8 ms·

Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas

35 points by 7402 6y ago

tengbretson 6y ago
What they really need is a facilitator to run a blameless postmortem for this incident.
- powvans 6y ago
  I am not sure if you are joking or not, but I had exactly this conversation yesterday morning with a friend who was heading into an after incident review meeting. Wouldn't it be nice.
- mncharity 6y ago
  > facilitator to run a blameless postmortem Here's Etsy's 2016 guide[1]. A bit old, but if it's been obsoleted by something, I'm not quickly finding it. Other suggestions? Its CareSets fork[2] saw a bit of work in 2020. [1] https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-guide/ https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-g... https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf [2] https://github.com/CareSet/DebriefingFacilitationGuide_FromEtsy https://github.com/CareSet/DebriefingFacilitationGuide_FromE...
- swinnipeg 6y ago
  Plane crash investigations are remarkable post-mortems. It seems so unique, and it could be applied to many areas.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
When a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other earthquake hits - do we 'assign blame' in the same way? Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?
- WalterGR 6y ago
  Because the lack of winterization of elements of the energy supply chain in Texas was and is a known issue. When the levees failed during hurricane Katrina, we blamed the levees and not the water, because we can plan for and prepare for adverse weather that we know is absolutely going to happen.
  - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
    What was the cost benefit analysis of winterizing for a once-in-30 years event? Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?
    - WalterGR 6y ago
      I don’t know. Are you suggesting that we blame neither the weather nor the known lack of winterization but instead a C-B analysis? Definitely the analysis is important but this feels like moving the goalposts to divert blame away from the known lack of winterization. Edit: Getting off-track here, but “Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?” For the record, that 10% also buys you other perks, such as 47 human lives so far. To intentionally tug the heart-strings, check out https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths where you can read about, for example, a little boy freezing to death in his home.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        I think this is fundamentally a problem amenable to a cost-benefit tradeoff discussion provided you get the costs and benefits right. If the argument is “this went badly because of a lack of winterization because the costs were improperly considered”, I can follow that logic and agree. If the argument is “this went badly and this is an engineering problem for which cost-benefit analysis has no proper place”, I disagree pretty strongly.
      - 6y ago
angry_octet 6y ago
She makes some good points about capacity, then tears off on an anti wind rant. Wind has performed well in a number of extreme weather events around the world, including in Texas. Why harp on about wind reliability when gas and goal are offline completely? She seems to have difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. Why might there be such storms, anything to do with all that fossil fuel consumption? It's something she refuses to even mention, which makes the essay hard to take seriously.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The issue is that a lot of people are hunting for a way to prove their ideological priors, rather than actually seriously considering the situation at hand.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    very true. wind turbines work fine in very cold climates (see the Netherlands) but you have to get the "winter" package with de-icing capabilities but it costs more. Typically, you wouldn't need that in Texas but this wasn't a typical weather event by any stretch.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      Except that the faults had occurred a number of times regionally in the last decade, and nothing had been done about it. Possibly an investment problem but some of the fixes (lubricant heaters) are not expensive; I would guess a general culture of 'no one told me it could happen', i.e. limited depth of experience in the utility company. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Texas relies on wind production to a much greater extent than the Netherlands. "Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of energy in Texas' power grid. In 2015, wind power generation supplied 11% of Texas' energy grid. Last year it supplied 23% of the system's power, surpassing coal as the second-largest source of energy. ... An ERCOT report on generating capacity listed the top sources of power in the state:" Natural gas (51%) Wind (24.8%) Coal (13.4%) Nuclear (4.9%) Solar (3.8%) Hydro, biomass-fired units (1.9%) (https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy-wind-power-outage-natural-gas-renewable-green-new-deal/6780546002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy...) "Energy from renewable sources accounted for only 7.4% of total final energy consumption (TFEC) in 2018, the third-lowest share among IEA member countries and well below the IEA median of 12.1%. ... Bioenergy is the primary source of renewable energy and includes transportation biofuels and direct use of biomass in heating and electricity.*" (https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020 https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- ihsw 6y ago
  The people of Texas voted for this.
glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
Nobody going to talk about the neo liberal mindset? most companies that really profited from the silicon valley revolution are based in texas for the lower taxes (i'm talking about the 80s ones, not even the recent events) Most people i know from there preached smaller government and that they should lower taxes always to bring more private investments, while everyone defends their own properties with their own guns and provide for their family on emergencies with their own capabilities etc. what happened to all that?
- gradys 6y ago
  My understanding of the term "neoliberal" doesn't include relentlessly lowering taxes or shrinking government. Maybe you mean "neoconservative" or "libertarian"? To me, neoliberalism is better characterized as balancing market and non-market approaches to addressing social problems (more market-oriented than progressives, more comfort with government intervention than conservatives). Also, sorta weird to blame Silicon Valley attitudes for a failure of the Texas government. Yeah a couple of companies from SV are opening offices in Texas, but this problem has been at least a decade in the making and it's not like SV is a dominant force in Texas.
  - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
    you are not wrong. My /mistake/ is that in most of the world, libertarian means US-progressist and liberal means US-libertarian. it's confusing. i may have even screwed up the terms here as i'm multitasking. look up wikipedia to learn more/better :)
- dang 6y ago
  Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle and please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines? Some of your comments are fine but the unsubstantive and flamewar ones are not fine. Also, taking threads on generic ideological tangents is explicitly not what we want here. The discussions it leads to are all the same, and we're trying to avoid mind-numbing repetition here. Also, they almost always turn nasty, and we're trying to have a community where people are kind to each other. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Texas Capitalism is the real issue. Its all Hat and no cattle.
mcguire 6y ago
"We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand." That was my first thought on hearing about Texas' problems. Air source heat pumps don't like cold temperatures outside---I've noticed ours here hitting the resistance heat when the outside temps were in the 20Fs and the indoor setting was 65F. With the population growth and all of the infrastructure using air-sourced pumps (once we got rid of the swamp cooler), cold temperatures mean a step change in energy usage.
- tzs 6y ago
  There are residential air source heat pumps that can work well at those temperatures. Mitsubishi has some [1] that provide 100% capacity down to 23 F and then fall off fairly linearly to 76% capacity at -13 F. Fujitsu has some [2] that go down to -15 F. It's probably a good as people's existing systems reach replacement age to replace them with that kind of system. [1] https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/technology/keep-warm-this-winter-inverter-technology-for-any-climate https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/technology/keep-w... [2] https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlth-low-temp-heating.html https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlt...
SomaticPirate 6y ago
It’a interesting that Texas NOT having a capacity market actually makes it more appealing for “green” energy sources. Texas created a market that favored green energy and now several of their prominent politicians are rallying against the green energy that their system incentivized.
- abernard1 6y ago
  > Texas created a market that favored green energy subsidized green energy. If those sources are truly economically efficient, we should remove the subsidies.
underseacables 6y ago
Why does blame need to be assessed at all? Snow is to blame, ice is to blame, mother nature happens.
- Kye 6y ago
  Nature didn't build the power grid or decide which engineering compromises to make.
  - underseacables 6y ago
    That’s true, but in order to build that power grid and decide on engineering compromises, certain assumptions had to be made about Mother Nature, and what the likelihood of what may happen. It wound be unreasonable to assume any system is built with all contingencies in mind.
    - WalterGR 6y ago
      I don’t know how many times this needs to be said, but the lack of winterization in Texas’s energy supply chain was and is a known issue. Other comments, which are worth reading, go into detail about how this event isn’t even close to some “all contingencies” handwave. (It got cold. This isn’t aliens invading.)
chasd00 6y ago
To me, the major failure was planning. We knew it was coming, the weather forecasters were certain and accurate. Warnings could have gone out way sooner that a major weather event is underway and all services may see significant interruption. This wasn't like a major tornado where it goes from blue sky to total destruction in a matter of 3 hours. Same goes for hurricanes, it's not like they come out of the nowhere. States have plans to deal with hurricanes, there were no plans/warnings to deal with this until it was too late.
justapassenger 6y ago
Blame is super simple - who USA has embarrassingly outdated and fragile infrastructure after many decades of neglect and short term bandaids (like whole discussion about green energy now - it’s distraction from overall state of the grid). What’s most fun is seeing California and Texas taking stabs at each other when failures happen. It’s like two homeless people arguing who has warmer tent.

