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The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem

• ptcrash 6y ago
  What this really helps point out is how frequently people voice their opinions on matters online without fully assessing the situation. As a Texan, I agree that the situation is more nuanced than what's being presented on the news, social media, and on HN. It's important to look at the policies in place to fully understand what could have been done to prevent the current problems.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids. Heck, even friends of mine who are affected take whatever stance they already agree with. Deregulation is good! It's the GOP's fault! It's the windmills. No, its not the windmills! I'm starting to internalize the idea that the news and the popular talk on social media is heavily distorted and based on what we are already biased to believe.
    • ptcrash 6y ago
      I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives. Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters. We have multiple large metropolitan areas but we also have massive rural regions that tend to outweigh when it comes time to vote.
      • rbanffy 6y ago
        I always suggest democratic voters to mode to districts where their votes count the most.
      • dominotw 6y ago
        > Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters meaning it would've been fair if didn't have democratic voters?
        • ptcrash 6y ago
          As in, Texas has a fair blend of both parties but get perceived as being "red". With the current political atmosphere, people tend to want to make issues political. What this article is trying to point out is that this was an engineering problem, not a policy problem.
      • BitwiseFool 6y ago
        I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance. If you look at the red vs blue divide nationally, this is quite literally the perfect storm for blue team to yell at red team "I told ya so". Intense weather due to climate change which red team denies, loving the idea of an independent grid that cuts you off from other states, being against federal regulations but asking for federal aid, and having one of your senators fly to Cancun in the middle of it. I could go on, but all of this happened right after talk of succession was trending on social media. I also believe a lot of online activists are hoping to capture the energy and anger over this event to "turn Texas blue" as they have been wanting to do.
        • tommyguide 6y ago
          You're not wrong, but red team is not exactly wasting the opportunity to score political points either: Rick Perry and others saying "See? Wind power + green new deal bad".
          • BitwiseFool 6y ago
            That's true, I am just more exposed to the Twitter and Reddit coverage, which is decidedly blue team. There is absolutely a bunch of red team folks trying to use this to their advantage. However I will say that I don't think red team is going to be as successful as blue team in this event.
        • rootusrootus 6y ago
          > I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance. Consider that Texans have a well-earned reputation for talking about secession from the union, Don't Mess with Texas, etc. In some ways the dynamic between Texas and not-Texas reminds me of the dynamic between USA and not-USA. > turn Texas blue People have to realize that there is not really red states and blue states. It's urban-vs-rural, and whether a state turns red or blue has everything to do with the growth of metropolitan areas, not some shift in political values.
      • folkhack 6y ago
        > I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives. Californian with family in the Midwest - lots of folks are too dense to realize there are people on the other side of natural disasters when these horrible situations are happening. That prejudice happens to some degree, I've lived it =/ Regardless of politics, best of luck to you and your own.
    • joe_the_user 6y ago
      It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids. It's as if ... being affected by this terrible doesn't make someone an expert on situation since whatever is happening with the grid is quite far from those affected. But it's not like there being differing opinions means that truth and falsehood cease to exist. Someone is lying, specifically Fox News and the governor of Texas are about alternative energy. Some policies really were problematic. etc. And I'm sorry the diverse people of Texas have to suffer this. If one policy makers were the one who had to freeze in the dark but that's life.
      • fuzzfactor 6y ago
        >If one policy makers were the one who had to freeze in the dark but that's life. Exactly. Sen. Ted Cruz just was discovered flying with his family to Cancun because they lost power and water like the rest of us. Had to return in disgrace a few hours ago and is currently still not able to offer a consistent excuse for abandoning his constituents. https://abc13.com/politics/it-was-a-mistake---ted-cruz-tells-abc13-of-cancun-trip/10351914/ https://abc13.com/politics/it-was-a-mistake---ted-cruz-tells... In each media interview he gives a different shade of the story as he tries to walk it back. He's got to be lying in at least all but one scenario he explains it as. Definitely not good enough for Texas.
    • txlpo78 6y ago
      I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding. That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc). It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO. There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
      • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force. > if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues. Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.” Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.
        • 6y ago
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids. The people who started publicly adopting passionate (and quite obviously false) stances despite not knowing (or worse, knowing but adopting the false stances anyway) about electrical grids live in and have responsibility for Texas, the crisis, and the response to it. And that's what turned it into a tribal, partisan political issue. You Texans don't like that, you should consider it next time you find yourselves in front of a ballot. Or sooner; effective political engagement requires more than voting.
