10,000 miles of lines in fire prone areas. Seems like a lot but it's $40/foot. Still that's only 10% of the total.
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...
In other words, politics scales the other way: The more people you have in the same spot using the same resource, the more different ways they can be unhappy with the management of that resource.
It's ok for you to sit this one out.
Because power was out for so long, everyone threw out a ton of food, but there was no trash pickup in some cases for weeks because of staffing shortages and contract disputes, so there was stinky trash and huge swarms of bright blue flies everywhere. At one point, the mayor suggested people could drive their own trash to the transfer station—after it had been sitting out in 95 degree heat for weeks.
There also was no proper street cleaning, which meant streets and sidewalks were full of storm debris, including things like roofing nails. The lines at tire repair shops were wrapping around the block.
Entergy's meter reading and billing also got completely thrown off. I moved shortly after Ida, and it took months to get any bill at all in the new place, and I only got my final bill for the old place this year, almost three years later, no longer living in Louisiana. (They also never actually sent me the bill or turned on my autopay, so I only knew it was time to pay when the power went out).
I think the derecho took out a lot of the problematic trees and branches.
Not to be pedantic, but this is easy to fix. Burying power lines, trimming trees, and all of the other labor are solved problems. By and large, it's not even a particularly hard technical problem. It's a bunch of easy solutions that are expensive and tedious and politically unpopular (nobody wants to spend money or tell their constituents that roads will be closed for utility work).
I'd also note that Hurricane Sandy was category 2 when it hit NYC, which is inarguably far denser than Houston. New York had power back for 95% of customers in 11 days. New Jersey did the same in less than two weeks. Texas could be doing better.
Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.
And this is also not a hard problem, just expensive, tedious, and politically unpopular.
This is quite literally the easiest thing to fix.
without wireless power transmission I'm not sure what people want.
Where do you put lines that can't be buried or blown over?
We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)
In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.
Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.
(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)
A more rational approach would be to look at comparable cities and see how they cope with big storms, whatever the storms' cat numbers. My guess is, no matter what comparables you pick, Houston comes out on the bottom.
Maybe it IS deregulation! You can be in favor of it in general, and still admit, "OK, maybe in this instance it didn't work." That doesn't mean you're giving free rein to the people in favor of the government regulating everything.
Miami, which also experiences massive power outages when they're hit with even category 1 hurricanes.
> The rains caused flooding, and the combination of rains and winds downed trees and power lines, leaving 1.45 million people without power.
That would be a lot of research, for sure.
In the past they've never had a cat 5. The last cat 5 was Carla in 1961. The last cat 3 was Alicia in 1983. The last cat 2 was Alicia in 2008 (although that was actually east of Houston and just hit Houston with its weaker winds).
Climate change should make such storms more likely to form, but it should also change ocean and air current patterns which could affect the chances they make it to Houston.
The list I got those from noted that in 1961 air conditioning was still novel, which makes me curious. How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning?
The average July temperature in Houston nowadays is 4.2℉ (2.3℃) higher than it was in 1970, and climate change tends to cause more extremes, so I'd guess that the highs are also higher and extreme days more common, so maybe AC has become more of a necessity nowadays?
I imagine at first it was really drafty homes, and later on big ceiling fans everywhere
There's a reason a lot of southwestern cities like Phoenix started booming in population when AC became more readily available.
Arable land that isn't habitable for weeks or months out of the year wasn't terribly valuable or sought out.
Wealthier people built big houses with lots of thermal mass and tall ceilings while poorer people lived in shotgun houses with aligned doors and porches that created constant airflow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
Burying lines, especially in historic areas, is incredibly expensive and not necessarily a panacea either, although it helps. Is it worth it?
Realistically, for the millions upon millions of people that live in the greater Houston MSA (and of course except for those who rely on power for healthcare equipment, who really need to invest in a small generator or get to a shelter), it's far more cost effective to simply deal with power outages every decade or two.
During Ike, large parts of Houston, especially to the northeast, were literally underwater, so power wouldn't have helped anyway. The number of utility crews lined up along highways from other states, even from thousands of miles away, in the immediate aftermath of Ike is both inspiring and enlightening, especially when you recognize that they were going into a disaster zone, likely without a nice hotel to go back to or even running water after working a 12 hour shift.
So, no, it's just part of living near the coast in a hurricane-prone area. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.
Houston has, on average, one large storm event every decade or so, and that hasn't really changed much over the last 100 years. https://www.weather.gov/hgx/major_events
So it’s just a matter of time.
