9 ms·

Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, officials say

130 points by irtefa 6y ago

ratsmack 6y ago
It sounds like their grid suffers from excessive fragility due to fragmentation and variability of infrastructure. I would also think there would be more automated switches in the system to moderate load balancing automatically.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Their grid prioritizes lower cost over reliability/durability of generators. If you don't pay for and govern capacity [1], it isn't there when you need it. [1] https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-capacity-market/ https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...
  - crmd 6y ago
    I live in New York City and pay a very high electric rate, however I’ve had less than 30 seconds of downtime (and on only one phase!)in the past 12 years, including through hurricane Sandy. So as an engineer I can’t be mad at my electric bill. Redundancy is expensive but worth it for me.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I agree entirely. It's a sales job to the general public.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  It seems a lot of this could have been avoided simply by winterizing the most high-producing sources of power (nuclear and nat gas). These plants are PLENTY capable of running in extreme cold and snow.
  - cure 6y ago
    Wind turbines have no intrinsic problems in extreme cold (cf. the Nordic countries, for example), but you have to make the investment to weatherize your turbines. Texas didn't prepare properly. Perhaps because they didn't want to spend the money, or because the people in charge think climate change is not real and won't affect them. I wonder how many "100 year" storms it is going to take for the latter to change. Probably more than just this one, though.
    - tharkun__ 6y ago
      With the added benefit of being able to blame renewables if it happens. Like they did/tried.
defen 6y ago
I know nothing about utility-scale electricity distribution ... can someone explain how "demand > supply" leads to things (apparently literally) blowing up?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  From the article: > The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
  - defen 6y ago
    Right, I mean physically what is happening that causes that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ihsw 6y ago
      The grid is a mesh network that self-balances -- eg: electricity automatically routes around damage. It's great when things work well (supply > demand) but if things go sideways then there can (and there has been) cascading failures. These failures are by design -- if too much electricity is routed through a given section of the grid then those sections will (for example) get too hot and surrounding materials (eg: plastic, wood, debris) will catch fire. Intentionally designing your equipment to fail in a non-catastrophic way is a sensible precaution. That said, the "seconds away from system-wide catastrophic failure" message could be (and probably should be) parsed as "long-standing cost-cutting measures made things go from bad to catastrophe rather than bad to worse." Sensible upgrades were skipped over (because those cost money), due diligence was not done (because that costs money), safety standards were lowered (because that saves money), etc etc etc. The argument that this was a Black Swan event is weak because the government should do its planning on multi-decade-long timescales, which should account for Black Swan events. The entire premise behind Texas having its own power grid was that being beholden to the West Coast/East Coast electrical grid dichotomy was to guard against a Black Swan event (civil war) -- this flies in the face of that rationale.
chris_va 6y ago
"Bus driver seconds from driving over cliff, if only they hadn't turned to follow the road!" ... Nothing in this article seems specific to ERCOT's grid vs any random ISO seeing a demand/supply mismatch.
- macintux 6y ago
  It does seem like a PR ploy to emphasize the fact that the operators did the right thing, and divert attention from the massive failures at the management level.
  - hengheng 6y ago
    Being addicted to the hero's tale is what holds this country back the most.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  A bus driver plans to be seconds from driving over a cliff, as that is the optimal way to drive in some cases. Not so, here. There was no need to be this close to the cliff.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    You really do have to drive close to the cliff when it comes to electricity generation. Producing too much power can damage the grid, and producing too little can damage the grid.
  - blt 6y ago
    Given that they were already stuck with the hardware, is it possible that an optimistic approach was a reasonable way to manage the grid? Constantly monitor the status, be ready to shut down parts at any moment, but hope that you won't need to? I do not know the answer to this question. I know nothing about power grids. However, if they were following such a strategy, it's not surprising that they would end up disabling the system "seconds and minutes away from a catastrophic failure". That does not make the shutdown a last-minute precarious decision. It could be a preplanned response to a certain combination of failure conditions. The article fails to disambiguate between "react quickly with a planned decision" and "react quickly after analyzing the whole situation from scratch". The latter makes the operator seem more heroic. I agree with nimbius that some of the quotes lean towards the latter, but it would be better if the article removed the ambiguity.
deepsun 6y ago
