8 ms·

Texas-Style Blackouts Are the Future

34 points by Bostonian 6y ago

Bostonian 6y ago
ungated: https://archive.is/GfiPd https://archive.is/GfiPd "Engineering challenges can be solved, but the real menace is an unwillingness, expressed through politics, to pay for the greenhouse reductions we say we want. Power lines are unwelcome. Solar arrays and wind farms are not everybody’s idea of pretty and so must be located in unpopulated areas. Batteries can’t yet cure an intermittency problem, leaving only conventional plants. Coal is the worst of greenhouse offenders, gas is better and yet still opposed by greens, and forget about nuclear. ... But I doubt many people will be phlegmatic when Texas-like rolling blackouts come to the Northeast or New England one of these winters, as they almost did in the 2014 polar vortex. Falling trees won’t be the culprit. The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants to support our desired renewables in the face of cold spells a lot more predictable than those that landed on Texas. This outcome is all but guaranteed unless we get a better discussion than the one we’re having. Then something else will become manifest: When the design performance limitations of utility systems come into play, it will always be in the interest of politicians and utility executives to change the subject to global warming."
- simonh 6y ago
  >The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants... The major cause of the outages was that 40% of their gas plants failing due to frozen pipes.
  - soneil 6y ago
    There's a lot that can be solved there just by adding storage. I won't pretend it's a silver bullet, the only silver bullet here is the much more vague "invest in your infrastructure like your economy depends on it" - but Texas is so resource-rich that it treats supply as a solved problem, and has very little buffer storage between gas supply and gas plants. "Just-in-time logistics" carries risks and rewards, and a large part of what we're seeing here is those risks.
    - sanp 6y ago
      How is not winterizing equipment JIT?
      - soneil 6y ago
        It's not - I'm not trying to pretend this is the only problem or the only solution. It's just one facet of a wider problem (as is winterizing). Anyone who tells you there's only one problem here is either being naive, or hand-wavy (eg, the problem is investment. I do believe that stands, but it's terribly hand-wavy). Texas' overall pipeline, for gas at least, is a pretty straight connection of supplier to consumer - which is the equivalence I'm drawing to JIT logistics. Any fluctuation at the supply (which is most the winterization issues) is a direct risk to the consumer. Buffers in the distribution reduce risk to the consumer. Winterization reduces risk at supplier. Neither exists in a vacuum, they both contribute to the overall resilience of the system.
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    There were no major causes it was a systemetic failure across all sectors due to nothing being winterized. Gas failed, coal failed, wind failed, solar failed, the grid failed. Its politics to point only at gas or only at renewables, it was systematic, which might be what you are saying.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Sure, that’s fair, I’m just saying the biggest single reason for losing power was gas plant failures. I’m refuting the idea that that was a particular failure of renewables. I would agree supply continuity means renewables are not usually a complete solution, but that’s a very different argument and not relevant to this incident.
      - edbob 6y ago
        You say that 40% of the gas plants failed. I'm sure you're also aware that wind was only able to produce 15-25% of its capacity, and it was at the lower end of that range during the cold nights when temperatures were below 0°F. Your framing in the GGP makes it sound like everything can be blamed on gas plants, and completely ignores wind output collapsing to 15% of capacity. As a world leader in wind capacity, we can't just ignore our abysmal wind generation situation by pointing fingers at other energy sources which performed much better relative to their share of capacity.
- milofeynman 6y ago
  Renewables weren't what caused the Texas blackouts. This is a GOP taking point to distract from their deregulation to the point of failure. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
  - barbacoa 6y ago
    Bad regulation is not the same as deregulation.
- tgflynn 6y ago
  Power plants in the Northeast don't go down when the weather gets cold.
