7 ms·

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, lon

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

yellow_postit 6y ago
Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their own power grid. I don’t known if there’s enough micro grids in Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these conditions.
- fastball 6y ago
  It's not that extreme. Texas is huge. Having it's own grid is not some support of excessively-local craziness.
  - yellow_postit 6y ago
    Yes it’s a huge area but the Texas interconnection[1] has a long history of fierce protectionism from other parts of the national grid. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
  - 29083011397778 6y ago
    You're describing why Texas having its own grid isn't localized insanity, but for the uninitiated, it still seems like insanity. Why not connect (and be able to draw from) other grids?
    - VintageCool 6y ago
      If Texas were more connected to other grids and transmitting above a certain threshold of electricity across state lines, they'd become subject to federal regulations. They might have to ensure that their electrical system was built to handle a 10-year cold weather event, and that would cost money. This way, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can write a report after the 2011 Texas cold snap that took down the Texas power grid. FERC can recommend that companies which generate or distribute power be required to verify that their systems are weather-proofed before every winter and before every forecasted cold snap. And Texas can simply ignore it.
    - fastball 6y ago
      My point is that there are many different grids, and the Texas Interconnection is large enough that (if properly ruggedized) you could easily avoid the situation of this week. Too small and even proper ruggedization won't necessarily give you enough breathing room. In response to "why doesn't the TI join another grid?", I would have to ask "why don't the Eastern and Western Interconnections join together?"
jimkleiber 6y ago
The irony is that longer distance connections is also what spread covid from one community to another. I think it's often just a combination of things that gives us resilience. Both longer distance grid connections could help, but so could more off-grid solutions. Maybe just designing more fail safes at various levels.
ahnick 6y ago
I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?
- Retric 6y ago
  You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.
  - tharkun__ 6y ago
    Yes and no :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Sequence_of_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq... I really like this minute by minute play. > Estimated total affected people 55,000,000 Now this is not supposed to be a "NA vs. Europe" thing. So here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timelin... Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :) > In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Or just Yes. That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss.... “The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.” It’s just a question of cost. Regional grids could have more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare enough it’s not considered worth it.
redisman 6y ago
Also thinking longer term, climate change is making the polar vortex more unstable and more prone to "freak" incidents like this. Of course there has been zero thought put into any of the effects of that.
7thaccount 6y ago
I'm not sure how true this is. There are DC ties that allow Texas to import from both the East and West interconnection, but power is scarce everywhere now. So even if their region was fully AC connected, all the other nearby regions were scrapping the bottom of the barrel as well.
- worker767424 6y ago
  But the lines have a fixed capacity, and only Texas is having California-style rolling blackouts.
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    The West is having crazy snow too, so I assume it is just as bad. Just east of ERCOT is SPP which was also in an EEA3 and very low on capacity. Northeast of them is MISO which is also in an EEA3 event (ready to curtail load) and very low on capacity. So even if they weren't as islanded, they'd still be in a lot of trouble. Both SPP & MISO have also curtailed load which is always the last resort. This thread is focused on the Texas grid being isolated as a primary cause, when natural gas supply and low wind are much bigger problems to me.
refurb 6y ago
I think the big lesson here is “when you have extreme weather events, things can go wrong”. No more than that. To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black swan events happen, shit goes bad.
- falcolas 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is a truly "black swan" event. Cold fronts that bring snow and cold temperatures to Texas are becoming more and more frequent. This is simply the worst one so far.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like" attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained power lines, etc. Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Your most recent example is 80 years ago? And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they need to compete for limited resources.
      - StillBored 6y ago
        Power is different. You get to pay the price it takes to produce and distribute even if it happens to be slightly inefficient. Its only when short term MBA/Politics get involved do the engineers who size capacity, maintenance, etc get overruled to save money. Or you can go the free market route, and just let everyone race to the bottom, which means cheap service that fails when it gets cold, hot, traders decide to screw people, or a storm blows through.
bhupy 6y ago
On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state. We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally. At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Your entire argument is only valid if the other two major grids don't have the excess generation capacity to support the gap in Texas. Otherwise, it's cutting off a limb because of a papercut.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    Well, there's also a cost to connecting the other two major grids, and Texans have collectively decided that this cost is not worth it. Energy sovereignty is a concept we talk about in the context of nation-states, but it's also applicable in the context of States. Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas, and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
- pas 6y ago
  It's not like extreme weather events getting more and more frequent weren't foretold long ago by those pesky climatologists... Sure it's possible to learn from this, but the "efficiency" of that learning is predictably low.
bstar77 6y ago
No, having a distributed grid is what makes you more resilient. If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue.
- worker767424 6y ago
  > If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue. I doubt this. That would mean a lot of power plants were taken offline as solar ramped up, and I doubt that enough solar to cool a house from 105 to 75 can heat it from 15 to 70.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    The latest thinking is that with the seasonality of solar insolation and the current demand curve, a complete move to solar will require massive overprovisioning. (5x, 10x capacity at solar noon?) The price curve in 2050 or so would look funny to modern eyes: power would be free around noon, but expensive at night. Charge your car for nothing during the day, and enjoy endless hot water, but the minute the sun sets you'd cut your own throat rather than run anything power hungry. Amusingly, Texas in this current crisis is halfway there: the handful of people who haven't had their power cut off are going to see gigantic power bills next month https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-urges-customers-to-change-providers-to-avoid-astronomical-power-bill-amid-winter-storm https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-urge... I wonder what a similar cold snap would look like in the future. Long distance HVDC lines ramping up to full capacity. Strident alerts on your phone as KWh spot prices triple, then trigintuple. Water heaters and EV charges passing stop loss triggers and shutting off. A wood stove in every home. I see Texans in this thread talking about using space heaters, and boy will they regret that when they see the bill. Electric blankets and heat pads are dozens of times more efficient: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hardy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hard...
- mmaurizi 6y ago
  Solar panels don't generate that much power during the day, and even less when they are covered in snow.
cat199 6y ago
Strangely, the TX grid also wasn't impacted the multiple times that CA couldn't manage it's own portion of the western grid...
randyrand 6y ago
Interconnectedness is not a silver bullet. The 2003 East coast blackout incredibly large because of inter-connectedness. The inter-connectedness is actually what caused that. blackout, and what caused it to be so hard to recover from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