      • konjin 6y ago
        I was unaware I could use the ballot to remove dumb twitter users. Can you point me where I can do that?
    • fuzzfactor 6y ago
      >It's the windmills. No, its not the windmills! It's the Bozos. They're going to goof things up and they know it so they need you to be _tilting at windmills_ in other directions for distraction.
    • HNfriend234 6y ago
      It is like that because of social media and news outlets that basically produce "confirmation bias" news that has no other intention but to reinforce one's own existing beliefs. Both sides do it so it is not a partisan issue. This is what I think is actually behind the reason that the USA is so divided now and each side of the debate is so entranced in the typical political discourse.
  • duxup 6y ago
    >What this really helps point out is how frequently people voice their opinions on matters online without fully assessing the situation. Does it? This article was written by someone with no expertise, and the result of some internet searches.
    • ptcrash 6y ago
      The author did more research than the common layman. From my perspective, the author fully assessed the situation. Do you have reason to believe the author hasn't done enough research?
      • duxup 6y ago
        Does doing more than "the common layman" make the conclusions reliable? I don't have any conclusions, mostly because I'm not confident in a layman's random few searches / ability read them in the appropriate contex could provide much in the way of conclusions.
        • ptcrash 6y ago
          > Does doing more than "the common layman" make the conclusions reliable? Yeah, by definition. Someone who has more knowledge in a subject is more reliable than someone who doesn't.
          • duxup 6y ago
            Does that make the conclusions reliable? I'm not sure why you want to use layman as a measuring stick.
            • gwoplock 6y ago
              > Does that make the conclusions reliable? Not totally but more then other posters on HN that were making claims without research. The NERC report will be totally reliable but that will take 6+ months. And if my conclusions are wrong, they're wrong and I'll update my blog. > I'm not sure why you want to use layman as a measuring stick. I made this post as a direct response to previous HN and Reddit posts where the layman were forming conclusions. I did not see a single person quoting or referencing a single standard to back up their claims. I went out looking for something to back up claims and this is what I found. I formed conclusions off this and included them. If an expert was to tell me I'm wrong and show me what I missed I would be happy to update my blog. I included the first paragraph just to show that the post was not an expert opinion and was what I found after some research.
  • aspaceman 6y ago
    I find it very funny how sensitive Texans have been over criticism of their state when California is talked about every day here. I think you're being extraordinarily precious about the criticism.
• spacemanmatt 6y ago
  It's too bad we can't hear from more Texans on this, right now. [edit: I am Texan; 28% of my city was still without power or water just earlier today]
  • eth0up 6y ago
    Not a Texan, but stuck in Fort Worth and Dallas since Sunday, making tomorrow the sixth day in a stationary truck. I think it was Tuesday that the truckstop was without power along with traffic lights, but only for 12 hours, in Burleson (off i35W) whereafter no further outages were observed. I finally unloaded today (7 miles north) where the warehouse was without power while a construction crew repaired a broken pipe and the ensuing damage. Many backroads are iced, warehouse lots are skating rinks, but highways have one or two drivable lanes. I'm parked outside a shipper in Irvin which was unattended today but seems powered. Many places seem yet to resume operation. Of course, this is through the lense of a single trucker hauling a 53' trailer which limits where I can go and most notably, park. I'm going fucking bonkers though, and all without a cent of pay. Obviously many others are enduring worse.
  • duxup 6y ago
    I hope they get power soon, but is a Texan more likely to voice accurate information about their power grid than anyone else? It's probably not that many of them who know it well.
• mrfusion 6y ago
  “Region struggles from weather it’s not used to”. That’s enough news for me.
  • spacemanmatt 6y ago
    Care to confirm my pet theory that you have working utilities and food at this time?
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    We'll have a whole lot more of that this century...
  • ptcrash 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a good distillation of what's going on. I think people have severely looked over just how significant this weather was and why it was really reasonable for engineers to not anticipate this situation. What we really need to be reminded of is that this was caused by global warming stifling the typical northern jetstream. As long as global warming stays a problem, we will need to anticipate these types of extremes across the entire US.
    • makomk 6y ago
      I think it's more like the mainstream media downplayed just how significant and unusual this weather was for nakedly partisan reasons - specifically, to feed a bogus narrative that this happens every decade and Texas just doesn't fix the problem because they're a bunch of right-wing anti-government morons. It's hard to overstate just how awful and corrosive the current state of the US media is. I've seen people elsewhere insisting that their Texan acquaintances must've been brainwashed because they think this was a once in a lifetime occurrence. (Which it was.)
