Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

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>Texas has shown no interest in life support critical.

I'm not sure that this is correct. I was initially worried about how Mom would fare since she lives alone and is over 80. During the entire one week period of power problems in Feb. 2021 my Mom never lost power, not even a quick brown-out. Her home is within a half mile of a local hospital which also never lost power. The area around the hospital did not lose power so businesses and homes close by had no issues with heating, cooking, bathing, etc during the cold blast. That fact allowed me to stay here at my place a couple hours away and manage my own situation which was fairly easy compared to many others in the state.

Your other statements are quite true and to date no one who played a part in mismanagement of utility power in Texas has been held accountable nor will they ever be in a libertarian state where regulations exist only to guarantee a profitable situation for a commercial entity. In fact, most electricity customers in Texas ended up paying for the huge cost increases that occurred as those in charge tweaked the system in real time to maximize their own profits.

Texas needs regulations worse than most other states. Grifters, fraudsters, and thieves have filled too many critical positions for too long.

>...in a libertarian state

I don't think any organization that considers themselves to be libertarian has ever called Texas a "libertarian state". For example:

>...Texas’ institutions and policies continue to bear something of an old statist legacy. In the Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States study, Texas scores a mere 17th, behind even the southern states of Florida (#2), Tennessee (#6), Missouri (#8), Georgia (#9), and Virginia (#12).

https://www.cato.org/commentary/texas-really-future-freedom

Are there any Texas national or state politicians who are members of the Libertarian Party or even refer to themselves as Libertarian?

Heating your house/cooking/bathing etc during this time put extraordinary strain on the grid. A big reason why others did not have power is because those that did did not reduce their consumption by much. So many of my neighbors/friends/collegues made comments like "we didn't lose power, so we kept the heat cranking at 75". So it would make sense that load shedding primarily affected neighborhoods, but my recollection of the events from people who lived near emergency centers was use it up before it goes away.

You must live near and work with some selfish people.

I have more family up there where Mom lives and they lost power for all or most of the week so they all shuffled operations to the homes that had the most reliable power and pooled resources so no one had to be hungry or cold.

In times of stress, people tend to only care about themselves and their close family

> A big reason why others did not have power is because those that did did not reduce their consumption by much.

First, that was the big manufacturers. ERCOT couldn't force big companies off the grid, and they didn't go off grid until the press noticed and started complaining.

Second, the Texas grid has insufficient granularity to actually shed enough non-critical load to do rolling blackouts. There are too many "critical" things connected to the same circuits as non-critical ones, and it would cost money to split those loads (something Texas just ain't gonna do).

Third, the base production got hit because fundamental natural gas infrastructure wasn't winterized, froze and exacerbated the whole situation. It would cost money to fix. (aka: something Texas just ain't gonna do)

Finally, when you don't have big industrial consumers defining your power grid (aka massive overprovisioning), you can't "shed load" your way out of trouble.

The fundamental problem is that, like so many things in the US economy, personal consumption is so low that it doesn't help when the problem is systemic. We've optimized houses with insulation, LED lighting, high-efficiency appliances, etc. Consequently, the difference between "minimal to not die" and "fuck it, who cares" in terms of consumption differential isn't sufficiently large to matter when a crisis hits.

My house had zero power for 3 days straight. No cooktop either, because that's electric, and no water heating. It got to be ~30 degrees inside.

I'm in the Austin area and lost power for 2 days. Some friends of mine lost power for almost a week.

We're near DFW. Mom is north of us by a bit. We lost power too, for days. Towards the end we had rolling outages that were predictable so we prepped anything that needed heat or power and as soon as the lights came on we made fresh coffee and tea and water for oatmeal or whatever and recharged the water supply since we are on a private well. Our power bricks handled most of the phone/laptop power delivery so we basically topped off the charge on the bricks whenever we had power. My greenhouse is solar/battery powered though I did use 1 lb propane cylinders for the coldest periods since the heater in the greenhouse was way too small to manage temps that went below 10F. I lost some things but I learned some things too. We are much more resilient today.

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