21 ms·

The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up

220 points by 0x53 5y ago

hmmmcurious1 5y ago
More like a cooling down in my case
- mrintellectual 5y ago
  I see what you did there.
vorpalhex 5y ago
I'm surprised that Texas Monthly says nothing has changed. The major issue was due to gas generators (the companies that produce natural gas) not being able to operate in winter conditions. 321 of 324 facilities have winterized since, with 304 inspected by ERCOT: https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-plants-ready-winter-163300606.html https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-plants-ready-winter-16330...
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  To be clear - the generators didn't winterize, they "passed" the new ERCOT winterization rules. Texas Monthly briefly addresses this, but the new rules are mostly a checklist of readiness actions designed to ensure that generators can perform in what they consider a 'normal' winter. Phase 1 at least includes such amazing winterization requirements as, "Attest that you repaired everything that broke last February" and "Inspect your insulation". There are more useful requirements like adding temperature monitoring, wind breaks around components, etc, but there is literally no enforcement mechanism yet so it's all basically on the honor-system for now.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Are ERCOT inspections and $100,000 daily fines not an enforcement mechanism? Yes, the fix for cold temperatures are insulation requirements and wind breaks, etc. Not exactly exciting stuff but still correct.
    - wyldfire 5y ago
      IIRC the article said that producers could exempt themselves by attesting that they weren't prepared to stay operational and paying a $150 filing fee.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      A $100,000 daily fine is a pittance compared to the $9000/MWh prices of electricity during the grid failures. Even a small generator could have been making millions during that time. Perhaps a tiny stick is more motivation than a much larger carrot for operators that were so unsophisticated as to miss that initial carrot, however.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      The inspections are only occurring at facilities that voluntarily declared themselves as critical infrastructure... {https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loophole/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loo...} If you notice the ERCOT press release, "321/324 facilities" passed inspection. Last February over 1,000 generating units failed, and over 600 of these were gas generators. So 320ish generators passed inspection -- it's unclear how many of those were in the 600 that failed last year or how many total there are in the state (e.g. the 320 that passed could have already been winterized?). And the daily fines are for "repeat offenders" who don't "remedy within a reasonable period of time" deficiencies that are reported to the commission. It's basically toothless because "reasonable" isn't defined anywhere and it's all at the discretion of the PUC. Obviously things will be directionally better now, and likely even more so in the future, I just wouldn't want to be in Texas during a cold streak in the next couple years.
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        Those 324 represent 88% of capacity. Any fine system has time limits and reasonableness clauses. I will continue living in Texas, and continue not being very concerned during the winter other than our lack of salt trucks.
    - kgwxd 5y ago
      The fines will just be passed off to the customers.
  - bryananderson 5y ago
    A friend of mine is an engineering manager overseeing winterization of gas generators for a utility company in a southern state. His utility hired a company from Texas to do the winterization. My friend commented to his counterpart at the winterization company that they must be getting a ton of business close to home after what happened last year. His counterpart said nope—the Texas utility companies are very much treating it as a one-off event, and the winterization company is not seeing an increase in business there.
- programmarchy 5y ago
  > Nearly all of Texas' electric generation units and transmission facilities have passed the state's new winterization rules That is very slippery language and the rest of the Yahoo/Reuters article reads like a puff piece. According to Texas Monthly's investigation, sounds like there's fuckery afoot: > When Schwertner sent his bill to the House, the legislation also created a committee to map the gas-electric supply chain and determine which gas facilities were critical to the operation of power plants. It authorized the Railroad Commission to use its hundred new employees to inspect and, if necessary, fine gas companies. When the bill returned from the House, though, the language had been revised: only companies “prepared to operate during a weather emergency” were considered critical. This created a troubling loophole. Once the bill had passed, the Railroad Commission was responsible for implementing it, and the agency proposed a rule allowing gas companies to exempt themselves from winterizing simply by paying a $150 filing fee and claiming that a facility wasn’t prepared to stay operational—a dizzying bit of circular reasoning.
  - wildzzz 5y ago
    Good to know that you can just say you're ineligible to get fined for breaking rules because you weren't going to follow them anyway. Like at least create a government incentive program for being prepared for winter weather other than lost profits during downtime. Why would I, as a power company, want to spend any money on hardening systems against the cold when the only downside is a potential small financial hit? It's like a consumer product recall, how much does it cost to do nothing versus how much does it cost to fix the problem?
- bigyikes 5y ago
  I wonder how many were considered “winterized” before last year? This article doesn’t tell us what the delta is. The “cold snap” terminology is also confusing to me. Is Texas expected to have one this year, and if so, at what point does a “cold snap” become part of normal climate? (I am a Texas native and never experienced anything like last year’s “cold snap”. I was living in California last year, and now I’m worried about another “cold snap” this year)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    Having grown up in a place where cold is normal, we still use the term "cold snap" to refer to a sudden drop in the temperature. So, even if it is a somewhat normal occurrence, it can still be called a "cold snap."