      • bluGill 6y ago
        This might be once in a lifetime, but it isn't that far off from normal extreems
      • 6y ago
• wnevets 6y ago
  Its only a national problem from the point of view there are millions of people who want that kind of leadership at the national level.
  • spacemanmatt 6y ago
    That is a problem but far from the only problem.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    The thing is, Texas winter weatherization standards exceed the NERC standards. Effectively the guidelines that NERC put out have been codified by the PUCT as requirements that are audited every year.
    • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Not relevant. Since the operating philosophy is that industry "knows what it is doing" and doesn't need to suffer the burden of regulation, they should demonstrate such competence regardless of any lackluster standards. An isolated event is forgivable but this has happened before with no effort to fix the issue.
• rangewookie 6y ago
  Lets get back to the basics here. If Texas was connected to either the East or West grid, would it have power right now? Yes. Edit - Texas can only access a tiny fraction of energy reserves due to weak connections to the East and West Grid. Imagine those connections were stronger or direct. I'm sure neighboring states will suffer too. I'm applying general knowledge of distributed systems, I'm not going to act like I know the specifics of the US power grid. If you go it alone, in any system, there are consequences.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    Maybe. Oklahoma, and other surrounding states have been dealing with rolling blackouts but on a smaller scale. I would wait for the NERC report on this.
  • ptcrash 6y ago
    If you read the article, you would see that there's a strong chance they still wouldn't have power. Texas' grid currently exceeds the requirements set out by NERC for winterization.
  • nradov 6y ago
    The Texas grid does have interconnects with the other US grids and Mexico. However the capacity on those is insufficient for current demand.
    • jussij 6y ago
      You are just playing word games as you just redefined the term interconnector. In power grids an interconnector is used to move large amounts of power between grids and if it can't do that then is not an interconnector. The Texas grid is and independent grid control by ERCOT exactly for this reason. It was always designed to be independent by the Republican government that has controlled Texas for the last 20 years.
      • shortandsweet 6y ago
        The 3 separately controlled grids have been around a lot longer than 20 years. Blaming politicians doesn't really solve much. The regulatory boards are not Republicans or democrats, those representatives are in the US government.
• glennvtx 6y ago
  It all boils down to utilities not thinking they needed to protect wellheads from these kinds of temperatures in Texas. I get how that can happen, many of you make the same mistake with outside faucets. I spent the past few days with rolling outages, I would love to find a way to blame this on government, but mostly i blame the weather.
  • ptcrash 6y ago
    Exactly; I'm tired of this being conflated into a ~political issue.~ Edit: Sorry, let me specify. I'm tired of this being a Texas-only political issue. I agree that politics are at play but this isn't localized specifically to Texas' grid.
    • selectodude 6y ago
      It is a political issue. Texas refuses to regulate their grid to meet certain standards. They're so unwilling to do it that they purposely keep their grid separated from the rest of the country. Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.
      • ptcrash 6y ago
        Which standards should they meet? NERC'S? That wouldn't have helped.
        • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
          For your enjoyment, detailed recommendations from 2011, none of which were implemented: https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/08-16-11-report.pdf https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/08-16-11-report.pdf
          • ptcrash 6y ago
            The East, West, or Texas grids didn't implement it, you're right. My point is that Texas' grid is getting called out when that report was ignored by everyone. It's a national issue, not a Texas issue.
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  "Over the last few days I read online people saying that Texas' power outages had been caused by Texas being on its own grid… deregulation… Not following national standards…" And he goes into detail and discovers that this is basically the case. And sure, other providers in other states also have problem. Which means ... regulators should be more on the ball. So his summary is correct despite there being more details. It's like someone can't comprehend that if corporations didn't systematically hamstring it, regulation could work, that regulation and leadership did work for a good fraction of the 20th century.
  • edbob 6y ago
    The article finds fault particularly with the national standards not being adequate, and specifically points out that the standards in Texas are more strict than the national standards. He goes on to give some details on the enforcement of those Texan standards. In this case, following national standards as opposed to Texas's standards would have led to an even worse disaster. Your claim that being on a separate grid caused the outage is too strong to be supported by the data in the article, which is why he doesn't make that claim. Additional data could come out either in favor of or against your claim: although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized (edit: txlpo78 points out that it was not fully utilized), we need solid data on whether Mexico and the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem. No one is attacking regulation. Virtually everyone I've seen is in agreement that better regulation is necessary in this situation.