Also, looking at your source, I see 2 tropical cyclones between 1900-1950, 3 between 1950-2000, and then 8 in the 24 years since. To me that looks like an increase in tropical cyclones over time.
We have to be careful about what is meant by “these events”.
According to the sources I was able to find [1,2], sea level rise (SLR) is perhaps the dominant driver for the increasing damages from tropical cyclones (TCs). Models show some increase (I’m not finding any support for 2x or 3x though!) in the number of high-intensity TCs, and TC intensification is expected to be more rapid.
But the underlying SLR will make even smaller TCs more consequential - even if the number of storms of a given intensity does not change.
[1] specifically says this. And if you look at the consensus report [2], they spend most of their time discussing SLR, in effect as an amplifier for all the trouble a TC can cause. Only in one sentence in a very long discussion do they claim that TCs are themselves worsening, and the statement is quite nuanced:
“For example, hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly and decaying more slowly, leading to stronger storms extending farther inland with heavier rainfall and higher storm surges…”
So if you interpret “these events” as “high dollar damage TCs”, you are correct. But not in the raw number of TCs of a given intensity.
And you are right that the situation is quite dire already:
“Annual frequencies of both minor and moderate coastal flooding increased by a factor of 2–3 along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines between 1990 and 2020” [2]
The same source says models predict a 5-10x increase in flood events by 2100, which is truly staggering. The recommendation of the GP commenter (“If you don't like it, move somewhere else”) seems to be poorly informed about how important adaptation will be.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/a-force-of-nat...
[2] https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/, and expand out “key message 1”.
I expect things will improve, but it may take some years. As these events become more common and people have to suffer every year, voters are going to get fed up, and Republicans would be foolish to keep up their climate denial stance.
Maybe, but no. Texas has its history of major hurricanes. While maybe not as popular of a target as Florida and New Orleans, but Houston definitely has as much of a bullseye on it as a trailer park in a tornado.
Harvey was predicted well in advance that it was going to be a devastating storm. For days ahead I saw the up to 40" of rain and thought that couldn't possibly be correct. Then it happened. Houston took little action and then acted shocked. Of course, Houston has it's own unique set of problems with their lack of zoning rules plus so many other things without having to make some climate denier argument that's not necessarily wrong but just horribly out of place
Politics is definitely a factor.
It's also election year. The state agencies didn't submit the emergency declaration work before the storm hit like they usually did in years past - this is not their first rodeo, so it can't be explained by ignorance.
Also, Houston is Harris county, so not exactly the governor's or legislature's favorite voting county.
It's not nearly as clear cut as "red = head in sand"
_just_. The definition of "just a cat 1" is winds from 75 to 95 miles per hour. There is some debate over whether it picked up to cat 2 levels just before it made landfall and reweakened to cat 1.
> Other??
Political corruption preventing elected officials from actually enforcing any laws or authority over Centerpoint.
if you were there during beryl you know the winds were strong enough to take trees out yes? trust me houston is not a stranger to hurricanes we all went through a cat 4 harvey years back. which well funnily enough didnt have any huge power problems. more so a house and car totally flooded problem. or 10in of water in the house for weeks problem. mold problem.
tropical storm ike before that took out power for weeks causing $30b in damages in the states
wish people would put their energy into helping or something instead of just thinking about their own agenda. or talking crap i dont know i wouldnt wish this on anyone its hell
Between this and the ice storm s couple years ago Texas has shown itself incapable of utility grade service.
In general I think the disaster resilience afforded by home solar is simply not valued enough by subsidies and incentives policies.
1. https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/2005/ut/002.00.000054.00....
Texas is a much richer economy than where I live, so I see no reason why it couldn't be a requirement, at least for single family homes.
If so that seems like a pretty substantial subsidy to me, the government is covering around 63% of the total cost.
And then hail punches through your solar panels and you have to pay for that.
If there were a cheap, easy solution, people would have done it already.
Here is a hail map.
https://solarpower.guide/solar-energy-insights/infographics/...
Here is a rough solar install map
I think it’s not necesarily true that people avoid Solar because of hail, although anecdotally I know a friend who is reluctant for this very reason
That being said, flooding happens very often and yet homes in Houston are not flood proof.
And let’s not get into the whole cheap energy from carbon sources being subsidized
Some who didn't have hail damage are now having difficulty getting other roof damage repaired because in order for their warranty to be valid they need certain people to remove the panels before other roof work can be done. But those people are massively backed up by all the other people needing panels removed/reinstalled/replaced.
