17 ms·

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, ev

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
      From what I've seen, you cannot keep 100% of generation online. However, in a properly designed and winter weatherized system stations should be able to come online to pick up the slack. In the reports I've seen this seems to be a high rate of failure point leading to the issues seen in Texas this week.
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      We didn't need 100%. We needed to not be without power for days. The "rolling blackouts" turned into myself and others were basically sacrificed for the grid because the load shed requirements were too high to roll.
    - usefulcat 6y ago
      We don't necessarily need 100%, just enough to allow rolling blackouts to even be an option. In Austin, they had to turn off power to ~40% of all customers pretty much as soon as the shortage began. Once they had done that, they could not implement rolling blackouts without also affecting critical infrastructure like hospitals (the granularity of the electrical grid is finite, apparently). The result was that some people had power the whole time (or nearly so), and others had nothing for ~3 days straight. Obviously it would be preferable for everyone to have intermittent power 1/N of the time than for 1/N to have nothing at all for the duration of the shortfall.
walrus01 6y ago
Missed one point: Extreme winter events like this, now being seen more often in unusual locations, are EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago in a number of reports and research papers about the coming effects of climate change. Global warming and climate change doesn't just mean "everything is getting hotter everywhere all the time", it also means shifting global wind patterns and unusual weather that breaks previous 100-year records every 5 or 10 years. And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas? Atmospheric co2 increase over time: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme-weather-in-2019-broke-over-120000-records-in-us-report https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme... https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/26/bleak-report-un-says-drastic-action-is-only-way-avoid-worst-impacts-climate-change/?wpisrc=al_news__alert-world--alert-national&wpmk=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/2... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680 https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-lows-set-in-alberta-amid-prolonged-cold-snap/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-low...
- austhrow743 6y ago
  The term global warming really did a number on the awareness of climate change.
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    Arguably, the term itself was only part of the problem; the ensuing propaganda deluge that followed in its wake also seriously conflicts with the claims. tl;dr: hyped-up panic usually finds itself at odds with findings mere years later. Slow down and step carefully, and you'll find you don't get this kind of whiplash.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      But in this particular case, all signs point to the panic being significantly hyped-down: the world is in a much worse shape than most mainstream predictions, and global warming is accelerating faster than many "worse-case scenarios" even a decade ago. It's also important to remember that this isn't a gradual phenomenon - there are certain break points that, when we'll reach, we won't ever be able to go back. And by all accounts, unless we significantly change the global economy literally today, there is no chance that we won't reach those breaking points in 50-100 years. And even if we did today, there's a good chance it's too late. The mess we're leaving for our children to fix should make all of us feel deeply ashamed.
caeril 6y ago
edit: disregard
- wffurr 6y ago
  How does Canada’s gas infrastructure deal with this? I don’t know the details, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s possible to make gas infrastructure operate in temperatures like those found in Texas, even for months on end.
  - GioM 6y ago
    I think the answer here is alternate capacity. Canada gets a relatively small portion (11%) of its energy from natural gas, with no province exceeding 21% (Alberta). On aggregate, most energy generated in Canada is renewable.
    - goalieca 6y ago
      Many of our homes are heated with gas furnaces and gas water heaters. Works well into -40. I never even thought got about it.
    - Pxtl 6y ago
      Yes, but realistically natural gas is the standard for home heating here in Ontario at least (and I assume most of Canada) and our gas infrastructure does just fine through winter.
  - bhewes 6y ago
    During the late 80s my dad ran Maxus Calgary office later sold to Kerr-McGee. So in Calgary the Texas temperatures would not even be considered cold. This storm dropped Calgary temps to the -20Fs with wind chills in the -55Fs (I did not even check the fields which are further north). Pretty common when I grew up there. Oil and Gas did fine.
- koolba 6y ago
  Why would they fall below 20F? Aren’t they underground?
duxup 6y ago
>It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power To me that doesn't justify the choice to be disconnected. So let's say they might not have made up the entire loss...so what? Making up for some of the loss would help wouldn't it? That seems like using perfection as a justification to make worse choices... The whole disconnected grid wisdom or lack of it seems unrelated to me as far as if winterization is being done well enough generally.
- solidsnack9000 6y ago