I've heard there is a good tech for backup generation in cases like that -- gas turbines. Not the cheapest one, but not too expensive either -- it could stay offline for months, and spin up in just a couple of minutes. Wondering what's the state of that in Texas.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- X-Istence 6y ago
  It's the gas turbines and power plants that failed to come online due to frozen gas pipelines...
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    That's simply an issue with winterization. It's nothing inherent to their operation during a winter snow storm. Russia runs all kinds of gas and nuclear power plants in cold parts of Siberia that regularly get this kind of weather. This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      You put the answer right in your post. Russia regularly sees weather like this. This is a rare/ record breaking event in Texas.
    - fredophile 6y ago
      Antarctica has wind turbines [0]. Arguments that renewable can't be winterized are wrong. [0] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm/ https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm...
      - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
        Those turbines also stop spinning when they freeze -- same as the ones in Texas.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asciimov 6y ago
This is the typical distraction of "Don't worry about how bad things are, think of how lucky you are that they weren't worse." Us Texans really need to focus on getting the people in charge out of office. I will vote for anybody that will work towards strengthening our infrastructure. Hell I'd run on an infrastructure platform if I had any idea how. (And of course the means to run.)
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2019/10/15/770332855/how-to-run-for-office https://www.npr.org/2019/10/15/770332855/how-to-run-for-offi... https://runforoffice.org https://runforoffice.org
  - buzzy_hacker 6y ago
    Also https://www.wherecanirun.org/ https://www.wherecanirun.org/
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  > And of course the means to run I'd vote for fixing this first, everything else will follow.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I'd vote for you if were to do so. I imagine we'll see an influx of people running on infrastructure in the near future, hopefully some of them will be doing more than "not wasting a good catastrophe".
- livueta 6y ago
  Here's something I've been wondering: an "infrastructure platform" sounds cool in theory at least in part because it's so vague; anyone can kinda take what they want from it, like the phrase "America is in crisis". Especially right now, I'm sure an infrastructure platform in the abstract would poll well. But in terms of concrete economic choices, the popularity of services like Griddly seems to indicate that many quite explicitly choose low (instantaneous) cost over reliability/price stability. It's like airline tickets: everyone loves griping about seatroom or whatever but revealed preference is for low-cost offerings. Put differently, as a non-Texan looking in, I guess I'm asking how hopeful you are that this zeitgeist can be capitalized on once you get down to actual policy and the inherent trade-offs you've got to deal with therein (and also when participants are warm and comfortable). To be clear I personally would vote for you in a heartbeat, but the cliffs in support between vague positive overarching statements and concrete policy proposals in other areas don't leave me super hopeful.
daenz 6y ago
Tangentially related: Has anyone else been shocked by the amount of widespread schadenfreude resulting from this disaster? I get that people dislike Texas for many reasons, but it seems like every avenue of "you deserve it" is being explored on social media towards the people there.
- bluedino 6y ago
  No different than anything else. Californians should not live near forest fires, New Orleans shouldn’t have been built in the gulf...
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I think (and hope) it is just a brief reflection on how useless many of those same attacks coming from texas politicians were every time there was a power issue in a blue state; examples- https://mobile.twitter.com/blkahn/status/1361682089310052354?s=21 https://mobile.twitter.com/blkahn/status/1361682089310052354... There is also the fact that Texas isolated itself from the national grid purposefully, which is worth reflecting on after this event. I agree that we should move on from that to helping our fellow Americans asap however.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  I mean there was plenty of schadenfreude directed at California during their electrical utility problems as well, much of it from the same people now scrambling to cover their ass regarding Texas's problems. You can argue whether tit-for-tat is a mature or useful behavior, but it isn't coming out of nowhere.
- dataflow 6y ago
  Not really "shocked" to see it, given that Texans mocked Californians during their wildfires earlier. [1] Especially given even as of yesterday Texan politicians were trying to blame this on Democrats and their plans for green energy. [2] That said I think/hope the sentiment is toward the politicians rather than ordinary people. [1] https://www.salon.com/2021/02/17/texas-republicans-mocked-california-for-blackouts-now-their-tweets-are-coming-back-to-haunt-them/ https://www.salon.com/2021/02/17/texas-republicans-mocked-ca... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-052453616.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-0524...
amluto 6y ago
> Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. I very much hope that the critical equipment on Texas’s grid would trip to protect itself instead of catching fire. I also very much hope that ERCOT knows how to start their grid from a complete shutdown in a couple of days, not months.
drocer88 6y ago
How did the pioneers survive?
- WJW 6y ago
  They did not have electricity to begin with.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Most of them didn't - our life expectancy in Texas today is miles above what it was in the mid 1800s and that's even without bringing in any self-selection of migration. Only the folks that thought they were particularly resilient would move to the frontier to begin with - someone with anemia probably isn't going to be traveling west and homesteading.
protastus 6y ago
"The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down." Technically correct yet hypothetical bullshit. Earlier in my career I worked in this industry designing automation equipment. A substation has more than enough protection relays with redundancies designed to shed load, turn on auxiliary cooling, trigger systems down the line, etc. The automation is far from rocket science, and reduces to comparing against thresholds and protecting the equipment or circuits as appropriate. Logic that matters defaults to a disconnected state, such that if the safety itself fails then the system is put in its most conservative mode, even if that means stuff turns off. It would take work and massive negligence to override multiple layers of automation (software, firmware and physical connections), so based on the information provided I'm not giving the operators here any special credit. No blue ribbon to the guy whose job was to watch a circuit breaker trip.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Even in Texas? They seem to have built everything in this saga to a fairly low standard.
  - protastus 6y ago
    At the scale hypothesized here (major substations, transmission lines), even in Texas. Large equipment that's hard to replace was at one point designed and certified against IEEE and IEC standards applicable to the global industry, with high safety margin, modeling harsh (to a point, catastrophic) operating conditions. Far beyond the requirements of consumer electronics. And there is no reason to believe a manufacturer capable of this scale (think ABB) would design/build/test a substation transformer from a playbook intended for a global market, and then execute to a lower standard because the customer is in Texas. For clarity, I am not referring to small stuff. Power pole transformers will occasionally blow up. But those get quickly replaced or bypassed without months-long outages.
valuearb 6y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when people asking for money are telling you these things.
thepasswordis 6y ago
I'm really getting sick of seeing all of this rhetoric from people on HN, reddit, etc. that seems to want to dance on the graves of a bunch of people in Texas who have literally frozen to death. It is especially ridiculous considering that many of these people doing the dancing are from California, and many of them have fled that state towards Texas, a place they now are demanding implement California-like policies. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. California has massive wildfires, rolling blackouts, and deaths as a result of these things every single year and has for the last decade. It happens, like clockwork, every single summer. And yet every single year the state throws its hands in the air, blames the federal government, and waits until next year. Texas is facing a once-in-a-century black swan event[1]. If Texas got a storm like this every February for a decade, and continued doing nothing about it, then sure, maybe they could start looking to others (although literally anyone except the Californians) for help. Until then I hope that everybody either proverbially picks up a shovel, or closes their mouth and gets out of the way. There are people suffering. Stop trying to extract joy from it. [1]No. The storm that Texas saw in 2011 is not comparable to this. Yes, there were recommendations made on how to mitigate catastrophic temperatures like Texas is seeing. There are also mitigation strategies for things like: war, flooding, meteor strikes, hacks, earthquakes, and other "acts of god". It is simply not feasible to put ALL of these recommendations into practice.
- panarky 6y ago
  Your argument is the textbook example of whataboutism.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
cameldrv 6y ago
My question is why so many plants went down in such quick succession that such a quick reaction was necessary. From the graphs I’ve seen, it was 10GW in less than an hour. That is dozens of power plants, presumably geographically distributed and not using the exact same gas supply or experiencing the exact same weather conditions. This caused prices to increase by about 200x and caused electric generators in Texas to earn about an extra $10 billion per day. This reminds me of Enron in California in 2000.
- panarky 6y ago
  Many of the plants are under common ownership. If you own 10 plants and shutting 3 of them can cause the remaining 7 to increase profits by 10,000%, it's not hard to see how that might influence your decisions. This is market failure. The incentives magnify minor events into catastrophes.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Yeah that's what I want to know. If it's a physical problem like low gas pressure or pipes freezing, I don't see why so many plants would shut down at the same time. If they were shut down for economic reasons, that suggests that there was a huge market failure, especially now, almost five days later and they're still not fully operational.