Well, better keep driving 5mpg trucks and dying when the power company fails then.
I don't think anyone could argue that Quebec has a deregulated power grid, it's the complete opposite in fact. Power generation, distribution, and last mile connections are all nationalized.
If you want to blame politics, this is a case of national bureaucracy getting it wrong than deregulation.
An entirely different energy market model (MISO/Entergy) was also heavily impacted. The Woodlands, Conroe, et. al. are on a completely different grid. I don't get to pick a "retail electricity provider" and I live 20 minutes from people who can. Doesn't seem to matter.
All markets hit by Beryl are approximately the same degree of screwed, regardless of any specific underlying ideologies.
The supply market is deregulated. The last mile transmission is not.
One of the problems I see is that people aren't prepared. I live my life by the motto "Be Prepared" (see username). One of the Merit Badges I teach is Emergency Preparedness, and with camping, my Scouts are okay going without electricity and electronics. Even if you're not interested or able to participate in Scouting, swing by your local Scout Shop and pick up an Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge booklet and learn what you can do to Be Prepared. It doesn't extend to just hurricanes.
You and I are highly unlikely to be able to fix the infrastructure; we can, however, be prepared for doing without it.
Because things are bad sometimes let's excuse unlimited incompetence when expected situations are ignored and cause inevitable catastrophic failure.
Sometimes plans fail so let's excuse failure to plan.
When a huge storm blows through with minimal fuss because preparation and regulation was taken seriously let's downplay the risk and deregulate and dismantle safety apperatus as they are clearly unneeded....
It goes on and on... why did we hire these security guys we never have breaches, why did we hire these sys and network admins everything always works, why do we have all these pesky earthquake codes no buildings have fallen recently...
After nearly 40 years I still can't understand the mental gymnastics required to be so obdurate. It's just nihilistic slash and burn thinking isn't it.
An obvious question is: why doesn't Houston have underground power? It turns out that Houston really shouldn't exist. It's built on a swamp. It's also hot so heat dissipation is an issue. So it's expensive [2]. Houston is also famous for its lack of zoning [3]. Combine this with a lot of really old neighbourhoods that don't, for example, have sufficient setbacks to bury cabling and you have a hot mess.
It's also worth pointing out that Houston is one of the worst urban sprawls on the planet. It's almost as large as LA with slightly more than half the population.
It's accurate to describe Houston as a low-lying car-dependent hellscape built on a swarmp with no urban planning in a hurricane zone.
[1]: https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-07-22/texas-elec...
[2]: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/05/24/burying-...
[3]: https://therealdeal.com/texas/2023/03/16/dont-say-the-z-word...
Geez. I thought LA was quite bad already.
1. The Greater Houston Metro Area is larger than Wales;
2. Greater Houston has fewer people than London but is almost twenty times the area;
3. IIRC if liad out the Greater Houston area over England it would stretch from London to Birmingham;
4. Greater Houston is, in fact, larger than several states including New Jersey;
5. Greater Houston is more than half the size of Switzerland.
Nobody really likes to think about the consequences of building in spaces where it’s not well-suited to human habitation at that scale - or about who too-commonly pays the price.
And, it's a minor, minor thing, but as a bonus, having lines out of sight is very nice.
Undergrounding costs are around $1M per mile. The US has millions of miles of lines.
Houston has a higher density than say Magdeburg
There’s NEVER 1M customers per mile in a distribution system. There’s only going to be a few thousand per substation. Half of the line miles will have customer counts in the tens or ones.
...but... that's like, uh, how projects like this actually get financed. On a per customer (which I know is distinct from per person) and per monthly bill basis, capitalized and amortized. Why would I use a lump sum unit when that's not how it's going to be paid for, or a per distance unit when pieces of dirt don't pay money, people do?
Pal, this is just how basic corporate accounting works, something you might like to look into if you are interested in opining on what units are best for comparing capital costs.
You’re also completely wrong. Utilities do not get to pass on costs to specific customers. It is, at best, just a compelling point with regulators to build it into the rate case for capital spending.
The point is there's no technological barrier, just made up paper barriers.
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/29/16560706/hurricane-sandy-an...
That is not the comeback you think it is. New York was unprepared for that and intra not designed for saltwater flooding because nobody had ever expected that kind of weather to make it up here. It triggered a lot of changes now that New York knows it needs to be ready for serious hurricanes and saltwater flooding
Also I never heard the term SoPO before. We called it hurricane sandy.