yellow_postit 6y ago

Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their own power grid. I don’t known if there’s enough micro grids in Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these conditions.

fastball 6y ago
It's not that extreme. Texas is huge. Having it's own grid is not some support of excessively-local craziness.
- yellow_postit 6y ago
  Yes it’s a huge area but the Texas interconnection[1] has a long history of fierce protectionism from other parts of the national grid. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  You're describing why Texas having its own grid isn't localized insanity, but for the uninitiated, it still seems like insanity. Why not connect (and be able to draw from) other grids?
  - VintageCool 6y ago
    If Texas were more connected to other grids and transmitting above a certain threshold of electricity across state lines, they'd become subject to federal regulations. They might have to ensure that their electrical system was built to handle a 10-year cold weather event, and that would cost money. This way, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can write a report after the 2011 Texas cold snap that took down the Texas power grid. FERC can recommend that companies which generate or distribute power be required to verify that their systems are weather-proofed before every winter and before every forecasted cold snap. And Texas can simply ignore it.
  - fastball 6y ago
    My point is that there are many different grids, and the Texas Interconnection is large enough that (if properly ruggedized) you could easily avoid the situation of this week. Too small and even proper ruggedization won't necessarily give you enough breathing room. In response to "why doesn't the TI join another grid?", I would have to ask "why don't the Eastern and Western Interconnections join together?"

jimkleiber 6y ago

The irony is that longer distance connections is also what spread covid from one community to another. I think it's often just a combination of things that gives us resilience. Both longer distance grid connections could help, but so could more off-grid solutions. Maybe just designing more fail safes at various levels.

ahnick 6y ago

I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?

Retric 6y ago
You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  Yes and no :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Sequence_of_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq... I really like this minute by minute play. > Estimated total affected people 55,000,000 Now this is not supposed to be a "NA vs. Europe" thing. So here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timelin... Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :) > In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Or just Yes. That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss.... “The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.” It’s just a question of cost. Regional grids could have more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare enough it’s not considered worth it.

redisman 6y ago

Also thinking longer term, climate change is making the polar vortex more unstable and more prone to "freak" incidents like this. Of course there has been zero thought put into any of the effects of that.