35 points by 7402 6y ago

tengbretson 6y ago

What they really need is a facilitator to run a blameless postmortem for this incident.

powvans 6y ago
I am not sure if you are joking or not, but I had exactly this conversation yesterday morning with a friend who was heading into an after incident review meeting. Wouldn't it be nice.
mncharity 6y ago
> facilitator to run a blameless postmortem Here's Etsy's 2016 guide[1]. A bit old, but if it's been obsoleted by something, I'm not quickly finding it. Other suggestions? Its CareSets fork[2] saw a bit of work in 2020. [1] https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-guide/ https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-g... https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf [2] https://github.com/CareSet/DebriefingFacilitationGuide_FromEtsy https://github.com/CareSet/DebriefingFacilitationGuide_FromE...
swinnipeg 6y ago
Plane crash investigations are remarkable post-mortems. It seems so unique, and it could be applied to many areas.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

When a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other earthquake hits - do we 'assign blame' in the same way? Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?

WalterGR 6y ago
Because the lack of winterization of elements of the energy supply chain in Texas was and is a known issue. When the levees failed during hurricane Katrina, we blamed the levees and not the water, because we can plan for and prepare for adverse weather that we know is absolutely going to happen.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  What was the cost benefit analysis of winterizing for a once-in-30 years event? Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?
  - WalterGR 6y ago
    I don’t know. Are you suggesting that we blame neither the weather nor the known lack of winterization but instead a C-B analysis? Definitely the analysis is important but this feels like moving the goalposts to divert blame away from the known lack of winterization. Edit: Getting off-track here, but “Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?” For the record, that 10% also buys you other perks, such as 47 human lives so far. To intentionally tug the heart-strings, check out https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths where you can read about, for example, a little boy freezing to death in his home.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I think this is fundamentally a problem amenable to a cost-benefit tradeoff discussion provided you get the costs and benefits right. If the argument is “this went badly because of a lack of winterization because the costs were improperly considered”, I can follow that logic and agree. If the argument is “this went badly and this is an engineering problem for which cost-benefit analysis has no proper place”, I disagree pretty strongly.
    - 6y ago

angry_octet 6y ago

She makes some good points about capacity, then tears off on an anti wind rant. Wind has performed well in a number of extreme weather events around the world, including in Texas. Why harp on about wind reliability when gas and goal are offline completely? She seems to have difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. Why might there be such storms, anything to do with all that fossil fuel consumption? It's something she refuses to even mention, which makes the essay hard to take seriously.

ashtonkem 6y ago
The issue is that a lot of people are hunting for a way to prove their ideological priors, rather than actually seriously considering the situation at hand.
- chasd00 6y ago
  very true. wind turbines work fine in very cold climates (see the Netherlands) but you have to get the "winter" package with de-icing capabilities but it costs more. Typically, you wouldn't need that in Texas but this wasn't a typical weather event by any stretch.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    Except that the faults had occurred a number of times regionally in the last decade, and nothing had been done about it. Possibly an investment problem but some of the fixes (lubricant heaters) are not expensive; I would guess a general culture of 'no one told me it could happen', i.e. limited depth of experience in the utility company. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Texas relies on wind production to a much greater extent than the Netherlands. "Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of energy in Texas' power grid. In 2015, wind power generation supplied 11% of Texas' energy grid. Last year it supplied 23% of the system's power, surpassing coal as the second-largest source of energy. ... An ERCOT report on generating capacity listed the top sources of power in the state:" Natural gas (51%) Wind (24.8%) Coal (13.4%) Nuclear (4.9%) Solar (3.8%) Hydro, biomass-fired units (1.9%) (https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy-wind-power-outage-natural-gas-renewable-green-new-deal/6780546002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy...) "Energy from renewable sources accounted for only 7.4% of total final energy consumption (TFEC) in 2018, the third-lowest share among IEA member countries and well below the IEA median of 12.1%. ... Bioenergy is the primary source of renewable energy and includes transportation biofuels and direct use of biomass in heating and electricity.*" (https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020 https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ihsw 6y ago
The people of Texas voted for this.

glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago

Nobody going to talk about the neo liberal mindset? most companies that really profited from the silicon valley revolution are based in texas for the lower taxes (i'm talking about the 80s ones, not even the recent events) Most people i know from there preached smaller government and that they should lower taxes always to bring more private investments, while everyone defends their own properties with their own guns and provide for their family on emergencies with their own capabilities etc. what happened to all that?

gradys 6y ago
My understanding of the term "neoliberal" doesn't include relentlessly lowering taxes or shrinking government. Maybe you mean "neoconservative" or "libertarian"? To me, neoliberalism is better characterized as balancing market and non-market approaches to addressing social problems (more market-oriented than progressives, more comfort with government intervention than conservatives). Also, sorta weird to blame Silicon Valley attitudes for a failure of the Texas government. Yeah a couple of companies from SV are opening offices in Texas, but this problem has been at least a decade in the making and it's not like SV is a dominant force in Texas.
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
  you are not wrong. My /mistake/ is that in most of the world, libertarian means US-progressist and liberal means US-libertarian. it's confusing. i may have even screwed up the terms here as i'm multitasking. look up wikipedia to learn more/better :)
dang 6y ago
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle and please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines? Some of your comments are fine but the unsubstantive and flamewar ones are not fine. Also, taking threads on generic ideological tangents is explicitly not what we want here. The discussions it leads to are all the same, and we're trying to avoid mind-numbing repetition here. Also, they almost always turn nasty, and we're trying to have a community where people are kind to each other. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

Texas Capitalism is the real issue. Its all Hat and no cattle.

mcguire 6y ago

"We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand." That was my first thought on hearing about Texas' problems. Air source heat pumps don't like cold temperatures outside---I've noticed ours here hitting the resistance heat when the outside temps were in the 20Fs and the indoor setting was 65F. With the population growth and all of the infrastructure using air-sourced pumps (once we got rid of the swamp cooler), cold temperatures mean a step change in energy usage.

tzs 6y ago
There are residential air source heat pumps that can work well at those temperatures. Mitsubishi has some [1] that provide 100% capacity down to 23 F and then fall off fairly linearly to 76% capacity at -13 F. Fujitsu has some [2] that go down to -15 F. It's probably a good as people's existing systems reach replacement age to replace them with that kind of system. [1] https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/technology/keep-warm-this-winter-inverter-technology-for-any-climate https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/technology/keep-w... [2] https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlth-low-temp-heating.html https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlt...

SomaticPirate 6y ago

It’a interesting that Texas NOT having a capacity market actually makes it more appealing for “green” energy sources. Texas created a market that favored green energy and now several of their prominent politicians are rallying against the green energy that their system incentivized.

abernard1 6y ago
> Texas created a market that favored green energy subsidized green energy. If those sources are truly economically efficient, we should remove the subsidies.

underseacables 6y ago

Why does blame need to be assessed at all? Snow is to blame, ice is to blame, mother nature happens.

Kye 6y ago
Nature didn't build the power grid or decide which engineering compromises to make.
- underseacables 6y ago
  That’s true, but in order to build that power grid and decide on engineering compromises, certain assumptions had to be made about Mother Nature, and what the likelihood of what may happen. It wound be unreasonable to assume any system is built with all contingencies in mind.
  - WalterGR 6y ago
    I don’t know how many times this needs to be said, but the lack of winterization in Texas’s energy supply chain was and is a known issue. Other comments, which are worth reading, go into detail about how this event isn’t even close to some “all contingencies” handwave. (It got cold. This isn’t aliens invading.)

chasd00 6y ago

To me, the major failure was planning. We knew it was coming, the weather forecasters were certain and accurate. Warnings could have gone out way sooner that a major weather event is underway and all services may see significant interruption. This wasn't like a major tornado where it goes from blue sky to total destruction in a matter of 3 hours. Same goes for hurricanes, it's not like they come out of the nowhere. States have plans to deal with hurricanes, there were no plans/warnings to deal with this until it was too late.

justapassenger 6y ago

Blame is super simple - who USA has embarrassingly outdated and fragile infrastructure after many decades of neglect and short term bandaids (like whole discussion about green energy now - it’s distraction from overall state of the grid). What’s most fun is seeing California and Texas taking stabs at each other when failures happen. It’s like two homeless people arguing who has warmer tent.