mindvirus 6y ago
And this also will lead to further divides where the wealthy get batteries and generators while everyone else is literally left out in the cold. Seeing the failure of American politics recently is sad - it feels like society has just given up any ambition in favor of petty in fighting. The article touches on an important point - we are hopelessly short term in our thinking, and the political system reflects that. Look at China's Belt and Road initiative, it's a 40 year, ambitious plan. Do we even have any serious 10 year plans? 5 year? And why not?
- humanlion87 6y ago
  I agree that short term thinking is a huge problem. Almost all the reps/senators are optimizing for winning the next election 2/6 years away. It's just a sad state of affairs. I have no idea what the problem to the soliton is. But unless we do something concrete, seems like things will get worse as weather patterns keep changing.
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    Reasonable term limits?
- hkt 6y ago
  > And why not? Expectation management. There's such rancour about basic questions of what people in society owe one another than it can't be any other way. The rancour is stoked by people who have the most to lose from a redistributive and rights based model of society. There used to be organised resistance to them, but it was comprehensively broken in the late 20th century and has yet to return.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    We seem to have replied to OP at the same time, and with the same thoughts.
  - kiba 6y ago
    Most to lose? A lot of republican voters are poor, no? They would have the most to gain from a more equal distribution of wealth.
spodek 6y ago
While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity. It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time. The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years. We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect. I did a podcast episode expanding on this, "How to Fix Texas" https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/439-how-to-fix-texas https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
- ryan93 6y ago
  What’s the point in fleshing out this idea that like .01% of voters want.
  - hshshs2 6y ago
    yeah but with a podcast someday it might be .02%
- walshemj 6y ago
  Doesn't explain why European countries don't seem to have the systemic failures that the US is prone to.
  - simonbarker87 6y ago
    Maintenance. European countries seem much more bothered about maintaining things than America ... perhaps because US culture focusses more on new and making money with new rather than maintaining the existing. When I travel to the US I am always astounded at the level of disrepair, things just look broken and dilapidated, not everything but just enough that it feels like I'm in a "poor" country, which it is clearly not. Miami is the worst level of richness and poverty next to each other I've seen, New York looks like it is falling apart and San Fransisco clearly has no social services for the homeless at all. I've loved my time visiting America but there is a vibe of wear and tear that I don't feel in other developed nations.
heraclius 6y ago
Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.
- fsh 6y ago
  Nuclear plants are enormously expensive to build and maintain. Having them idle would be economic suicide for the operators.
- jdxcode 6y ago
  Nuclear isn't something you can just turn on and off like gas
- finiteseries 6y ago
  You can build out backup gas without decades long political battles over one of the most singularly controversial issues over the past century or so.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  A nuclear plant was also taken offline due to the cold.
  - heraclius 6y ago
    Well all sorts of things were taken offline due to the cold—anything can be made to work properly in cold weather.
    - adamcstephens 6y ago
      Right. Clearly much of Texas was built with “it’ll never be below freezing for multiple days in a row”, which unfortunately has caused for an even greater disaster.
  - edbob 6y ago
    Nuclear was outputting about 75% of its capacity, which was pretty good performance compared to the other sources. At that rate, if we'd had 25 GW of additional nuclear capacity instead of 25 GW of wind capacity, we would have had another 15 GW of power available during the cold night hours, when wind was outputting only 3.5 GW of its 25 GW capacity.
quattrofan 6y ago
In the United States...
yowlingcat 6y ago