Really weird seeing complete darknesss to the south with just a march of flashlights coming uptown to charge their phones in Duane Reade.
> the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish.
Any Texans wanting to talk about their special case can have a look at Iberia and its meteorology, for example.
The notion that North American weather is anomalistic is false.
>The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually.
Europe doesn't have hurricanes. Europe has 1/4 as many tornadoes as the US.
Which part of Iberia's weather are you referring to?
Ie. If power lines at one end of the street get felled by a tree, power just comes from the other end of the street instead.
High voltage distribution lines can be done the same - every transformer getting fed from at least 2 places.
Obviously with many lines down, such a system might leave everyone with power, but total power deliverable is still lower. For that, you need smart metering that integrates with consumers distribution boards such that at times of stress on the power network, less important loads are turned off by default (ie. Pool heaters), whilst lighting and fridges stay on.
Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.
That would imply a live wire under a tree. Not a good idea.
> Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.
Tons of places do that, in exchange for a lower rate you install a box that lets the utility shut off your AC when demand is very high. It's available in almost all states last time I checked.
Incredibly, my fiber internet never went down the entire time. That part of my infrastructure is buried and they back it all up with proper generators.
I do wish Comcast (and Tmobile) would use generators instead of battery backups. We get about 4 hours of internet when the power is out and I run the home router off of a generator.
For some real numbers for Houston specifically in the middle of the hot summer months, input 77002 (a Houston metro zip code) into Texas govt's electricity provider search engine https://powertochoose.org/ ; it will show most plans are around 12-14 cents per kwh, down to 10.9 c/kwh on a variable 12 month 500kWh plan.
Source on that?
Also, when did people vote for this issue specifically? Was there a referendum about this?
Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40951647 - July 2024 (68 comments)
Portland too had that major cold snap where power was out due to last mile transmission problems. I know at least one city in the metro area that sped up their plans to bury their power transmission because during that storm large parts of that city were without power for days.
As usual, socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits.
It's all a massive scam. It would be better if companies were not able to own other companies.
Ever increasing profit.
(I live in Dallas)
We also had a 2 weeks long power outage 20 years ago. Again, in Quebec
There's the answer.
A public utility is a natural monopoly. If given lack of regulation (or, wrong/weak regulation) it will of course seek to maximize profit at all cost, which means very little is spent on grid quality and maintenance (these things eat into profits, thus bad).
- due to climate change alone AND business predatory practice alone infrastructure are very vulnerable and there is no easy fix at infra level;
- p.v. and batteries for large slices of the inhabited planet where they are meaningful AT CHINESE PRICES are an expensive backup that can pay back itself even without emergencies.
Corollary: doing our best to annihilate companies who makes absurdly high margins on p.v. and batteries and do individually our best to be covered. Personally I eat my fingers a bit when 4 years ago I decide for a small (8kWh LFP) backup with only 5kWp p.v. instead of 10kWp/30kWh witch would give me enough also in winter in case of a blackouts. In summer I can be autonomous since local climate is hot only during the day, no need of A/C from early evening to mid-morning.
Corollary of the corollary: built modern well insulated homes is needed, not only to consume less as a whole society but also to live well individually.
WRT the local utility, I can appreciate that they have some hard choices ahead. There are two branches of possible futures: one where many more people are charging cars etc and require more power to domiciles; two where battery deployment at the edge bears the brunt of peak loads and requires a lower constant trickle or even nearly nothing as PV is more broadly deployed.
That shows a gaping misunderstanding of electricity.
For that to be possible in this situation, the assisted living and nursing homes would have to have their own, dedicated power plant that is knocked out by a hurricane, separate from the knocked-out power plants for anything else. Then you prioritize fixing that power plant first.
That would require them to be on their own dedicated circuits, separate from everything else in the same city block. And for the problem to be local to them, and not the outage of a big power station far away.
Idea: maybe these homes should have their own wind, solar and generators, not to be 100% reliant on the grid.
Each category has their own reliability targets, although I don't think policy specifies how that target is met: separate circuits or a backup generator.
My point -- it's all already known for 50+ years. And I believe it's all must be already done in Texas as well.
Any area near coast line is going to disappear over the next couple of decades due to climate change.
[1] https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2024/03/19/texas-populat...
Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis
In my neighbourhood in northern germany about 5% of the houses have them. They pay for themself in about 5-10 years.
edit: spelling
So yes, air conditioning is very common there, even if you're poor that's one thing you will try to find a way to get.
