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Comment by cozzyd | Hacker News Reader

Hope they have ample backup power

Doesn't matter where you are you need that. There is no place in the world where the grid is reliable enough that someone who wants to operate with high reliability can get by without ample backup power. Grid power is normally a lot cheaper than running backup power (that is the capital and maintenance costs are sunk costs, just counting fuel) so it isn't worth disconnecting from the grid despite having enough backup power that you could.

There are grids where you are planning for hours of power outage, grids where you plan for days, and grids where you plan for weeks. Texas is in that last category. And you have to ensure your internet uplink has similarly reliable backup power

some former soviet industrial parks are like that. They had redundant direct lines from say local power plant, a direct line from fairly far geographically removed Nuclear power plant and regular grid. They were classified as critical consumer so hospitals would get cut from the grid before they would.

One of my previous employers only lost our east-coast colo facility twice in their couple decades of existence:

- once when the DC ran out of diesel and couldn't get any more after Hurricane Sandy

- once when the backup generators caught fire and the fire department needed to kill grid power to the facility

Everything else is pretty reliable or easier to decouple from the local real world

Equinix Dallas was hours from running out of fuel during the last snowpocalypse.

It would be helpful for readers to know what Equinix is

> Equinix's infrastructure supports the digital services businesses rely on, from cloud computing and enterprise applications to content delivery and financial trading platforms.

They are a very popular "high end" server colocation provider and have their own network with many peering agreements.

A lot of large companies put their servers into Equinix data centers.

Is this saying it was "hours away" and safe or "hours away" and nearly missed a disaster? I assume the latter.

reminds me of "you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor" from SNL...

For the curious: https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-10-e-06-ed... @ 53:42

Presumably they've learned from that experience.

Hahahahahahahahhahaaaaaa hahahaaaaahaaah hahhahaaaa!!!!!

I'm assuming you interpreted they as ERCOT with that response

The people who live in Texas are completely and utterly shocked every time the temperature goes below 40F. Even though there is some kind of "winter" weather almost every winter, none of the houses or commercial buildings have insulation on any of the pipes. A lot of high traffic roadways are elevated and banked making them completely unusable if someone so much as spills a coffee on them, let alone having ice or even just rain on them. "Winterizing" is just not a thing. It is always deemed too expensive. Then disaster strikes, everyone freaks out, then forgets about it in a few months because the temp in the summers stays well north of 100F for weeks at a time. OF COURSE they haven't learned. It goes against human nature to think more than a few months ahead when the state "rainy day fund" is at stake.

Clearly, they spent a few hours too much on their backup capacity.

The following 2 years, TX deployed metric shittons of solar and it was growing steadily until the very stable genius axed incentives.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot

An exchange having to stop trading and gracefully shut down their systems for a few days doesn't really strike me as a disaster though.

It might be slightly inconvenient to people who want to sell their shares.

Not really because there are a lot of stock markets these days.

But depending on the setup, often you just cant "sell the one thing at another exchange which you bought earlier at a different exchange", sure this depends on the country/etc.

There may be some odd financial instrument that can only be traded on a single exchange, but that's generally not going to be something that is liquid enough for HFT trading anyway. The idea that a stock is listed "on the NYSE" and can only be traded there is a quaint anachronism. e.g. https://help.tradestation.com/10_00/eng/tradestationhelp/rou...

The NYSE was only closed for 3 business days after 9/11. Uptime is important for listed companies.

Wild! Source?

I know of one DC that does government hosting so that they get prioritized to keep the lights on.

I doubt the exchange infrastructure will be physically located in Texas.

In fact, it won’t be. Which is why NYSE was so quick to rebrand NYSE Chicago as NYSE Texas when TXSE made the announcement they were launching in Equinix NY4 in Secaucus. The only real differentiator these guys would have had (outside of listings rules) would have been location, but they opted for the lower resistance of locating with all the other markets.

Texas loses power one time for a week and the redditors will never let it go. Wild how this is still a cringe joke so many years later.

it was an avoidable catastrophe, not just a minor blip

I still remember the northeast blackout from 2003 too and that was only a part of a day for me

"There have been 263 power outages across Texas since 2019, more than any other state, each lasting an average of 160 minutes and impacting an estimated average of 172,000 Texans, according to an analysis by electricity retailer Payless Power (https://paylesspower.com/blog/blackout-tracker/)"

Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.

What you talked about is not a Texas grid problem, but a local problem. The Texas grid itself is very reliable.

> Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.

Yes, a rare storm knocked out power and people died. It is a big deal and a lot of things changed after the event.

But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.

Yeah, but that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Texas for example had ~400 heat deaths in 2024 depending on where you look but in 2023 it was 334 or 563 depending on your criteria [1].