130 points by irtefa 6y ago

It sounds like their grid suffers from excessive fragility due to fragmentation and variability of infrastructure. I would also think there would be more automated switches in the system to moderate load balancing automatically.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Their grid prioritizes lower cost over reliability/durability of generators. If you don't pay for and govern capacity [1], it isn't there when you need it. [1] https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-capacity-market/ https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...
- crmd 6y ago
  I live in New York City and pay a very high electric rate, however I’ve had less than 30 seconds of downtime (and on only one phase!)in the past 12 years, including through hurricane Sandy. So as an engineer I can’t be mad at my electric bill. Redundancy is expensive but worth it for me.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I agree entirely. It's a sales job to the general public.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
It seems a lot of this could have been avoided simply by winterizing the most high-producing sources of power (nuclear and nat gas). These plants are PLENTY capable of running in extreme cold and snow.
- cure 6y ago
  Wind turbines have no intrinsic problems in extreme cold (cf. the Nordic countries, for example), but you have to make the investment to weatherize your turbines. Texas didn't prepare properly. Perhaps because they didn't want to spend the money, or because the people in charge think climate change is not real and won't affect them. I wonder how many "100 year" storms it is going to take for the latter to change. Probably more than just this one, though.
  - tharkun__ 6y ago
    With the added benefit of being able to blame renewables if it happens. Like they did/tried.

defen 6y ago

I know nothing about utility-scale electricity distribution ... can someone explain how "demand > supply" leads to things (apparently literally) blowing up?

ceejayoz 6y ago
From the article: > The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
- defen 6y ago
  Right, I mean physically what is happening that causes that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ihsw 6y ago
    The grid is a mesh network that self-balances -- eg: electricity automatically routes around damage. It's great when things work well (supply > demand) but if things go sideways then there can (and there has been) cascading failures. These failures are by design -- if too much electricity is routed through a given section of the grid then those sections will (for example) get too hot and surrounding materials (eg: plastic, wood, debris) will catch fire. Intentionally designing your equipment to fail in a non-catastrophic way is a sensible precaution. That said, the "seconds away from system-wide catastrophic failure" message could be (and probably should be) parsed as "long-standing cost-cutting measures made things go from bad to catastrophe rather than bad to worse." Sensible upgrades were skipped over (because those cost money), due diligence was not done (because that costs money), safety standards were lowered (because that saves money), etc etc etc. The argument that this was a Black Swan event is weak because the government should do its planning on multi-decade-long timescales, which should account for Black Swan events. The entire premise behind Texas having its own power grid was that being beholden to the West Coast/East Coast electrical grid dichotomy was to guard against a Black Swan event (civil war) -- this flies in the face of that rationale.

chris_va 6y ago

"Bus driver seconds from driving over cliff, if only they hadn't turned to follow the road!" ... Nothing in this article seems specific to ERCOT's grid vs any random ISO seeing a demand/supply mismatch.

macintux 6y ago
It does seem like a PR ploy to emphasize the fact that the operators did the right thing, and divert attention from the massive failures at the management level.
- hengheng 6y ago
  Being addicted to the hero's tale is what holds this country back the most.
TameAntelope 6y ago
A bus driver plans to be seconds from driving over a cliff, as that is the optimal way to drive in some cases. Not so, here. There was no need to be this close to the cliff.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You really do have to drive close to the cliff when it comes to electricity generation. Producing too much power can damage the grid, and producing too little can damage the grid.
- blt 6y ago
  Given that they were already stuck with the hardware, is it possible that an optimistic approach was a reasonable way to manage the grid? Constantly monitor the status, be ready to shut down parts at any moment, but hope that you won't need to? I do not know the answer to this question. I know nothing about power grids. However, if they were following such a strategy, it's not surprising that they would end up disabling the system "seconds and minutes away from a catastrophic failure". That does not make the shutdown a last-minute precarious decision. It could be a preplanned response to a certain combination of failure conditions. The article fails to disambiguate between "react quickly with a planned decision" and "react quickly after analyzing the whole situation from scratch". The latter makes the operator seem more heroic. I agree with nimbius that some of the quotes lean towards the latter, but it would be better if the article removed the ambiguity.