In the ghettos it's normally an old window unit, not central AC. Also shotgun shacks, which are houses setup with a straight-through floorplan so that if you open the front and back doors the whole thing becomes kind of a wind tunnel. Not as good as AC, but better than nothing.
In those neighborhoods, you'll also often see people (especially elderly and children) hanging out at the neighborhood church or mom and pop store, where there is air conditioning, if they don't have AC or it isn't working.
If these kinds of services don't exist in enough quantity, government subsidy could help.
They don't own the homes. They likely rent them.
> government subsidy could help.
More government money going directly over the people who most need it into the hands of the people who least need it. The property owner class redirects another crisis to their benefit.
I think for a rich sunny region like texas, best answer is resiliant microgrids with rooftop solar and powerwalls.
I mean how can they when reps like Ted Cruz fly off to Cancun when the weather gets really bad.
“People have a right to be extremely frustrated with CenterPoint. People are suffering through terribly oppressive heat, a lack of food and gasoline availability, debris everywhere, and much more,” Patrick said. “The poor and most vulnerable are suffering the most.”
Not, “People have a right to be frustrated with the government,”
From the outside, your own country seems to have a dystopian liking for government control of speech and the internet.
If your daily experience does not align with this perception, consider that Texans might be in exactly the same boat as you, perception-vs-reality-wise.
Acting like Texas isn’t uniquely shitty requires intentionally forgetting reality.
Do you have the magic solution that makes them resilient to natural disasters short of burying every single power line underground? Which is not only impractical but insanely expensive. The infrastructure has been physically damaged or destroyed. You fired off a politically charged comment and offered no specifics.
I don't know that it would help in this specific instance, but connecting Texas to the rest of the power grid would likely make the system overall more resilient.
The only way you can prevent damage from falling trees is to completely remove them.
Irrelevant wishful thinking. The outages are caused by localized physical damage. There is no shortage of grid power. Inter-ties to every grid in the world wouldn't help when the wires on the last mile have been physically destroyed.
Previous outages have been caused by issues with the grid rather than lines. Apparently CenterPoint is predicting that this summer power usage will near the grid's capacity and supposedly CenterPoint is known for underestimating.
"Do you have any suggestions other than what would actually work??"
Root cause seems to point towards prioritizing shareholder value over providing services, and lack of regulation enabled by Texas laissez-faire handling of utility providers.
A short timeline: In 2014 CNP reported ‘excess revenue’ but were allowed to keep it https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/10/20/texas-puc-leave....
In 2020 a major activist investor put a large stake in CNP https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/12/14/billiona.... The owner of that private equity group also happens to be a major donor to the political party of the current Texas governor, who appoints the commissioners who regulate public utilities (https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/paul-singer-hedge-fund-r...).
Texas electric utilities are regulated in theory, but in practice this regulation seems lax or at least not proactive. This was readily apparent in the 2021 freeze (Uri): https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/10/21/texas-re...
And later in 2021 CNP also made direct political donations to Texas politicians: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/04/texas-energy-industr....
It doesn’t seem like Texas has done much to improve regulation since the 2021 failure. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2022-11-17/texas-lawmakers-a...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/why...
It’s hard to see how these apparent conflicts of interest (and lack of regulation or consequences) don’t create an environment where a state supported monopoly can abuse their position by putting short term profits first.
> “The grid is a whole different issue which we’re addressing, have been addressing, and will continue to address,” Patrick said. “The power is down because the lines are down, and the transmission lines are down primarily because trees fell on them.”
Until every power grid failure, when they ask the Feds for relief money (this is notwithstanding that in cases like this, they are not just asking for money for the grid failures but the general aftermath of Beryl, but it is a component).
Underground lines would not be vulnerable to falling trees. But they are a lot more expensive to install, and when they require maintenence for any other reasons.
That and a lot of Europe got to do some involuntary infrastructure rebuilding in the 1940s that the US didn't.
I lived on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple years. The island gets hit with storms pretty regularly, two or three major storms in my lifetime if I'm not mistaken. All of the power lines were above ground until maybe 5 years ago for two reasons - the island had a pretty low density for full time residency and buried lines are expensive, and they were worried about issues with burying lines in a sand island that can quite literally move and shift after a major storm. It seems like the latter either isn't a concern today, and its a good thing because those power poles were always causing problems on the island.