>But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.

Most of these deaths are not because of electrification but the fact that homes are built out of bricks and mortar and become ovens with heat waves that get hotter each year and ~10% to ~20% [2] of homes in Europe have air conditioning meanwhile ~95% [3] of homes have air conditioning. Your apples to oranges comparison mostly shows how Europe is generically unprepared for climate adaption (specifically heat resilience) and has nothing to do with electrification stability.

[1] https://www.texasenvironment.org/news-room/heat-related-deat... [2] It's all over the place some places like UK are around 5% adoption while southern Europe can be close to as much as 95% adoption. [3] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/...

It's a perfect apples-to-apples comparison if you level accusations of grid incompetence at Texas. Should all those EU homes suddenly go out and buy AC, EU power grids would have to enact massive load shedding during heat waves. Such waves already push demand up, causing local blackouts and price spikes: https://www.ft.com/content/23b3dc59-b40f-48e2-ad93-e301de7ac...

The vast majority of these 400 heat deaths have nothing to do with the power grid. They are people living outdoors, roofers, elderly, etc. When the temps hit 105+ for long periods there are bound to be people who don't have access to AC or overexert themselves outdoors.

That website shows California as currently worse. It looks like Larger states just have more power outages, which is to be expected. Texas also is a weird state that is very large it gets Tornadoes, extreme heat, and hurricanes, while also having several very large metro areas in it. There also isn't anything indicated differences in grid monitoring, are all grids (like large rural grids) monitored to the same levels?

California has power outages as a matter of routine in some places. When I went there the rural areas were constantly experiencing load-shedding power outages and some of the rural lodging advertised that they had backup generators because this is so routine there.

also selective exurban areas, for fire prevention, might be skewing the numbers. our datacenters in the city don't get these outages.

We also have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg

We have high power demand in both winter and summer: in the latter, air conditioners use a lot; in the former, about half of Texans heat with electricity because we have less cold and so less usage of cost-effective, grid-preserving furnaces.

Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.

90% of the Texas grid is independent from the rest of the country

Texas has installed a vast number of solar and battery backup systems since 2019. And it will be a few years, but is going HEAVILY into nuclear (and for the next 3.5, is going to get auto-approval to actually build them. ERCOT is changing fast, don't rehash stale narratives.

Also wind, more than 40GW installed capacity, leading the USA and ahead of many other countries.

Only as long as the Texas politicians don't sabotage wind. Texas businesses make lots of money on wind, but the legislature and governor absolutely hate it.

So about one every 9 days that affects 0.55% of the population. So in a 3 year window a Texan has about a 50% chance of losing power for 2.5 hours. Seems pretty good to me.

Having experienced the Snowpocalypse and mini Snowpocalypse, weeks of 2019 PG&E PSPSes, and the 2000–2001 CALISO-Enron rolling blackouts, it's ridiculous for those in glass houses to throw stones.

Improper deregulation never ends well.

> Texas loses power one time for a week and the redditors will never let it go. Wild how this is still a cringe joke so many years later.

Texas had the most number of power outages between 2019 and 2023 [1].

It wasn't one time. And it's not a joke. Infrastructure weatherization is a very real overlooked (and expensive) investment that still has not taken place.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116952/documents/...

[flagged]

You originally called someone a redditor making a cringe joke for highlighting a serious historical problem. It wasn't clear to me that it was a joke at all, but my impression is that it seemed clear to you that it was a joke.

What if that person has also lived in Texas for 30 years? And what if they had a family member that died during that power grid failure in 2021? I personally would find it quite difficult to communicate to them the nuance of a local problem and a state-wide problem when the end result is the same: no power.

In the future, you might consider approaching an interaction online with more balanced judgement.

Edit: Actually, looking back at the original comment, it's not even clear they're talking about the Texas power outage in 2021. All they said was "Hope they have ample backup power." Seems like a reasonable thing to hope for what might be critical infrastructure.

Maybe you got a bit lucky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Backgr...

> In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state… Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems.

> Unlike other power interconnections, Texas does not require a reserve margin of power capacity beyond what is expected. A 2019 North American Electric Reliability Corporation report found that ERCOT had a low anticipated reserve margin of generation capacity and was the only part of the country without sufficient resources available to meet projected peak summer electricity demand.

If I hadn't been reading headlines I wouldn't have even known about the 2011 blackout, and I was definitely here for that. Things were pretty much normal for everyone around me and friends around the state (Houston, Austin, DFW, Lubbock, San Antonio, etc). The Superbowl even went ahead in AT&T stadium. It really wasn't as big of a deal as a lot of internet commenters seem to act like.