As an aside to all the necessary and important conversation about societal infrastructure investment, I think back to something I noticed when I was a teenager spending a lot of time in my basement on my computer as I'm sure a lot of us did. One thing I noticed was that although it wasn't heated very well, it was cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter. I wonder if we'll see any renewed interest in earth-sheltered homes after this whole episode. There are of course challenges with them (mortgaging restrictions, dealing with moisture over time), but you get a lot of mileage out of it. It's not just high lifetime energy savings, it's also insurance against freezing to death in these kinds of situations.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  Nope. Hurricane Harvey. September 19. 2019 - Houston and a good part of the southeastern part of TX was underwater. Increasing volatility of climate may make a good portion of Texas vulerable to that type of thing. Everyone would have to move to Northen Texas.
1_2__4 6y ago
I don’t understand why anyone on HN cares what the editorial page of the WSJ has to say about, well, anything. It’s a largely partisan and stubbornly fact-free source of poorly considered right-wing ideology. This whole article is essentially trying to carry water for ERCOT and Texas’s Republican government. You can bet that if Texas was run by Democrats the article would take a literally opposite position. Everyone knows this. Why are we pretending here, on HN, otherwise? As in, why are we pretending that a columnist for a highly partisan op-Ed section has anything substantive to say about energy policy or climate change?
ziftface 6y ago
I couldn't read the article because it's behind a paywall.
airhead969 6y ago
- America: The Fairwell Tour - book, C. Hedges - Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - book, C. Johnson -The Unraveling of America - article, book W. Davis America is slowly boiling on the stove of corruption and apathy to become another failed state like Brazil, and has been unraveling for decades. It's not doomer hysteria to suppose it when it's demonstrably happening. Look at the burgeoning number of homeless, extreme budget expenditures on global MIC militarism, horrible leadership, lack of plans, lack of achievements like the JFK days, lack of leadership, lack of organizational effectiveness, lack of disaster containment, violence, political divisions, prevailing social hermitage and animosity, personal habits/escapism/conditions of despair (drug use, alcohol, hikamori isolation, friendlessness, depression, anger issues, road rage, screen addiction, virtual lives, extended adolescence, negative attitudes, poor social skills, fatalism, no families), cannibalism of public commons by corporations, power/influence of corporations, lack of accountability of public officials, lack of community, unequal distribution of wealth, and false beliefs by the middle-class and rich that everything is good enough. To pull the republic out of this fatal dive towards the ground, nonviolent but assertive direct action is needed to undo the neglect and revitalize the American psyche. Better days are ahead when, not if, people pull-together to solve the big problems and advance breathtaking goals. The universe is malleable, not inevitable.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  Since I appreciate your list, here’s a couple more about the growing class divide. - The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class - book, Guy Standing - Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? - book, Thomas Frank
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Oh thanks. Yeah, the American empire is socially divided-and-conquered against itself and economically pyramidally-narrowing with ultra rich vs. growing favelas / ultra poor. Americans have to escape their ruts, become more unified, and act more sensibly, determined, and rationally to assert for a fair shake and better leaders focused on public works, reinvigoration, and better services. I also like: - Death of the Liberal Class - book, Hedges - Collapse - book, Jared Diamond - Upheaval - book, Jared Diamond - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 1-6 - book set, Gibbon - Screw It, Let's Do It - book, Branson
kyrra 6y ago
For those that don't know, Holman Jenkins is an opinion pages columnist for WSJ. This is not the news side. He's also probably one of my favorite writers at the WSJ. He has done a lot of writing on energy policy and climate change. His pieces tend to be well researched and present unique views on lots of topics.

