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Analysis: Texas power outage leaves officials working political angles
- chovybizzass 6y agoI heard it was frozen pelicans on windmills.
- germinalphrase 6y agoI heard it was frozen politicians tilting at windmills.
- choonway 6y agonot sancho panda at it again?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- salawat 6y agoI heard the windmills uprooted and started blasting Waco.
- vkou 6y agoThe politicians responsible aren't frozen, they are patting themselves on the back in their 72-degree homes for having an independent energy grid free from federal oversight - or from cross-state assistance.
- germinalphrase 6y agoFrozen one way or another. It’s their inaction that led to this result.
- kasey_junk 6y agoThe question this leaves me with is does Texas rely more heavily on natural gas power due to their usage of wind/solar power sources?
- morsma 6y agoYes typically Gas generation are used in combination with wind power as their up and down cycle are fast compared to other sources. Secondly, Texas is overflowing with natural gas due to fracking.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- philipkglass 6y agoNuclear can perform fine even in very cold weather, but one of Texas's reactors went offline due to freezing water: https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/nuclear-reactor-in-matagorda-county-shutoff-because-of-weather-concerns/article_7126430a-709a-11eb-a770-cb3d1f5f9219.html https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/n... So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.
- dfsegoat 6y agoThe US tests many of it's reactors in Idaho Falls, Idaho (fairly cold). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nuclear_Energy_Projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nucl...
- kasey_junk 6y agoPresumably nat gas and coal can perform fine in cold weather as they are major sources of electricity in northern climes that get much worse weather much more often. I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
- watmough 6y agoHere in Spring Texas, I’m seeing rolling blackouts since Tuesday pm. Few hours on. Few hours off. Having a gas fire and stove is killing it for us. I’m planning on switching one of our water heaters to gas so we can be covered for hot water in power outages.
- other_herbert 6y agoI’ve gone tankless and have a gas tankless water heater on a battery backup and I can also power it from a generator if needed... so from the battery I get around 90 mins of usage... highly recommended
- macintux 6y agoIt sounds like you're one of the relatively lucky ones. From what I've heard "rolling" blackouts are a misnomer for large swathes of the state, unless by "rolling" you mean "the blackout rolled in and never rolled out". Good luck. I'd be glad to suffer short blackouts here if the grid were interconnected so we could share power with your state.
- jounker 6y agoYeah, rolling blackout seems to mean more than 24 hours for my friends and relative back there.
- sp332 6y agoI couldn't believe the WSJ Editorial Board came out with an article saying otherwise. Wouldn't being blatantly factually incorrect about business analysis hurt their reputation among their target audience?
- vernie 6y agoNot Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal! Say it ain't so!
- dang 6y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a ton and we ban that sort of account. We're trying for something a bit different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Pfhreak 6y agoEditorial board's audience is "my tribe", and I don't believe that "my tribe" ever really has much of a factual requirement. I know I unconsciously support the positions of my tribe more those of not my tribe. I suspect that the target audience of WSJ is inclined to like WSJ no matter what the editorial board pursues as long as they stay within their tribal lane.
- sp332 6y agoThat's true to some extent, but when it hits people in their wallets, it starts to break down somewhat. Taking the wrong side of this bet could lose businesses really large amounts of money.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> I couldn't believe the WSJ Editorial Board came out with an article saying otherwise. Wouldn't being blatantly factually incorrect about business analysis hurt their reputation among their target audience? Who do you imagine the audience is for the editorial pages of the WSJ? Even long before Murdoch took it over, that part of the paper has a very different reputation and appeal than the rest.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adolph 6y agoBetter explainer: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-outage-analysis/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-outage-a... It appears that wind and solar power produced more electricity this week than they were expected to produce, but at this time of year, that’s a relatively small part of the expected statewide generation. Generation from gas and coal plants was far below expectations, causing supply to fall as demand rose. How much of that is bad design — a case where the system should be reworked — and how much was operator error is still to be sorted out. As someone in the Houston blackout and hearing a bit of the initial blame-game: I’d like to find out what failure modes were gamed out, what likelihood’s were assigned to each and how and what mitigation was chosen with the knowledge that between time, money and people not all failure scenarios can be covered. For example: water vapor in methane (natural gas) freezes and causes sensor and valve problems which have shut plants down. That seems predictable to a point, something that operators with experience in other climates would know about. On the other hand, the mitigation strategy for that failure may run counter to fixes for hot weather problems.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI suspect that it wasn't the mitigation was too challenging, just costly. Someone looked at the map and said, "Texas? You'll never need to be handling subzero temperatures over a long time period." I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy. This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.
- shawnz 6y ago> I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy. Playing devil's advocate here: It might not have been malicious or lazy, but actually just good judgement in avoiding unnecessary waste and getting those services deployed sooner for less cost to the customer. Of course it looks bad now that the situation they didn't expect to happen has happened, but in the long term, were the losses worse than what they saved by not implementing extreme cold weather mitigations?