    • txlpo78 6y ago
      > although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized, we need solid data on whether the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem. As a data point: the interconnects were not fully utilized, as the Eastern DC tie had to be severed yesterday because power emergencies in the Eastern US meant that grid had no electricity to spare.
• jussij 6y ago
  The head line of the article does not seem to match its contents. The article spends 90% of the time describing problems in the Texas grid. The only mention of the nation problem is this throw away line at the end: > The issue of extreme cold weather and electrical outages is a national issue that needs to be addressed. However, after repeated failings it hasn’t really been addressed. Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA. But to date I only know of two such events and both occurred in Texas. To make matters worse the national energy regulator warned Texas this would most likely happen again: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-17/texas-was-warned-a-decade-ago-its-grid-was-unprepared-for-cold https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-17/texas-was... That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    > Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA. In 2014 the polar vortex brought power down across the Eastern Interconnection (citation 13) and again in 2018 (citation 10). > That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered. There currently are not standards for winter weatherization. In 2013 standards were proposed for this however they were rejected (citation 15). Finally in 2020 standards started the approval process however they wont be fully approved until November.
    • jussij 6y ago
      So for that event which states experienced state wide blackouts that lasted for days on end? Here is a write up of that event: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/us-polar-vortex-extreme-cold-weather-heads-to-east-coast-live https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/us-polar-vorte... Not a single mention of blackout. And the reason for that is the grid is well designed and has backup options that makes it resiliently to extreme weather events.
      • rcurry 6y ago
        The grid didn’t seem so great back in 2003 when NYC took a dive for two days. It was amazing seeing the whole city just dead in the water. Shit happens, but fortunately our infrastructure is fairly resilient and we can recover pretty quickly from this kind of thing.
• 99_00 6y ago
  Reminds me of the Great Ice Storm of 98. The North American Ice Storm of 1998 (also known as Great Ice Storm of 1998) was a massive combination of five smaller successive ice storms in January 1998 that struck a relatively narrow swath of land from eastern Ontario to southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada, and bordering areas from northern New York to central Maine in the United States. It caused massive damage to trees and electrical infrastructure all over the area, leading to widespread long-term power outages. Millions were left in the dark for periods varying from days to several weeks, and in some instances, months. It led to 34 fatalities, a shutdown of activities in large cities like Montreal and Ottawa, and an unprecedented effort in reconstruction of the power grid. The ice storm led to the largest deployment of Canadian military personnel since the Korean War, with over 16,000 Canadian Forces personnel deployed, 12,000 in Quebec and 4,000 in Ontario at the height of the crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
  • svnpenn 6y ago
    Sadly I fear nothing will change this time around, as here in the good old USA, we value the dollar more than human lives.
• JohnTHaller 6y ago
  They knew how to fix this after it happened in 2011. El Paso fixed it. ERCOT didn't. And the reason their small number of wind farms had issues, too, is that they didn't winterize those either.
• Meekro 6y ago
  Texan here, living in a suburb of Houston. This was a really unique week, but not that bad I think. Everything was totally covered in snow Monday through Wednesday, which was super-weird for Texas. My power was only out on Wednesday, 9am-6pm precisely. Pretty sure it was a rolling outage because it died and came back on the hour. Our water comes from a neighborhood well shared by about 10 houses here. That means when we lose power, the pump stops and we have no water. Our heating is natural gas, but lack of electricity to run the fan motors means no heat. When the power failed, neighbors went door-to-door making sure everyone had enough food, water, and blankets. Some people had indoor fires going and invited others to come and stay warm. One neighbor had a backyard pool and he let us come in with buckets and take back some water for flushing toilets. Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts. Most of the roads were covered with ice on Monday/Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed. Grocery stores had lots of empty shelves, but plenty of food, too. Safely driving to one was the hard part. Again, 15mph is pretty much your limit unless your car has AWD, winter tires, etc. I saw some photos showing huge lines to get into stores, and that was misleading-- it's probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they'll be open 12pm-5pm, but then not actually open until 12:30. When that happens, people would line up and wait (or wait in their cars). With dangerous road conditions keeping non-desperate shoppers away, I never saw the stores get overcrowded. Overall, things were pretty okay as far as I saw. I feel like some of the media reports were focusing in on the worst of it and gave readers a very wrong impression of how the average Texan was faring. To be fair, though, it would really suck if you broke a leg or otherwise needed medical care on Monday. [EDIT] Couple things I forgot to mention- There was another neighbor who had a generator that she was using to run an electric heater and heat up a single room in her house. She invited her neighbors to come and spend the night there if anyone was too cold, but power came back before the night came. Also, we had every faucet in the house dripping water-- this was enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I saw some burst pipes spraying water when I was driving on Monday, but they seemed to be in "abandoned" businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren't dripping.