34 points by Bostonian 6y ago

ungated: https://archive.is/GfiPd https://archive.is/GfiPd "Engineering challenges can be solved, but the real menace is an unwillingness, expressed through politics, to pay for the greenhouse reductions we say we want. Power lines are unwelcome. Solar arrays and wind farms are not everybody’s idea of pretty and so must be located in unpopulated areas. Batteries can’t yet cure an intermittency problem, leaving only conventional plants. Coal is the worst of greenhouse offenders, gas is better and yet still opposed by greens, and forget about nuclear. ... But I doubt many people will be phlegmatic when Texas-like rolling blackouts come to the Northeast or New England one of these winters, as they almost did in the 2014 polar vortex. Falling trees won’t be the culprit. The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants to support our desired renewables in the face of cold spells a lot more predictable than those that landed on Texas. This outcome is all but guaranteed unless we get a better discussion than the one we’re having. Then something else will become manifest: When the design performance limitations of utility systems come into play, it will always be in the interest of politicians and utility executives to change the subject to global warming."

simonh 6y ago
>The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants... The major cause of the outages was that 40% of their gas plants failing due to frozen pipes.
- soneil 6y ago
  There's a lot that can be solved there just by adding storage. I won't pretend it's a silver bullet, the only silver bullet here is the much more vague "invest in your infrastructure like your economy depends on it" - but Texas is so resource-rich that it treats supply as a solved problem, and has very little buffer storage between gas supply and gas plants. "Just-in-time logistics" carries risks and rewards, and a large part of what we're seeing here is those risks.
  - sanp 6y ago
    How is not winterizing equipment JIT?
    - soneil 6y ago
      It's not - I'm not trying to pretend this is the only problem or the only solution. It's just one facet of a wider problem (as is winterizing). Anyone who tells you there's only one problem here is either being naive, or hand-wavy (eg, the problem is investment. I do believe that stands, but it's terribly hand-wavy). Texas' overall pipeline, for gas at least, is a pretty straight connection of supplier to consumer - which is the equivalence I'm drawing to JIT logistics. Any fluctuation at the supply (which is most the winterization issues) is a direct risk to the consumer. Buffers in the distribution reduce risk to the consumer. Winterization reduces risk at supplier. Neither exists in a vacuum, they both contribute to the overall resilience of the system.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  There were no major causes it was a systemetic failure across all sectors due to nothing being winterized. Gas failed, coal failed, wind failed, solar failed, the grid failed. Its politics to point only at gas or only at renewables, it was systematic, which might be what you are saying.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Sure, that’s fair, I’m just saying the biggest single reason for losing power was gas plant failures. I’m refuting the idea that that was a particular failure of renewables. I would agree supply continuity means renewables are not usually a complete solution, but that’s a very different argument and not relevant to this incident.
    - edbob 6y ago
      You say that 40% of the gas plants failed. I'm sure you're also aware that wind was only able to produce 15-25% of its capacity, and it was at the lower end of that range during the cold nights when temperatures were below 0°F. Your framing in the GGP makes it sound like everything can be blamed on gas plants, and completely ignores wind output collapsing to 15% of capacity. As a world leader in wind capacity, we can't just ignore our abysmal wind generation situation by pointing fingers at other energy sources which performed much better relative to their share of capacity.
milofeynman 6y ago
Renewables weren't what caused the Texas blackouts. This is a GOP taking point to distract from their deregulation to the point of failure. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
- barbacoa 6y ago
  Bad regulation is not the same as deregulation.
tgflynn 6y ago
Power plants in the Northeast don't go down when the weather gets cold.

mindvirus 6y ago

And this also will lead to further divides where the wealthy get batteries and generators while everyone else is literally left out in the cold. Seeing the failure of American politics recently is sad - it feels like society has just given up any ambition in favor of petty in fighting. The article touches on an important point - we are hopelessly short term in our thinking, and the political system reflects that. Look at China's Belt and Road initiative, it's a 40 year, ambitious plan. Do we even have any serious 10 year plans? 5 year? And why not?

humanlion87 6y ago
I agree that short term thinking is a huge problem. Almost all the reps/senators are optimizing for winning the next election 2/6 years away. It's just a sad state of affairs. I have no idea what the problem to the soliton is. But unless we do something concrete, seems like things will get worse as weather patterns keep changing.
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  Reasonable term limits?
hkt 6y ago
> And why not? Expectation management. There's such rancour about basic questions of what people in society owe one another than it can't be any other way. The rancour is stoked by people who have the most to lose from a redistributive and rights based model of society. There used to be organised resistance to them, but it was comprehensively broken in the late 20th century and has yet to return.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  We seem to have replied to OP at the same time, and with the same thoughts.
- kiba 6y ago
  Most to lose? A lot of republican voters are poor, no? They would have the most to gain from a more equal distribution of wealth.

spodek 6y ago

While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity. It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time. The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years. We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect. I did a podcast episode expanding on this, "How to Fix Texas" https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/439-how-to-fix-texas https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

ryan93 6y ago
What’s the point in fleshing out this idea that like .01% of voters want.
- hshshs2 6y ago
  yeah but with a podcast someday it might be .02%
walshemj 6y ago
Doesn't explain why European countries don't seem to have the systemic failures that the US is prone to.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Maintenance. European countries seem much more bothered about maintaining things than America ... perhaps because US culture focusses more on new and making money with new rather than maintaining the existing. When I travel to the US I am always astounded at the level of disrepair, things just look broken and dilapidated, not everything but just enough that it feels like I'm in a "poor" country, which it is clearly not. Miami is the worst level of richness and poverty next to each other I've seen, New York looks like it is falling apart and San Fransisco clearly has no social services for the homeless at all. I've loved my time visiting America but there is a vibe of wear and tear that I don't feel in other developed nations.

heraclius 6y ago

Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.