It's like making global warming a worse problem with AC, so it gets hotter and we use more AC.
I live in Rome, Italy, we had 40C (104F) degree max temperatures during day, and even at night it doesn't fall below 29C (84) and we survive without AC just fine, not just me but the rest of my family in their houses too, of course it is sometimes uncomfortable, but that's summer.
The worst offenders though are the many shops that blast AC 24/7 and have their doors open! Put some goddamn sensors and sliding doors!?
I just can't look at it. Even worse, electricity comes and goes all time during summer and it's hard to work at times (I'm full remote).
I'm fully convinced nobody gives two damns about global warming and our own impact. It's better to just ignore our actions and focus on evil corporations so we keep avoiding doing anything, maybe buy and change our EVs every 3/4 years as it didn't make it worse.
Tell me you've never been to Texas in July without telling me.
The AC cools the house at the cost of many more KW.
The house gets cooler but this is all heat from the electrical usage.
The AC cools the house using about 3-4kW, total.
The roof on the house (assuming 29N because the article is about Houston, so between 10AM and 2PM, that's a Solar irradiance of 1kW/m^2) is receiving 157.9kW of sunlight, and then absorbing about 85% of that.
62F Rome 74F Houston
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/italy/rome/climate
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/houston/climate
Noticable vs humid and uncomfortable bordering on oppressive
https://www.weather.gov/images/tbw/dewpoint/DewPointScale.pn...
*edit to fix Houston dew point
There were 5,600 deaths across Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 2023 heatwave that could be attributed to a lack of AC [0][1]
Just because you and your family have been fine doesn't mean others can.
AC is a critical need in increasingly hot environments.
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/hotter-summers-kill-thousan...
[1] - https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/339462/978928905...
I used to live in an apartment built in the 70s which was a pain to cool or heat because it was so badly sealed. But the one benefit it did have is that on hot days with cool nights it'd very quickly cool off, without needing AC. My current place requires AC unless I mind waiting until 4am for it to cool off.
A well sealed and insulated house takes less to cool too, though. It doesn't just help in winter.
Sadly, in central Kansas where I live, it regularly forgets to get cool at night. Last summer we did our corn silage chopping at night and slept in the day, as we were getting burned trying to operate equipment. At night it was still very hot and muggy. IIRC the dewpoint was in the mid-to-upper 80s F.
[Edit] This is not about insulation but heat capacity.
thin wood as an engineer has many advantages over stone. Stone seens stronger but often it isn't where strength matters while being stronger where it doesn't-
As you mention, once a stone house heats up in the summer, that is an incredible amount of thermal mass to cool. Your AC would run non-stop. Similar issue in the winter, super high heating costs in cold regions.
The frost line where I live is around 5 feet deep into the ground- meaning that footings for any building have to be that deep to avoid shifting as the ground freezes and thaws.
Summer months thick stone walls can be nice if you are able to keep humidity out, but if you don't and your walls actually stay cool you're dealing with a lot of mold and mildew since water will be condensating 24/7.
I don't know how thick a feet is, where we live we don't measure distances by the length of the feet of the king.
But I have lived for 10 years in a house with 30 cm thick walls and it has a tremendously positive effect, when outsite it is 30C and inside the walls are still 20C into July.
"mold and mildew"
Didn't have that problem in 10 years. This more happens with modern insulation than thick stone walls from my experience YMMV.
As for mold and mildew, you only get that with modern insulation if you have a poor envelope- i.e. drafts in the walls due to improper sealing. It's not the sort of thing drier climates have to worry about at all, but in very humid environments such as where I live, preventing condensation inside is important. That means not having walls that are cooler than the dew point of the air getting inside.
Basements here are very prone to getting mold or mildew, because (a) they have solid walls, (b) are kept cool via the earth acting as a heat bank, and (c) will readily absorb moisture through the stone or cement.
Most around here have some sort of sealant paint or active dehumidification running in summer to avoid mildew. If the basement walls didn't have to be load bearing, solid wall construction would absolutely be the last choice for basements because they're definitely the worst for thermal and moisture resistance properties.
There are months of the year where it doesn't get less than like 32C. save for rare cold snaps were it'll dip down to 26C or so for an evening or two.
My pool, which also has some decent thermal inertia, is already at 30C. The average temperature is still going up outside.
All of Europe is further north than most of the US. This does some big things for the climate.
I've seen shaded portions of my concrete slab at 36C at 1AM
Just about drove me insane.
Note the temperature and especially the humidity sections.