• solidsnack9000 6y ago
  To summarize: * Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized. * The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them. * Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids. * It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point. Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    > Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states. Exactly. I'm not sure that even the new NERC regulations for winter weatherization go far enough. They seem to bring NERC standards closer to Texas'.
  • redisman 6y ago
    > estimated to be as much as ~45GW But if they had winterized that number would be a lot lower
    • burlesona 6y ago
      I mean in theory if they had winterized that number wound be zero, right? If I understood correctly the total demand was within the system’s theoretical capacity, but that capacity was not actually available due to the deep freeze.
      • azernik 6y ago
        Depends if winterization keeps you at 100% output during cold weather. It might, but I don't know enough about the subject to say for sure.
        • gwoplock 6y ago
• jplr8922 6y ago
  As an Canadian and ex power trader across north america (including ERCOT), I find the political interpretations of events very weird. Poor regulation and deregulation are not the same thing. Do you really think that talking about grid preparation for winter will get any anybody elected? The nuances of esoteric economic principles and advanced egineering are not cool topic which can be understood or debated through tweets and memes. The same can be said about a lot of tangible or intangible infrastructure. I think ERCOT-type failures will become the norm.
  • xxpor 6y ago
    The point is that politicians should be marketing themselves as leaders who take care of this kind of stuff so I as a constituent do not have to worry about it. They should be able to hire advisors who make sure they prioritize the right things. Instead what we have are pols who optimize for fundraising. Which means you get the opposite.
    • aidenn0 6y ago
      > The point is that politicians should be marketing themselves as leaders who take care of this kind of stuff so I as a constituent do not have to worry about it. ... They do (at least partly) market themselves that way, but they don't follow through because if you don't worry about it you're not checking if they follow through.
    • drjasonharrison 6y ago
      And there is a group of wealthy people who contribute money to reinforcing the idea that government (at any level) is incapable of fixing problems. Either through argument or by creating laws that hamstring the ability of members of the government to take action. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2019/11/15/can-comics-save-democracy-new-series-take-on-plutocracy-and-other-current-issues/?sh=7926e50245d4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2019/11/15/can-com...
  • eigenvector 6y ago
    As a Canadian power systems engineer who lives and breathes NERC compliance standards every day (something I'd never ever thought I'd see discussed by the broader public) I find it bizarre that everyone is staking out their position on this based on political allegiances rather than focusing on analyzing the event. There are also extremely broad misconceptions that Texas is somehow exempt from all federal regulation that are fueling people's motivated reasoning on this topic. NERC reliability standards are enforceable in Texas! [1] All existing and future NERC winterization rules apply just as much in Texas as anywhere else. Yes, ERCOT messed up. Yes, there are big issues to be resolved here. Some of those issues are national in scope and some are Texas specific. But drawing a direct line from Texas being its own interconnection to this failure simply doesn't follow the facts for me. [1] https://www.texasre.org/enforcement https://www.texasre.org/enforcement
• liquidify 6y ago
  Nicely written article. I also like your font and dark color scheme.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    I really appreciate that.
  • gruez 6y ago
    Could use max-width though. On a large monitor the lines get excessively wide.
• maybelsyrup 6y ago
  > As an aside I am not an expert in the grid or electricity, I am a software developer, and this is my best interpretation of the requirements I could find. If this kind of sentence isn't an example of why society is turning against SV/tech, I don't know what is.
  • mulmen 6y ago
    Really? Why? I figured it would be something like "I make surveillance equipment for a living" or "I am the reason you see ads before your favorite content" or maybe "I caused a genocide and am the reason you can't talk to your uncle anymore."
    • maybelsyrup 6y ago
      It's kind of a hot take at this point, and in a vacuum what the person is saying is, if anything, laudable -- he's announcing his own subject matter ignorance/inexperience and making a go of it as an autodidact, etc. Humble! But in the current context, this looks a lot like a lot of other, more famous attempts to disrupt or solve age-old, difficult problems using technology or software ... Problems that turn out to still be tough once the software-savior has put the solution on the market and absconded with the money. I think parts of society are starting to read a bit of arrogance in this approach after 20 years of big tech swallowing us whole.