fsh 6y ago
Nuclear plants are enormously expensive to build and maintain. Having them idle would be economic suicide for the operators.
jdxcode 6y ago
Nuclear isn't something you can just turn on and off like gas
finiteseries 6y ago
You can build out backup gas without decades long political battles over one of the most singularly controversial issues over the past century or so.
adamcstephens 6y ago
A nuclear plant was also taken offline due to the cold.
- heraclius 6y ago
  Well all sorts of things were taken offline due to the cold—anything can be made to work properly in cold weather.
  - adamcstephens 6y ago
    Right. Clearly much of Texas was built with “it’ll never be below freezing for multiple days in a row”, which unfortunately has caused for an even greater disaster.
- edbob 6y ago
  Nuclear was outputting about 75% of its capacity, which was pretty good performance compared to the other sources. At that rate, if we'd had 25 GW of additional nuclear capacity instead of 25 GW of wind capacity, we would have had another 15 GW of power available during the cold night hours, when wind was outputting only 3.5 GW of its 25 GW capacity.

quattrofan 6y ago

In the United States...

yowlingcat 6y ago

As an aside to all the necessary and important conversation about societal infrastructure investment, I think back to something I noticed when I was a teenager spending a lot of time in my basement on my computer as I'm sure a lot of us did. One thing I noticed was that although it wasn't heated very well, it was cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter. I wonder if we'll see any renewed interest in earth-sheltered homes after this whole episode. There are of course challenges with them (mortgaging restrictions, dealing with moisture over time), but you get a lot of mileage out of it. It's not just high lifetime energy savings, it's also insurance against freezing to death in these kinds of situations.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
Nope. Hurricane Harvey. September 19. 2019 - Houston and a good part of the southeastern part of TX was underwater. Increasing volatility of climate may make a good portion of Texas vulerable to that type of thing. Everyone would have to move to Northen Texas.

1_2__4 6y ago

I don’t understand why anyone on HN cares what the editorial page of the WSJ has to say about, well, anything. It’s a largely partisan and stubbornly fact-free source of poorly considered right-wing ideology. This whole article is essentially trying to carry water for ERCOT and Texas’s Republican government. You can bet that if Texas was run by Democrats the article would take a literally opposite position. Everyone knows this. Why are we pretending here, on HN, otherwise? As in, why are we pretending that a columnist for a highly partisan op-Ed section has anything substantive to say about energy policy or climate change?

ziftface 6y ago

I couldn't read the article because it's behind a paywall.

airhead969 6y ago

- America: The Fairwell Tour - book, C. Hedges - Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - book, C. Johnson -The Unraveling of America - article, book W. Davis America is slowly boiling on the stove of corruption and apathy to become another failed state like Brazil, and has been unraveling for decades. It's not doomer hysteria to suppose it when it's demonstrably happening. Look at the burgeoning number of homeless, extreme budget expenditures on global MIC militarism, horrible leadership, lack of plans, lack of achievements like the JFK days, lack of leadership, lack of organizational effectiveness, lack of disaster containment, violence, political divisions, prevailing social hermitage and animosity, personal habits/escapism/conditions of despair (drug use, alcohol, hikamori isolation, friendlessness, depression, anger issues, road rage, screen addiction, virtual lives, extended adolescence, negative attitudes, poor social skills, fatalism, no families), cannibalism of public commons by corporations, power/influence of corporations, lack of accountability of public officials, lack of community, unequal distribution of wealth, and false beliefs by the middle-class and rich that everything is good enough. To pull the republic out of this fatal dive towards the ground, nonviolent but assertive direct action is needed to undo the neglect and revitalize the American psyche. Better days are ahead when, not if, people pull-together to solve the big problems and advance breathtaking goals. The universe is malleable, not inevitable.

adamcstephens 6y ago
Since I appreciate your list, here’s a couple more about the growing class divide. - The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class - book, Guy Standing - Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? - book, Thomas Frank
- airhead969 6y ago
  Oh thanks. Yeah, the American empire is socially divided-and-conquered against itself and economically pyramidally-narrowing with ultra rich vs. growing favelas / ultra poor. Americans have to escape their ruts, become more unified, and act more sensibly, determined, and rationally to assert for a fair shake and better leaders focused on public works, reinvigoration, and better services. I also like: - Death of the Liberal Class - book, Hedges - Collapse - book, Jared Diamond - Upheaval - book, Jared Diamond - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 1-6 - book set, Gibbon - Screw It, Let's Do It - book, Branson

kyrra 6y ago

For those that don't know, Holman Jenkins is an opinion pages columnist for WSJ. This is not the news side. He's also probably one of my favorite writers at the WSJ. He has done a lot of writing on energy policy and climate change. His pieces tend to be well researched and present unique views on lots of topics.