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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 generall
by 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 agoYour 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 agoWell, 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 agoIt'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.