I lived in Texas and we never got rolling blackouts for this. We didn't hear about it from family and friends in every major Texas city. Maybe this means 75% of the state by area rather than population? We just didn't drive because much of Texas isn't set up to clear roads and, more importantly, few of our drivers know how to deal with snow and so most get very unsafe to drive around.

The report your wikipedia article cites for 75% says this: "In the case of ERCOT, where rolling blackouts affected the largest number of customers (3.2 million), there were 3100 MW of responsive reserves available on the first day of the event, compared to a minimum requirement of 2300 MW." So an eighth or so of Texas' ~25 million population in 2011.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2024/12/09/after-4-years...

I'm not sure what is meant by Redditors... I haven't used Reddit in many years.

Admittedly anectodal, but I don't remember any power outage here in Chicago over the last 11 years I lived here, but I was in Texas for work for a few weeks this summer at the NASA balloon base and there were multiple power outages.

The Houston metro area is particularly bad. When I lived in Austin, the outages were very rare. In Houston, I would guess there is at least 1 outage every month that lasts for an hour on average.

Anecdotal, but I've lived in DFW for over a decade. The only time I lost power for more than a minute was due to a drunk driver hitting a utility pole just outside my house. They had the pole fixed and everything working again within an hour.

Having lived in both DFW and Houston, I will definitely say Houston's infrastructure is much more fragile, but the weather is also much more extreme.

Yes, I agree. It was common to lose power for a day or so when the big hurricanes rolled through growing up Houston.

"Redditor" in this context is just an internet-savvy way of saying "sheeple."

Texan here. Going without power for a week during the 2021 winter black out really, really sucked. It had huge economic consequences.

Texas' grid was very reliable when I was growing up there. Since deregulation however, it's no longer reliable. It used to be mandated that grid facilities were overbuilt to have some headroom for emergencies. That's no longer true. Now, Texas utilities only maintain the minimum infrastructure needed for normal operations and they have no cushion if something goes wrong. Any CEO of a Texas utility that spends money building overcapacity gets fired by Wall Street.

This was supposed to change after the 2021 crisis, but I haven't seen much evidence that it has.

in many country, electric(or energy) is state company

that way any infrastructure that related to serve the citizen well being isn't exploited for profit

why US can't do this????

The US did do this for most of the 20th century. Or at least something close to this: Many utilities were private companies but they were regulated monopolies. The state allowed them to be monopolies in exchange for tight state control.

In the 1990s this started to change. The idea was that the different utilities could compete for customers, and thus they wouldn't be monopolies any more and thus market forces would take the place of government regulation.

Of course this has failed spectacularly. Deregulation brought us the Enron disaster and the 2021 Texas grid crisis, among others. But since corporations control the US government now, there's no chance regulation will be brought back.

I'm surprised that you put the blame squarely on the the (bought) government.

Deregulation and "free" markets are something that many americans actively want. You can argue that they're misinformed and they're advocating against their own self-interest. But it's still something they actively want, this isn't just the evil corporations taking control of the corrupt government.

In fact on this very site I'd wager that more than half of Americans users are against regulation in general, state ownership of any utility, or any additional control on financial markets.

Yeah, free market is great until some company is reach certain size and monopolies certain shares and forces to bend the market at will

and US citizen let them do it, how can't you vote the fck out of this is crazy

It's not just the "snowpocalypse". In Houston, for example, there have been multi-day power outages since then, often during hot weather where lack of adequate cooling can become a life-threatening concern. Personally I don't find it any more "cringe" than the weird boasting people like to do about our state.

“ Houston has the worst power outages in the nation; how bad is it in your ZIP code?”

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2025/10/07/check-no...

> Hope they have ample backup power

Texas has more reliable electricity than California

considering the California electricity provider PG&E shuts off the electricity multiple times a year when it gets windy outside, to prevent power lines falling (due to lazy maintenance) and starting a wildfire

I wonder where the California’s additional 13% tax on capital gains is being spent? SF parking ticket enforcement?

What did California have to do with this other than everything you are saying being laughable cope and false.

(Regional controlled brownouts and state wide power grid failure are not comparable)

Wondering why you'd bring up California in a discussion about Texas.

Whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

"us versus them", "blue vs red", "liberals vs conservatives"

Texas is the favorite punching bag of the left, and California is the favorite punching bag for the right. When one side is attacked, they defensively jump to the default. Which is kind of ironic, when you consider there's more Democrats in Texas than in many "blue" states, and the inverse is also true for California.

I can find many Republican representatives, Trump, and media personalities insulting New York with sweeping generalizations and hateful rhetoric.

The only negative comments from Democrat representatives and the media on the left I see is are critical of specific laws, for example abortion, but they don't insult the entire state or generalize.

If you need specific quotes let me know.

According to this Texas is the worst.

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO05/20240312/116952/HHRG...

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