      • mulmen 6y ago
        I don't get it. The post says even the NERC regulations are insufficient to prevent this situation and that Texas (ERCOT) may have even higher standards. I don't see any suggestion that a tech company or even technology in general would solve this problem. Just an admitted non-expert pointing out that the current best practices to not adequately prepare for this situation.
      • ptcrash 6y ago
        Having read the article, I didn't see any suggestions towards a solution... just clarifying which regulations would have helped/stratified the problem. Why do you have an issue with a non-expert clarifying that he's not an expert? I prefer people call out their own ignorance as apposed to implying expertise they don't have.
• etempleton 6y ago
  This is a nice overview, but I disagree with the dismissal of the root cause: The interconnects to the East and West coast grids do not have enough bandwidth to provide electricity in a true crisis. This is intentional to avoid federal regulation. As pointed out, there would still be issues caused by a complete lack of winterization in Texas—rolling blackouts would still be likely—but humans would at least be able to keep their homes above freezing and not have to resort to heating their houses with propane grills. That is the difference between a major inconvenience and a crisis. Life and death.
  • Armisael16 6y ago
    The interconnects that do exist weren’t being used at capacity so it’s hard to imagine having more would’ve more the situation meaningfully better.
• Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
  Be careful about early reports: for example, the claims an entire nuclear power plant tripped, and that it was due to a lack of weatherization. If you drill down to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission report https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2021/20210216en.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... (go to the bottom) only one of its two reactors tripped due to at the time of the report unknown problems with two feedwater pumps. The weather is of course a likely cause, but whatever it was it didn't affect the other reactor.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    Fair. In the documents I've found, it's not uncommon for sensors to have issues with the cold weather and force the station offline.
• maxerickson 6y ago
  It's not quite a national issue. There have not been regional issues in the Midwest, despite it being considerably colder than Texas, for longer (the average daily temperature in Minneapolis was 0 °F or below from the 6th through the 16th).
  • Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
    You might want to check with your neighbors to the west and southwest. The Southwest Power Pool which covers most of the Dakotas and by eyeball 2/5ths of Iowa has not had a fun time starting Monday 10:08 am https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/ https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/ I can report from further south of those states we've had rolling blackouts at times, although they didn't hit me personally. We've also move one level down in Energy Emergency Alerts each of yesterday and today shortly after 6 pm, another neither of those to Level 3 where you must shed residential loads.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      There's a difference between not having enough generation to meet extreme load and having 35 gigawatts of power drop out of service. It's also clearly that case that lots of operators are able to run reliably in extreme cold weather (of course they do that because it's a fact of life and not because of weatherization regulations).
      • Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
        It's not quite a national issue. There have not been regional issues in the Midwest, despite it being considerably colder than Texas, for longer....
        • maxerickson 6y ago
          A rolling blackout in Iowa isn't a regional issue in the Midwest.
• blunte 6y ago
  The problems are modern US capitalism/anti"socialism" problems. Most people do not want to pay for anything that might be more useful to others than themselves. Predictably when things go very wrong, this bites _everyone_ in the ass. Regulations are usually designed to provide some minimum standard, some predictability. Whether they are rules that say banks cannot invest deposits or utilities must build in higher level fail-safes, they are requirements which cost the companies some profit. Naturally the companies fight those requirements. When those companies are allowed to pour money into political campaigns, they naturally help elect people who will return the favor (by fighting regulation, or even deregulating). So yes, it is a nationwide problem. But it is more of a Red-state problem, because those are the places which fight hardest against measures that protect and benefit the general population.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Damn good research! Thanks for sharing it!
• technofiend 6y ago
  Good write up with some minor technical inaccuracies. First they are spelled "peaker" as in they cover peaks above the base load as base load generation is slower to ramp up or down. Second there may have been frozen wells but natural gas does not go directly from the wellhead to the peaker AFAIK: well gas has other hydrocarbons in it and those along with excess moisture are extracted. These extraction plants create a buffer and there are also sites where natural gas is injected underground and stored for later sale when the price is lower than the producer wants. Natural gas at the burner tip is supposed to be one million cubic feet (MCF) is one million BTU (MMBTU). That consistency is required. I'm not sure why wellheads freezing would be an issue if there's enough gas in storage to cover the demand.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    > Second there may have been frozen wells but natural gas does not go directly from the wellhead to the peaker I agree that the natural gas does not directly go to the station. However, from what I could tell in the NERC documents they referenced it freezing at or close to the well. > Natural gas at the burner tip is supposed to be one million cubic feet (MCF) is one million BTU (MMBTU) I'm guessing you're referencing "14.8 Bcf of natural gas production was lost". If so, Bcf comes directly from the NERC report in reference 14.