- legitster 6y agoIt's kind of crazy that power plants are competing with consumers over a shared energy source: natural gas. You can use it to heat your home, or you can send it to a power plant to convert it into electricity and heat your home at a 3x markup. But regardless, you are relying heavily on a single resource in a single state.
- sp332 6y agoIn Texas' usual weather, an electric heat pump would be much more efficient than burning the gas for heat directly.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoPrescient post from November 2019 about transitioning Texas to heat pumps and the benefits of doing so. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-texas-sized-gas-for-electricity-swap https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-texas-sized-g... > According to a paper from Pecan Street, an Austin-based energy research organization, the transition would reduce climate-warming pollution, save Texas households up to $452 annually on their utility bills, and flip the state from a summer-peaking to a winter-peaking system. And that winter peak would be “nothing the grid couldn’t evolve to handle,” according to co-author Joshua Rhodes.
- jounker 6y agoNot terribly prescient. The current cold snap has even shut down coal and nuclear plants in Texas.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoI'm discouraged no one is asking about the elephant in the room - which is why the polar vortex has shifted to the extent that these events are happening at all. It's not just Texas. There has been extreme cold across Europe, and unseasonable warmth across parts of the Arctic. Of course it's far too late to fix the primary cause now. But it's still true that extreme weather events caused by climatic instability were being discussed more than twenty years ago. Adding more of Power Source [X] is a bandaid. The real problem is structural, and it could have been solved more cheaply back then.
- Lammy 6y agoAtomic energy, please. This is a solved problem :(
- notacoward 6y agoNot really. Besides the obviously unsolved waste-disposal problem, one of the main problems in Texas seems to have been non-weatherproof control and distribution systems. Nuclear does nothing to solve that. Texas has nuclear plants, and they've been unable to contribute for the same reasons as every other generation technology.
- macintux 6y agoWell, only 1 of Texas' 4 plants is offline, so it's doing a heck of a lot better than natural gas.
- ALittleLight 6y agoThe waste disposal problem isn't solved? What part of "Put it in a hole" isn't solved yet? The waste issue seems very well solved to me. Nuclear has been providing a fifth of US power for decades - and more in some other countries. Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).
- notacoward 6y agoYou are aware that those holes are leaky relative to the half-life of the waste they contain, right? Decades? Pffft. No, that problem's only deferred, not solved.
- db48x 6y agoThere is no nuclear waste, only different kinds of nuclear fuel. We _could_ have started building reactors that can extract power from that fuel decades ago.
- United857 6y agoLink is broken for some reason, use the archived one: https://web.archive.org/web/20210216231402/https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/16/natural-gas-not-wind-turbines-main-driver-texas-po/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210216231402/https://www.polit...
- bneumann 6y agoI wonder what made up for electricity shortages before they had wind turbines.... Oh, right. It was coal. Thank goodness we got rid of coal. Sure, it's way cheaper and more reliable than wind power, and a couple dozen people are dead due to the blackouts in freezing temperatures.. But there's a strong chance that ditching coal in Texas has somehow kept the planet from overheating by .0000001 degrees, so it's all good!
- Grim-444 6y agoIt really feels like they're trying hard to manipulate the statistics. They mention that wind lost a full 50% of its capacity, but only mention that natural gas / coal made less than "was estimated". I don't really care what somebody estimated it would make, I want to know what capacity was lost. 10%? 90%? That and the last 5 paragraphs departing from just reporting facts and instead start trying to convince the reader of a viewpoint gives the article a smell for me.
- spodek 6y agoWhile the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity. It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time. The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years. We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.
- xenadu02 6y agoTexas has taken a very "free market" approach to regulating electricity. I lived there during de-regulation and whatever else happened it didn't lower the price of electricity very much. In my opinion it was an excuse to line some pockets. At any rate there has been zero investment in grid interconnects which could have been much more helpful. ERCOT only has the capacity to source sub-1% of load over the interconnects which is not meaningful. That's one of the ultimate failures in my mind: A relatively small investment in HVDC interconnect upgrades would have allowed the grid to import power - especially from the US Western grid which has not been impacted the way some parts of the US Eastern have. ERCOT is fairly toothless as well. I'm not sure they bothered to issue any requirements for weatherproofing prior to the freeze but they wouldn't be able to do much about it if the generating plants refused to comply. And the Texas Railroad Commission regulates Natural Gas. And by "regulate" I mean let them do whatever they like.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoHow fully was it de-regulated? An advantage of regulation is that it generally shields you from lawsuits. If you follow the rules, you generally can't be successfully sued for negligence. If there are no rules more of the responsibility falls on the courts. If things were fully deregulated the producers should be hit with some massive lawsuits from the families of those who died. IANAL.
- bcrosby95 6y agoThere have been no investment in grid interconnects because ERCOT does not want to abide by federal regulations.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThere are (small) interconnects, yet ERCOT is still not federally regulated.