  Without winterization, it doesn't matter if Texas is connected or not. With it, it doesn't matter either, because it produces and uses so much electricity. If anything, it might be a blessing to the other states, that they are not connected to Texas at present. Consider the northeast blackout of 2003: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-five-years-later/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv... Texas is not shutting down train lines in Canada. We didn't implement our own winterization guidelines and now we face the consequences. That's how it should be. The justification for Texas's grid goes back many decades and can't be assessed on the basis of an event like this -- that's recency bias.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I don't think limiting yourself to the possibility of 0 help makes sense if "maybe they wouldn't get very much help".
    - solidsnack9000 6y ago
      I'm just not sure you're applying the right kind of reasoning here. The question is, what do we learn from this event? One thing we don't learn is that Texas's disconnected grid was a problem -- it simply made no difference, because of the magnitude of the capacity loss. It might even have protected the surrounding states.
      - duxup 6y ago
hedora 6y ago
Also, the exact same thing happened in 1989, 2011 and (less so) in 2014, and the recommendations that were made and ignored due to those events would have prevented the grid from collapsing.
StillBored 6y ago
I think Abbott is one of those right twice a day kind of guys, and in this is one of those cases. The engineering side like to focus on the difficulty of stabilizing a grid with a lot of renewables. But this isn't really TX's problem since we have all these NG plants that spin up a few times a year and make their entire yearly operating budget. But there is also financial destabilization because the wind generators are putting a lot of financial pressure on the entire system. None of those NG plants would have wanted to miss out on the last couple days, but they did because they are also operating at fairly thin margins because the wind has fairly low capital costs and just pumps energy into the grid when it feels like it, even when they aren't actually making any money. If the price of NG goes up much, this will become completely unsustainable. Frankly, I think what we need is a power demand tax/fee. If your a generator and you can't supply energy during peak demand times you get hit with say a 20% generating fee that get transferred to the energy sources that do. That would force the intermittent sources to at least pay for part of the peaking and base load capacity that has to deal with the intermittent sources flooding the market. It would also strongly discourage market manipulation by "accidentally" having a bunch of generation capacity offline at the same time.
- hayst4ck 6y ago
  You prescribed a solution to the problem and justified it with a single way the solution will work. When explained this way, it is obviously a bad way to justify something. What is a vastly more interesting question is what is the most perverse set of incentives the proposed system could result in, or what are ways the new system could fail, sometimes you never understand these until implementation, and only at that point is it discovered that most problems are not simple. Your entire proposition is founded on the axiom that the free market is the ultimate good in running efficient systems, but the free market is reactionary (a way to fail) and the free market makes distinctions between owner class people, intermediary class people, and customer class people (misaligned incentives are a way to fail). Fundamentally there is a disconnect between who pays for a water pipe that bursts and who pays to weatherize power plants, so you end up with a terrible set of incentives. Unless every owner of a burst pipe can successfully sue the power company for losses, I can't see a situation in which the free market would win over a well planned/regulated system. We went to the moon. We built nuclear subs. The world runs on American technologies which are a major output of our institutions. We are one of the few countries with clean water running into our kitchen faucets. Strong, responsible, accountable institutions have proven to make this country great. There are multiple potentially valid ways to do better than last time: - Guide the free market (your solution) - Regulate customers (pipes must be insulated/buried) - Regulate the producers (all power plants must be weatherized) - Give regulatory authority to experts (like regulation, but lighter weight, and much more easily changable) - Nationalize infrastructure I am pretty unconvinced that the free market can offer efficient/acceptable solutions to disaster scenarios.
dboreham 6y ago
If Texas were integrated with the Eastern or Western grids, there would likely be more generation capacity in neighboring states.
gnopgnip 6y ago
A significant portion of the loss of generation was due to destabilization of the grid due to poor timing of the rolling brownouts.
hypervisorxxx 6y ago
Easy to say "properly" winterized without going into the details on how one would insulate natural gas lines across thousands of miles which requires digging up gas lines to replace them or investing more in on going research on liquids that can be injected into the peiplines that are antifreeze that don't contaminate the gas also flowing in them. Alot of innovation is going on in that direction but it's still heavily regulated. It's good the power grid is heavily regulated. The tldr is texas isn't often covered with sleet and snow and has made great strides in renewable energy. Now that one ice storm has hit everyone is acting like every moment of the past ten years should have been spent preventing it when in reality it requires heavy regulation and taxes. Texans don't like taxes. FERC was almost completely cleaned out when Trump came to power so the entire set of regulations is backed up by a few years. In reality "winterizing" gas pipelines is an unsolved problem in