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"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

"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.

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.