- bcrosby95 6y agoThese are small, and so far the courts have ruled those small interconnects do not open them to federal regulation. There were lawsuits back in the 70s over this. Mess with the status quo too much and that could change. If they want to continue to avoid federal regulation, it's in their best interests to not invest heavily in interconnect.
- sep_field 6y agoCapitalism working as intended was the main driver of the Texas power shortage. Texas' grid was explicitly designed to profit off of shortages, which is why it has always been kept separate. Former governor Rick Perry said Texans would rather have no power than have federal regulation of their grid. The mayor of Colorado City Texas said the government owes the people nothing and that the strong will survive and the weak will perish. Until we have socialism, exploitation and abuse of the poor will continue.
- betwixthewires 6y agoSo I don't know if you read the terms of service for this site, but it isn't Reddit. While any topic can be discussed (and is), this site isn't about shilling your pet political ideology and character attacking political opponents. If you want to have a discussion about the merits of different political ideologies then do that. But this is not a community designed for you to crusade.
- sep_field 6y agoDirectly quoting people is not character attacking them: Here's a screenshot of what Tim Boyd (the mayor I quoted) said, in his own words: https://twitter.com/Holiday1326/status/1361808806515253248 https://twitter.com/Holiday1326/status/1361808806515253248 and here's Rick Perry in his own words: https://www.republicanleader.gov/whats-up-in-texas/ https://www.republicanleader.gov/whats-up-in-texas/ I'm not in any way mischaracterizing what these people say and therefore it is not a character attack. You may disagree with my conclusions, and you might even be justified saying my conclusions don't belong on this site, but you can't just imply I'm lying or simply trying to make people look bad.
- dang 6y agoRecent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159680 - "What went wrong with the Texas power grid?", 2021-02-16, 1010 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945 - "Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold", 2021-02-15, 35 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893 - "Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid", 2021-02-15, 568 comments
- minikites 6y agoOf course, this was never in doubt. The right wing of the USA has become increasingly un-tethered from reality in the past decade or so and the gap between their beliefs and reality has been repeatedly shown to be false. https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1362140199644495874 https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1362140199644495874 "We've gone from Big Mistake to Big Lie. The official GOP response to the power outage is now in the same moral and intellectual universe as Stop the Steal and Jan 6 was a false-flag antifa operation. No acceptance of reality, let alone responsibility."
- betwixthewires 6y agoI'd say most people who spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on politics, particularly party politics, have become untethered from reality.
- minikites 6y agoEverything is political. Someone's "politics" is just shorthand for "This is how I think other people should be treated".
- betwixthewires 6y agoEverything is not political and the only people that say things like that want to forcibly inject their political ideology into unwilling peoples lives.
- minikites 6y agoYou must live a life of unimaginable privilege if this is what you believe and I'm sorry if thinking about that makes you uncomfortable.
- balozi 6y agoWhy all the competing narratives? We can actually measure power produced and where the gaps occurred. Seems to me like this is a simple case where facts can be verified and corrective actions deployed. Political spin will not keep anyone warm.
- minikites 6y agoIt's important to know who in government caused this so we can assess their performance on the next election day. It's the entire point of voting in the first place. In this case, all available evidence points to the Republican officials in the government of Texas, so keep that in mind if you're a resident of Texas.
- drivingmenuts 6y agoWe all know how this will eventually wash out. People will make noise for a while, there will be legislative noise. Power operators will grease the skids and nothing will happen. Then the next big freeze happens and the cycle will start again. Meanwhile, the governor will deflect the blame onto Democrats, who haven’t been power for 20 years and can’t get elected here anyway, no matter how many people die.
- betwixthewires 6y agoOh come on, I thought this site was about interesting technical discussion, but it appears people are cashing in on a disaster to attack their political opponents. If anyone's working political angles it is people writing and sharing hollow articles like this one.
- autoditype 6y ago> Or on the bumbling rollout of vaccines. The article picks on this amongst other items, but I want to know: who HAS had a successful rollout of vaccines? The US, the UK, and the EU have all failed. Is there a model state, province, or nation that has been doing 'great' at rolling out of vaccines?
- dhd415 6y agoThe article's author clearly has an ax to grind if an unsubstantiated "botched Covid vaccine rollout" accusation is thrown into an article about this winter storm and the power grid. In reality, Texas has one of the most effective vaccination rollouts being tied for the tenth-highest percentage of available doses administered. A friend of mine who's employed at Moderna commented that Texas's non-micro-managed approach to vaccinations has proven quite effective. I do wish that Texas's power grid were more resilient, but that is an entirely unrelated topic.
- RickJWagner 6y agoTexas gets 25% of it's power from wind. https://www.city-journal.org/texas-cold-snap-a-warning-for-wind-power-advocates https://www.city-journal.org/texas-cold-snap-a-warning-for-w...