technology and the more manual way required digging up thousands of miles of people's land and property to use tax money to put in new pipes. Try going to a texans property and telling them the state wants to increase your taxes to dig up a gas line and replace it with a new one.... Texas has wanted to retain the ability to secede from the union and having their own power grid enables them with that independence but it is hard to tell without looking at a layout of the power grid if being connected to other states who were also freezing would have helped, which is a good time to add that having a layout of the power grid requires special levels of as needed access upon which bypassing is a felony atleast. As someone who stared at the east coast power grid everyday for 5yrs doing power analysis and reliability studies on it, I never had access to the Texas power grid, but I'm amazed how many people on the internet act like they do. As a full disclosure I'm an Electrical Power Engineer who specializes in wind and solar, electrical power grid and substation design and worked in electrical energy markets and power flow for four years after working for a renewable energy startup. I went into this field because I care about renewable energy, but I have also learned the system is heavily gained and renewable energy sources have their flaws like for example you know ice can kind of freeze solar and turbines over, as well as pipelines. It's been very hard to have objective and we'll informed takes in this field with people who aren't working in power grid stuff because they assume if I have constructive criticism on how renewable energy policy could be better or has previously incentivized corruption then I am an evil republican who wants gas and oil to rule the world and we all die due to global warming. Now is also a good time to mention the concept of global cooling. Due to this and not global warming Texas is probably in for a lot more cold weather and it makes sense to assess what "winterizing" power sources actually means, instead of just demanding it without any understanding of what that would entail what it would cost and whether Texans are willing to put their money where their mouth is given they are typically hands off when it comes to massively coordinating with state and local regulation more than they need to.
HNfriend234 6y ago
I was looking into this and I am thinking that the solution is actually not to weatherize the grid but rather to have each home be able to be self-sufficient for a certain period of time. Perhaps having micro grids in communities and maybe having each home have either a generator or a home battery. We already have stuff like the Tesla powerwall. If the battery bank method is used then it could also possibly be used during summer months. Possibly a good idea to offer more generous tax credits to encourage people to purchase these technologies. Under this setup if a partial grid failure occurs then rolling blackouts wouldn't be a big deal. I'm not sure how expensive it is to weatherize the grid but I would imagine it to be very expensive.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  The thing is, rolling blackouts aren't a big deal. In an extreme event like these storms, having a power grid that can survive some loss in capacity with rolling blackouts is the goal. What happened in Texas was a complete failure of the entire gird over huge swaths of land leading to millions of people being without power for multiple days. Most people don’t need generators or powerwalls for a once a decade risk of some rolling blackouts. Most communities don’t need more expensive, less efficient micro power grids for the occasional rolling blackout. It is less expensive to weatherize the grid so it can remain mostly functional in extreme events than to have tens of millions of households buy and maintain generators so they don’t freeze to death because the actual power grid was not properly built and maintained.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
You missed a key point that was crucial in what is basically a cascading failure: Texas (like other states) relies on gas plants for electricity plants (about half of them) and is also a gas producer. The increased demand on gas because of people heating their homes contributed to shortages. This then leaad to issues with gas production sites in texas that need power. This was then aggravated by pipes icing up (water vapor in the gas). That's a cascading failure. Wind power was also affected of course but not nearly as much as the gas supply issues. Texas needs to reconsider its over-reliance on gas and diversify its grid. Ice proofed turbines are a thing. Solar is still a relatively minor part of production in what is obviously a state that has plenty of potential for that. Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. If only to enable the export of the ample supplies of wind and solar it can produce normally. It's just good business sense. Then, it should probably start incentivizing people more to do sensible things like putting solar on their roofs, installing batteries in their homes, insulating their houses, and consuming off peak power (e.g. by charging their EVs). All these things collectively should make blackouts a lot less likely.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  > Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. But that choice is purely ideological, not practical.
- solidsnack9000 6y ago
  The business case for Texas's separate grid is local control, so connecting to the other two grids (it's not really accurate to say "the rest of the country") could present some real practical difficulties. It's interesting to read your proposals because of the eco-targeted nature of them; but I think most Texans are going to interpret this differently. Forget batteries and solar panels; they're going to get generators and use diesel.