deepsun 6y ago

I've heard there is a good tech for backup generation in cases like that -- gas turbines. Not the cheapest one, but not too expensive either -- it could stay offline for months, and spin up in just a couple of minutes. Wondering what's the state of that in Texas.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
X-Istence 6y ago
It's the gas turbines and power plants that failed to come online due to frozen gas pipelines...
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  That's simply an issue with winterization. It's nothing inherent to their operation during a winter snow storm. Russia runs all kinds of gas and nuclear power plants in cold parts of Siberia that regularly get this kind of weather. This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    You put the answer right in your post. Russia regularly sees weather like this. This is a rare/ record breaking event in Texas.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    Antarctica has wind turbines [0]. Arguments that renewable can't be winterized are wrong. [0] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm/ https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm...
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      Those turbines also stop spinning when they freeze -- same as the ones in Texas.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

asciimov 6y ago

This is the typical distraction of "Don't worry about how bad things are, think of how lucky you are that they weren't worse." Us Texans really need to focus on getting the people in charge out of office. I will vote for anybody that will work towards strengthening our infrastructure. Hell I'd run on an infrastructure platform if I had any idea how. (And of course the means to run.)

toomuchtodo 6y ago
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/15/770332855/how-to-run-for-office https://www.npr.org/2019/10/15/770332855/how-to-run-for-offi... https://runforoffice.org https://runforoffice.org
- buzzy_hacker 6y ago
  Also https://www.wherecanirun.org/ https://www.wherecanirun.org/
Griffinsauce 6y ago
> And of course the means to run I'd vote for fixing this first, everything else will follow.
Shared404 6y ago
I'd vote for you if were to do so. I imagine we'll see an influx of people running on infrastructure in the near future, hopefully some of them will be doing more than "not wasting a good catastrophe".
livueta 6y ago
Here's something I've been wondering: an "infrastructure platform" sounds cool in theory at least in part because it's so vague; anyone can kinda take what they want from it, like the phrase "America is in crisis". Especially right now, I'm sure an infrastructure platform in the abstract would poll well. But in terms of concrete economic choices, the popularity of services like Griddly seems to indicate that many quite explicitly choose low (instantaneous) cost over reliability/price stability. It's like airline tickets: everyone loves griping about seatroom or whatever but revealed preference is for low-cost offerings. Put differently, as a non-Texan looking in, I guess I'm asking how hopeful you are that this zeitgeist can be capitalized on once you get down to actual policy and the inherent trade-offs you've got to deal with therein (and also when participants are warm and comfortable). To be clear I personally would vote for you in a heartbeat, but the cliffs in support between vague positive overarching statements and concrete policy proposals in other areas don't leave me super hopeful.

daenz 6y ago

Tangentially related: Has anyone else been shocked by the amount of widespread schadenfreude resulting from this disaster? I get that people dislike Texas for many reasons, but it seems like every avenue of "you deserve it" is being explored on social media towards the people there.

bluedino 6y ago
No different than anything else. Californians should not live near forest fires, New Orleans shouldn’t have been built in the gulf...
mattnewton 6y ago
I think (and hope) it is just a brief reflection on how useless many of those same attacks coming from texas politicians were every time there was a power issue in a blue state; examples- https://mobile.twitter.com/blkahn/status/1361682089310052354?s=21 https://mobile.twitter.com/blkahn/status/1361682089310052354... There is also the fact that Texas isolated itself from the national grid purposefully, which is worth reflecting on after this event. I agree that we should move on from that to helping our fellow Americans asap however.
Analemma_ 6y ago
I mean there was plenty of schadenfreude directed at California during their electrical utility problems as well, much of it from the same people now scrambling to cover their ass regarding Texas's problems. You can argue whether tit-for-tat is a mature or useful behavior, but it isn't coming out of nowhere.
dataflow 6y ago
Not really "shocked" to see it, given that Texans mocked Californians during their wildfires earlier. [1] Especially given even as of yesterday Texan politicians were trying to blame this on Democrats and their plans for green energy. [2] That said I think/hope the sentiment is toward the politicians rather than ordinary people. [1] https://www.salon.com/2021/02/17/texas-republicans-mocked-california-for-blackouts-now-their-tweets-are-coming-back-to-haunt-them/ https://www.salon.com/2021/02/17/texas-republicans-mocked-ca... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-052453616.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/texas-governor-walks-back-fox-0524...

amluto 6y ago

> Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. I very much hope that the critical equipment on Texas’s grid would trip to protect itself instead of catching fire. I also very much hope that ERCOT knows how to start their grid from a complete shutdown in a couple of days, not months.

drocer88 6y ago

How did the pioneers survive?