    • technofiend 6y ago
      No I wasn't referencing that report. I was explaining why gas has to be processed before use and it's not a straight line from wellhead to burner tip. If you look at this report you'll see 28 Bcf was pulled from non-salt storage and 61 Bcf from salt storage between 2/5 and 2/12. But that still left 233 and 593 Bcf respectively in each storage type. Far more than the 14.8 Bcf loss mentioned in the report. https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html
• duxup 6y ago
  Is the person who wrote this knowledgeable on this topic? The way it is written it seems like they just did a bunch of searches and found some information. It reads like you see when we'll meaning internet sleuths find data, but often don't understand enough to interpret it with enough context. Do they know enough to be sure they're drawing the right conclusions based on what they found? I'm really not sure the general conclusions are so much wrong (about winterization), there may be events elsewhere, but that doesn't mean what happened in Texas also isn't what he seems to try to refute.
  • Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
    You're right to be suspicious, he got a lot wrong about the nuclear power plant where only one of two reactors tripped.
    • gwoplock 6y ago
      You are right that I should have been clearer about the nuclear plant. However, the reason reactor unit 1 went offline appears to be accurate. https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-tripped-at-0537-on-feb-15-2021/ https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe... > The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip.
      • Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
        Fair enough, and fresh this morning I read the whole thing beginning to end, and that level of detail isn't required from your very high level overview of the whole problem. You are also to be congratulated because while you started with the "Texas is bad" narrative like 99.999% of the US Left, you discarded it as soon as your research revealed a different story.
  • gwoplock 6y ago
    > Is the person who wrote this knowledgeable on this topic? I am not... "I am a software developer, and this is my best interpretation of the requirements I could find" > The way it is written it seems like they just did a bunch of searches and found some information. That is about how that went. > Do they know enough to be sure they're drawing the right conclusions based on what they found? Maybe? if you have other conclusions, I'd love to hear them.
• Animats 6y ago
  Threats that cross wide areas incur different costs than ones that are localized. This isn't stressed in the NERC report. Tornadoes are a problem but tend not to take out a large number of plants all at once. They're localized. Freezes are large-area events and hit many plants simultaneously. So protection against freezes is required for the system even if it is not economic for each unit.
• mortdeus 6y ago
  You forgot about the trees and the above ground power lines! As somebody who grew up in California but has been living in oklahoma for the last 13 years, I can tell you that honestly this cold front is seriously exceptional, I mean we've had some pretty cold winters but atleast I haven't experience anything like this. It's so cold the water is freezing in the lines underground. Its so cold I can actually walk and ice skate on my salt pool right now. The snow is so high in some places that if you threw a cat into the middle of it you know that it will die because there is nothing it will be able to do to see to know which way to go in order to get out. I mean its absolutely crazy how exceptionally cold this winter was. And the reality is this. 1.) it's only lasting 4 days and the last time it was recorded being this cold in the midwest was 100 years ago. (which btw it got even colder in oklahoma than it did in texas and we didn't lose power, just food for thought) 2.) It's not a national problem because the coasts don't get as cold. The coldest day in recorded new york city history is -15 f and that was on February 9th, 1934. The coldest day recorded in LA is like the low 40 f, but here in Oklahoma City we've just about hit -15 degrees EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE THE THERMOMETER WAS INVENTED. Like i said we are used to being cold, but we've never actually experienced anything like this before. 3.) Being connected to the coastal grids would mean that if we actually had to use it, we'd end up being forced to saw off limbs in order to pay for it. That is just how capitalism works and therefore we find that it's better for us to be independent because in exchange for having to suffer a power outage every now and then, at least we understand that when we pay for energy here it is going to energy companies who create energy here, who employ people who live here, etc etc. The midwest doesn't have the same economic opportunities as the coasts have, nor do we receive the same kind of "federal government assistance" when it comes to these matters regardless of which party is in power. Out here poor people vote for lower taxes, because that is the only way they are personally going to see any of that money actually make it's way back to their bank accounts. 