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
    From what I've seen, you cannot keep 100% of generation online. However, in a properly designed and winter weatherized system stations should be able to come online to pick up the slack. In the reports I've seen this seems to be a high rate of failure point leading to the issues seen in Texas this week.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    We didn't need 100%. We needed to not be without power for days. The "rolling blackouts" turned into myself and others were basically sacrificed for the grid because the load shed requirements were too high to roll.
  - usefulcat 6y ago
    We don't necessarily need 100%, just enough to allow rolling blackouts to even be an option. In Austin, they had to turn off power to ~40% of all customers pretty much as soon as the shortage began. Once they had done that, they could not implement rolling blackouts without also affecting critical infrastructure like hospitals (the granularity of the electrical grid is finite, apparently). The result was that some people had power the whole time (or nearly so), and others had nothing for ~3 days straight. Obviously it would be preferable for everyone to have intermittent power 1/N of the time than for 1/N to have nothing at all for the duration of the shortfall.

walrus01 6y ago

Missed one point: Extreme winter events like this, now being seen more often in unusual locations, are EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago in a number of reports and research papers about the coming effects of climate change. Global warming and climate change doesn't just mean "everything is getting hotter everywhere all the time", it also means shifting global wind patterns and unusual weather that breaks previous 100-year records every 5 or 10 years. And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas? Atmospheric co2 increase over time: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme-weather-in-2019-broke-over-120000-records-in-us-report https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme... https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/26/bleak-report-un-says-drastic-action-is-only-way-avoid-worst-impacts-climate-change/?wpisrc=al_news__alert-world--alert-national&wpmk=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/2... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680 https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-lows-set-in-alberta-amid-prolonged-cold-snap/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-low...

austhrow743 6y ago
The term global warming really did a number on the awareness of climate change.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  Arguably, the term itself was only part of the problem; the ensuing propaganda deluge that followed in its wake also seriously conflicts with the claims. tl;dr: hyped-up panic usually finds itself at odds with findings mere years later. Slow down and step carefully, and you'll find you don't get this kind of whiplash.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    But in this particular case, all signs point to the panic being significantly hyped-down: the world is in a much worse shape than most mainstream predictions, and global warming is accelerating faster than many "worse-case scenarios" even a decade ago. It's also important to remember that this isn't a gradual phenomenon - there are certain break points that, when we'll reach, we won't ever be able to go back. And by all accounts, unless we significantly change the global economy literally today, there is no chance that we won't reach those breaking points in 50-100 years. And even if we did today, there's a good chance it's too late. The mess we're leaving for our children to fix should make all of us feel deeply ashamed.

caeril 6y ago

edit: disregard

wffurr 6y ago
How does Canada’s gas infrastructure deal with this? I don’t know the details, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s possible to make gas infrastructure operate in temperatures like those found in Texas, even for months on end.
- GioM 6y ago
  I think the answer here is alternate capacity. Canada gets a relatively small portion (11%) of its energy from natural gas, with no province exceeding 21% (Alberta). On aggregate, most energy generated in Canada is renewable.
  - goalieca 6y ago
    Many of our homes are heated with gas furnaces and gas water heaters. Works well into -40. I never even thought got about it.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Yes, but realistically natural gas is the standard for home heating here in Ontario at least (and I assume most of Canada) and our gas infrastructure does just fine through winter.
- bhewes 6y ago
  During the late 80s my dad ran Maxus Calgary office later sold to Kerr-McGee. So in Calgary the Texas temperatures would not even be considered cold. This storm dropped Calgary temps to the -20Fs with wind chills in the -55Fs (I did not even check the fields which are further north). Pretty common when I grew up there. Oil and Gas did fine.
koolba 6y ago
Why would they fall below 20F? Aren’t they underground?

duxup 6y ago

>It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power To me that doesn't justify the choice to be disconnected. So let's say they might not have made up the entire loss...so what? Making up for some of the loss would help wouldn't it? That seems like using perfection as a justification to make worse choices... The whole disconnected grid wisdom or lack of it seems unrelated to me as far as if winterization is being done well enough generally.