WJW 6y ago
They did not have electricity to begin with.
munk-a 6y ago
Most of them didn't - our life expectancy in Texas today is miles above what it was in the mid 1800s and that's even without bringing in any self-selection of migration. Only the folks that thought they were particularly resilient would move to the frontier to begin with - someone with anemia probably isn't going to be traveling west and homesteading.

protastus 6y ago

"The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down." Technically correct yet hypothetical bullshit. Earlier in my career I worked in this industry designing automation equipment. A substation has more than enough protection relays with redundancies designed to shed load, turn on auxiliary cooling, trigger systems down the line, etc. The automation is far from rocket science, and reduces to comparing against thresholds and protecting the equipment or circuits as appropriate. Logic that matters defaults to a disconnected state, such that if the safety itself fails then the system is put in its most conservative mode, even if that means stuff turns off. It would take work and massive negligence to override multiple layers of automation (software, firmware and physical connections), so based on the information provided I'm not giving the operators here any special credit. No blue ribbon to the guy whose job was to watch a circuit breaker trip.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Even in Texas? They seem to have built everything in this saga to a fairly low standard.
- protastus 6y ago
  At the scale hypothesized here (major substations, transmission lines), even in Texas. Large equipment that's hard to replace was at one point designed and certified against IEEE and IEC standards applicable to the global industry, with high safety margin, modeling harsh (to a point, catastrophic) operating conditions. Far beyond the requirements of consumer electronics. And there is no reason to believe a manufacturer capable of this scale (think ABB) would design/build/test a substation transformer from a playbook intended for a global market, and then execute to a lower standard because the customer is in Texas. For clarity, I am not referring to small stuff. Power pole transformers will occasionally blow up. But those get quickly replaced or bypassed without months-long outages.

valuearb 6y ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when people asking for money are telling you these things.

thepasswordis 6y ago

I'm really getting sick of seeing all of this rhetoric from people on HN, reddit, etc. that seems to want to dance on the graves of a bunch of people in Texas who have literally frozen to death. It is especially ridiculous considering that many of these people doing the dancing are from California, and many of them have fled that state towards Texas, a place they now are demanding implement California-like policies. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. California has massive wildfires, rolling blackouts, and deaths as a result of these things every single year and has for the last decade. It happens, like clockwork, every single summer. And yet every single year the state throws its hands in the air, blames the federal government, and waits until next year. Texas is facing a once-in-a-century black swan event[1]. If Texas got a storm like this every February for a decade, and continued doing nothing about it, then sure, maybe they could start looking to others (although literally anyone except the Californians) for help. Until then I hope that everybody either proverbially picks up a shovel, or closes their mouth and gets out of the way. There are people suffering. Stop trying to extract joy from it. [1]No. The storm that Texas saw in 2011 is not comparable to this. Yes, there were recommendations made on how to mitigate catastrophic temperatures like Texas is seeing. There are also mitigation strategies for things like: war, flooding, meteor strikes, hacks, earthquakes, and other "acts of god". It is simply not feasible to put ALL of these recommendations into practice.

panarky 6y ago
Your argument is the textbook example of whataboutism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cameldrv 6y ago

My question is why so many plants went down in such quick succession that such a quick reaction was necessary. From the graphs I’ve seen, it was 10GW in less than an hour. That is dozens of power plants, presumably geographically distributed and not using the exact same gas supply or experiencing the exact same weather conditions. This caused prices to increase by about 200x and caused electric generators in Texas to earn about an extra $10 billion per day. This reminds me of Enron in California in 2000.

panarky 6y ago
Many of the plants are under common ownership. If you own 10 plants and shutting 3 of them can cause the remaining 7 to increase profits by 10,000%, it's not hard to see how that might influence your decisions. This is market failure. The incentives magnify minor events into catastrophes.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  Yeah that's what I want to know. If it's a physical problem like low gas pressure or pipes freezing, I don't see why so many plants would shut down at the same time. If they were shut down for economic reasons, that suggests that there was a huge market failure, especially now, almost five days later and they're still not fully operational.