4. The problem with winterizing is that you can really only do so much. The issue is more of an implicit limitation of physics than any individual companies negligence out here in the midwest (because as I pointed out, were used to getting cold weather like this every year and it's never been a problem on the scale of a state of emergency until now). The problem is that if you have to raise the temperature so that you can actually produce energy, you have to use most of that energy you produce to raise the temperature and keep it up, and when you also have a bunch of people who need to use that energy to keep spaces like homes that don't help produce energy, you can see how this situation becomes quickly and increasingly insurmountable. The reality is that energy companies out here know that when they don't do their job well, people out here die. If your argument is that greedy oil men don't care enough about "grandma baptist" dying to ensure they go above and beyond to ensure our power grid is prepared to "weather the storm" frankly you don't understand that one of the many unwritten rules of capitalism is "It's not considered good business to kill your customer.", while I understand in places like Silicon Valley (be cause like i said i grew up there) the general belief is that Government is king. But out here Business is king. And so while it might be advantageous for a politician to kill off a bunch of old people. It is not advantageous for a business to because in Government you need 75,000,000+ votes to fire the boss. In a corporation you only need like 10 votes to kick out a crappy CEO. And while there are millions of reasons why it makes sense for us to keep firing our politicians. There is really only one reason why a board of directors will fire it's CEO. And thats because they stop earning. Like I said blackouts aren't good for business, and if you want to argue whether keeping energy surpluses artificially low in order to jack up prices is a problem, then sure let's have that discussion. But lets not pretend that people on the coast are on team "cheap energy" here and lets not pretend that's because they don't know that's the only thing we have that they desperately need. All im saying if you isolate the politics from the underlying economics and science, you will surely find that nobody's head deserves to roll for this. (unless you can catch mother nature)
• stakkur 6y ago
  Half a million in Oregon, many now for going on a week. News? Silence.
• hownottowrite 6y ago
  I worked on energy trading systems in the late 90s. Everyone knew that the Texas configuration was a unique time bomb, but Texas wanted it that way. They wanted to avoid regulation and if you talked to Texans they liked the idea of being able to separate entirely from the nation. I feel for the people who are impacted by this but they voted for this time and time again. A further footnote here. Anyone involved in power generation keeps an eye on very long range forecasts. This current polar incursion was forecast nearly 60 days ago. Of course they might not expect it to intrude into Texas or be this severe but they knew it was a possibility. I guarantee that someone, somewhere filed reports on this not just for safety but also for profit. Long range forecasts and data play a huge role in energy trading. Day traders are glued to the weather channel. The long range teams look at in-depth scientific reports and there are serious climate modeling systems that feed into contract calculations. I can imagine how much more complicated it is today and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to discover that a lot of “somebodies” placed some very sure bets.
  • veltas 6y ago
    >I feel for the people who are impacted by this but they voted for this time and time again. Not sure that everyone impacted 'voted for this', or that even the majority had an opportunity to vote on this issue specifically.
    • sgift 6y ago
      Everyone? No. A majority? Probably. I think over long times and always voting for the same "feds are bad" and "regulation is bad" people you can infer that at least a significant part of the voters thought this was a good idea. Or at least an idea that was acceptable to them as part of the package they bought with their votes. Voting for a governing body will always be a compromise. You have to decide what are the issues I cannot budge on and what are the issues I like but can live without and then find the best deal out of the available ones.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      Of course not everyone voted for this. Even in reliably red or blue states there are a lot of voters who vote against whoever won. By its very size Texas has a lot of democrats in it, just not nearly as many as it has republicans. That being said, Greg Abbott beat his democratic opponent by 13.3 points, which is a lot. He won in 2014 by 20.4 points, which is even more. And while I personally doubt that this specific issue was a campaign point, it’s hard to deny that minimal regulation and a general attitude against interdependence weren’t major campaign planks. Does anyone doubt what Abbott’s position on power regulation or connecting to the federal grid would be? Are any of his voters under the impression that Abbott would regulate power more? Certainly not. Does that mean Texans deserve this on a moral basis? No, of course not. But a majority of their voters continually voted for leaders that have led them to this place. It’s kind of hard to know what to do for them when they keep voting for people who seem to care more about vacations and Fox News hits than actually serving their constituents.
• jhoechtl 6y ago
  The US must switch to 230V grid. 110 is arcane and full of losses. Likely a centennial project.