solidsnack9000 6y ago
Without winterization, it doesn't matter if Texas is connected or not. With it, it doesn't matter either, because it produces and uses so much electricity. If anything, it might be a blessing to the other states, that they are not connected to Texas at present. Consider the northeast blackout of 2003: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-five-years-later/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv... Texas is not shutting down train lines in Canada. We didn't implement our own winterization guidelines and now we face the consequences. That's how it should be. The justification for Texas's grid goes back many decades and can't be assessed on the basis of an event like this -- that's recency bias.
- duxup 6y ago
  I don't think limiting yourself to the possibility of 0 help makes sense if "maybe they wouldn't get very much help".
  - solidsnack9000 6y ago
    I'm just not sure you're applying the right kind of reasoning here. The question is, what do we learn from this event? One thing we don't learn is that Texas's disconnected grid was a problem -- it simply made no difference, because of the magnitude of the capacity loss. It might even have protected the surrounding states.
    - duxup 6y ago

hedora 6y ago

Also, the exact same thing happened in 1989, 2011 and (less so) in 2014, and the recommendations that were made and ignored due to those events would have prevented the grid from collapsing.

StillBored 6y ago

I think Abbott is one of those right twice a day kind of guys, and in this is one of those cases. The engineering side like to focus on the difficulty of stabilizing a grid with a lot of renewables. But this isn't really TX's problem since we have all these NG plants that spin up a few times a year and make their entire yearly operating budget. But there is also financial destabilization because the wind generators are putting a lot of financial pressure on the entire system. None of those NG plants would have wanted to miss out on the last couple days, but they did because they are also operating at fairly thin margins because the wind has fairly low capital costs and just pumps energy into the grid when it feels like it, even when they aren't actually making any money. If the price of NG goes up much, this will become completely unsustainable. Frankly, I think what we need is a power demand tax/fee. If your a generator and you can't supply energy during peak demand times you get hit with say a 20% generating fee that get transferred to the energy sources that do. That would force the intermittent sources to at least pay for part of the peaking and base load capacity that has to deal with the intermittent sources flooding the market. It would also strongly discourage market manipulation by "accidentally" having a bunch of generation capacity offline at the same time.

hayst4ck 6y ago
You prescribed a solution to the problem and justified it with a single way the solution will work. When explained this way, it is obviously a bad way to justify something. What is a vastly more interesting question is what is the most perverse set of incentives the proposed system could result in, or what are ways the new system could fail, sometimes you never understand these until implementation, and only at that point is it discovered that most problems are not simple. Your entire proposition is founded on the axiom that the free market is the ultimate good in running efficient systems, but the free market is reactionary (a way to fail) and the free market makes distinctions between owner class people, intermediary class people, and customer class people (misaligned incentives are a way to fail). Fundamentally there is a disconnect between who pays for a water pipe that bursts and who pays to weatherize power plants, so you end up with a terrible set of incentives. Unless every owner of a burst pipe can successfully sue the power company for losses, I can't see a situation in which the free market would win over a well planned/regulated system. We went to the moon. We built nuclear subs. The world runs on American technologies which are a major output of our institutions. We are one of the few countries with clean water running into our kitchen faucets. Strong, responsible, accountable institutions have proven to make this country great. There are multiple potentially valid ways to do better than last time: - Guide the free market (your solution) - Regulate customers (pipes must be insulated/buried) - Regulate the producers (all power plants must be weatherized) - Give regulatory authority to experts (like regulation, but lighter weight, and much more easily changable) - Nationalize infrastructure I am pretty unconvinced that the free market can offer efficient/acceptable solutions to disaster scenarios.

dboreham 6y ago

If Texas were integrated with the Eastern or Western grids, there would likely be more generation capacity in neighboring states.

gnopgnip 6y ago

A significant portion of the loss of generation was due to destabilization of the grid due to poor timing of the rolling brownouts.