7thaccount 6y ago

I'm not sure how true this is. There are DC ties that allow Texas to import from both the East and West interconnection, but power is scarce everywhere now. So even if their region was fully AC connected, all the other nearby regions were scrapping the bottom of the barrel as well.

worker767424 6y ago
But the lines have a fixed capacity, and only Texas is having California-style rolling blackouts.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  The West is having crazy snow too, so I assume it is just as bad. Just east of ERCOT is SPP which was also in an EEA3 and very low on capacity. Northeast of them is MISO which is also in an EEA3 event (ready to curtail load) and very low on capacity. So even if they weren't as islanded, they'd still be in a lot of trouble. Both SPP & MISO have also curtailed load which is always the last resort. This thread is focused on the Texas grid being isolated as a primary cause, when natural gas supply and low wind are much bigger problems to me.

refurb 6y ago

I think the big lesson here is “when you have extreme weather events, things can go wrong”. No more than that. To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black swan events happen, shit goes bad.

falcolas 6y ago
I'm not sure this is a truly "black swan" event. Cold fronts that bring snow and cold temperatures to Texas are becoming more and more frequent. This is simply the worst one so far.
- StillBored 6y ago
  Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like" attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained power lines, etc. Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Your most recent example is 80 years ago? And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they need to compete for limited resources.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Power is different. You get to pay the price it takes to produce and distribute even if it happens to be slightly inefficient. Its only when short term MBA/Politics get involved do the engineers who size capacity, maintenance, etc get overruled to save money. Or you can go the free market route, and just let everyone race to the bottom, which means cheap service that fails when it gets cold, hot, traders decide to screw people, or a storm blows through.

bhupy 6y ago

On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state. We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally. At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.

unethical_ban 6y ago
Your entire argument is only valid if the other two major grids don't have the excess generation capacity to support the gap in Texas. Otherwise, it's cutting off a limb because of a papercut.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Well, there's also a cost to connecting the other two major grids, and Texans have collectively decided that this cost is not worth it. Energy sovereignty is a concept we talk about in the context of nation-states, but it's also applicable in the context of States. Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas, and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
pas 6y ago
It's not like extreme weather events getting more and more frequent weren't foretold long ago by those pesky climatologists... Sure it's possible to learn from this, but the "efficiency" of that learning is predictably low.

bstar77 6y ago

No, having a distributed grid is what makes you more resilient. If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue.

worker767424 6y ago
> If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue. I doubt this. That would mean a lot of power plants were taken offline as solar ramped up, and I doubt that enough solar to cool a house from 105 to 75 can heat it from 15 to 70.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  The latest thinking is that with the seasonality of solar insolation and the current demand curve, a complete move to solar will require massive overprovisioning. (5x, 10x capacity at solar noon?) The price curve in 2050 or so would look funny to modern eyes: power would be free around noon, but expensive at night. Charge your car for nothing during the day, and enjoy endless hot water, but the minute the sun sets you'd cut your own throat rather than run anything power hungry. Amusingly, Texas in this current crisis is halfway there: the handful of people who haven't had their power cut off are going to see gigantic power bills next month https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-urges-customers-to-change-providers-to-avoid-astronomical-power-bill-amid-winter-storm https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-urge... I wonder what a similar cold snap would look like in the future. Long distance HVDC lines ramping up to full capacity. Strident alerts on your phone as KWh spot prices triple, then trigintuple. Water heaters and EV charges passing stop loss triggers and shutting off. A wood stove in every home. I see Texans in this thread talking about using space heaters, and boy will they regret that when they see the bill. Electric blankets and heat pads are dozens of times more efficient: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hardy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hard...
mmaurizi 6y ago
Solar panels don't generate that much power during the day, and even less when they are covered in snow.

cat199 6y ago

Strangely, the TX grid also wasn't impacted the multiple times that CA couldn't manage it's own portion of the western grid...

randyrand 6y ago

Interconnectedness is not a silver bullet. The 2003 East coast blackout incredibly large because of inter-connectedness. The inter-connectedness is actually what caused that. blackout, and what caused it to be so hard to recover from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003