hypervisorxxx 6y ago

Easy to say "properly" winterized without going into the details on how one would insulate natural gas lines across thousands of miles which requires digging up gas lines to replace them or investing more in on going research on liquids that can be injected into the peiplines that are antifreeze that don't contaminate the gas also flowing in them. Alot of innovation is going on in that direction but it's still heavily regulated. It's good the power grid is heavily regulated. The tldr is texas isn't often covered with sleet and snow and has made great strides in renewable energy. Now that one ice storm has hit everyone is acting like every moment of the past ten years should have been spent preventing it when in reality it requires heavy regulation and taxes. Texans don't like taxes. FERC was almost completely cleaned out when Trump came to power so the entire set of regulations is backed up by a few years. In reality "winterizing" gas pipelines is an unsolved problem in technology and the more manual way required digging up thousands of miles of people's land and property to use tax money to put in new pipes. Try going to a texans property and telling them the state wants to increase your taxes to dig up a gas line and replace it with a new one.... Texas has wanted to retain the ability to secede from the union and having their own power grid enables them with that independence but it is hard to tell without looking at a layout of the power grid if being connected to other states who were also freezing would have helped, which is a good time to add that having a layout of the power grid requires special levels of as needed access upon which bypassing is a felony atleast. As someone who stared at the east coast power grid everyday for 5yrs doing power analysis and reliability studies on it, I never had access to the Texas power grid, but I'm amazed how many people on the internet act like they do. As a full disclosure I'm an Electrical Power Engineer who specializes in wind and solar, electrical power grid and substation design and worked in electrical energy markets and power flow for four years after working for a renewable energy startup. I went into this field because I care about renewable energy, but I have also learned the system is heavily gained and renewable energy sources have their flaws like for example you know ice can kind of freeze solar and turbines over, as well as pipelines. It's been very hard to have objective and we'll informed takes in this field with people who aren't working in power grid stuff because they assume if I have constructive criticism on how renewable energy policy could be better or has previously incentivized corruption then I am an evil republican who wants gas and oil to rule the world and we all die due to global warming. Now is also a good time to mention the concept of global cooling. Due to this and not global warming Texas is probably in for a lot more cold weather and it makes sense to assess what "winterizing" power sources actually means, instead of just demanding it without any understanding of what that would entail what it would cost and whether Texans are willing to put their money where their mouth is given they are typically hands off when it comes to massively coordinating with state and local regulation more than they need to.

HNfriend234 6y ago

I was looking into this and I am thinking that the solution is actually not to weatherize the grid but rather to have each home be able to be self-sufficient for a certain period of time. Perhaps having micro grids in communities and maybe having each home have either a generator or a home battery. We already have stuff like the Tesla powerwall. If the battery bank method is used then it could also possibly be used during summer months. Possibly a good idea to offer more generous tax credits to encourage people to purchase these technologies. Under this setup if a partial grid failure occurs then rolling blackouts wouldn't be a big deal. I'm not sure how expensive it is to weatherize the grid but I would imagine it to be very expensive.

542354234235 6y ago
The thing is, rolling blackouts aren't a big deal. In an extreme event like these storms, having a power grid that can survive some loss in capacity with rolling blackouts is the goal. What happened in Texas was a complete failure of the entire gird over huge swaths of land leading to millions of people being without power for multiple days. Most people don’t need generators or powerwalls for a once a decade risk of some rolling blackouts. Most communities don’t need more expensive, less efficient micro power grids for the occasional rolling blackout. It is less expensive to weatherize the grid so it can remain mostly functional in extreme events than to have tens of millions of households buy and maintain generators so they don’t freeze to death because the actual power grid was not properly built and maintained.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

You missed a key point that was crucial in what is basically a cascading failure: Texas (like other states) relies on gas plants for electricity plants (about half of them) and is also a gas producer. The increased demand on gas because of people heating their homes contributed to shortages. This then leaad to issues with gas production sites in texas that need power. This was then aggravated by pipes icing up (water vapor in the gas). That's a cascading failure. Wind power was also affected of course but not nearly as much as the gas supply issues. Texas needs to reconsider its over-reliance on gas and diversify its grid. Ice proofed turbines are a thing. Solar is still a relatively minor part of production in what is obviously a state that has plenty of potential for that. Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. If only to enable the export of the ample supplies of wind and solar it can produce normally. It's just good business sense. Then, it should probably start incentivizing people more to do sensible things like putting solar on their roofs, installing batteries in their homes, insulating their houses, and consuming off peak power (e.g. by charging their EVs). All these things collectively should make blackouts a lot less likely.

542354234235 6y ago
> Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. But that choice is purely ideological, not practical.
solidsnack9000 6y ago
The business case for Texas's separate grid is local control, so connecting to the other two grids (it's not really accurate to say "the rest of the country") could present some real practical difficulties. It's interesting to read your proposals because of the eco-targeted nature of them; but I think most Texans are going to interpret this differently. Forget batteries and solar panels; they're going to get generators and use diesel.