  - chasd00 5y ago
    I live in Dallas, weather is notoriously hard to predict. However, the big freeze last year gave plenty of warning as a big blob of cold air moving south out of Canada. It was exceptionally severe and long lasting. I’ve lived here through other extreme (for Texas) winter events but that affected a larger portion of the state and longer than any other one I have experienced. I expect hard freezes and occasional ice during winters in Texas but consecutive days of single digit highs I do not.
  - reddog 5y ago
    The 2021 Feb cold was very tramatic but rare. I live in Austin. Since 1927 we has only gotten into single digits in 5 years: 2021, 1989, 1951, 1949 and 1930. 1949 was coldest at -2 F. And it wasn't just the cold that was the problem -- it was the cold over 5 days and unprecedented amount of snow. It is rare for Austin to ever see snow.
- willis936 5y ago
  They didn't do it after 2011. I don't see why 2021 would be different. These once-a-decade events cost very little compared to winterizing. TX is on year 23 of a deregulated essential utility experiment.
  - nxm 5y ago
    Would still take it over California’s utilities and their costs. How many hundreds of millions can be spent and still have regular blackouts…
    - whoiskevin 5y ago
      I’ve lived in both places and if you think not having power during a week of sub 20 degree temps compares to not having power when it is 40-60 degress outside then I guess we have different ideas of what is better.
    - draw_down 5y ago
    - mrguyorama 5y ago
      There's 48 other states who all have their electricity infrastructure more or less together. Here in Maine we experience the weather Texas had basically bi-weekly in normal winters (it's been very mild the past few years) and IF your power goes out, it's back on in 4 hours, 20 if it's a particularly bad storm and you are a low priority area. Meanwhile the wind turbines up north will happily keep spinning, and at no point has generation failed.
- hypersoar 5y ago
  TFA explains at length that the power generating facilities are only half the problem. The other half are the gas wells and pipelines themselves. Fully winterized gas plants still can't make electricity if they can't get any gas. But the gas industry profited handsomely from the crisis, and it's very powerful in Texas. They successfully fought back a winterizing requirement for themselves.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Yep - another huge issue. None of the winterization requirements have been applied to the wells/pipelines yet: https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-11-18/as-power-plants-winterize-in-texas-gas-companies-get-a-pass https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-11-18/as-power-p...
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
    Macquarie Bank made an absolute killing
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    TFC applies to the gas wells/pipelines, as explained in detail. "Gas generators" in ERCOT terminology are not "generators run by gas", they are "producers of gas". 88% of gas producers by volume are winterized.
mcbishop 5y ago
> A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. It’s not a matter of flipping switches. The steps required for a black start are numerous, complex, and delicate. No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least. I understand that it's a challenge to maintain 60-hertz frequency throughout the grid-restart process. But I'd like to know why exactly it'd take weeks instead of hours to restart the grid.
- Filligree 5y ago
  Because the procedure hasn't been tested. Nothing ever works right on the very first try.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
  Cold starts on industrial equipment, turbo machinery, etc is not as simple as just turning the power back on. There are checklists and physical inspections that usually need to take place before re-instating. That's just on a single unit/plant, I have no idea how they coordinate across an entire power grid.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    They basically can't. You run into the same problem that caused the blackout to begin with -- you need to turn on the generators one-by-one, but you also need to find an outlet for the power to exactly match the supply that's being generated. If you run a power plant without sufficient load, the frequency will flip in the other direction, and if you attach too much demand to a single generator that can't handle it, the frequency will drop again. So you need to do this slow 'titration' of turning on power assets, connecting demand to them, balancing that load and then moving on to the next thing. Texas has something like 11 designated 'black start' generators that are meant to be bulletproof but more than half of them failed in some way last February.
    - Tempest1981 5y ago
Helithumper 5y ago
Ignoring the textual content of the article, the photography is really well done.
Scoundreller 5y ago
> It is hard to fathom the devastation a total shutdown would have wreaked. […] “What my team and the folks at the utilities in Texas would be doing is an exercise called ‘black start,’ ” he said. A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. […] No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least. Why weeks? I “survived” the “great” northeast blackout and most areas were back up in 16-48 hours. And that involved a bigger network across multiple jurisdictions.
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago
  Significant parts of the eastern interconnect successfully islanded the blackout areas during the cascade failure in 2003, while the blackout was huge the interconnect itself was still up and running for (geographically) most of it, so thousands of generators worth of power were available to feed in via dozens of major transmission paths to re-energize the faulted areas. In a real "black start" none of that external capability and coordination exists. Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark.
  - riskneutral 5y ago
    > Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark. For weeks? Without ATMs, gas pumps, grocery stores, etc? It all runs on electricity. It would get pretty grim. According to risk assessments of EMP risk, 90% of Americans of die after 1 year of not having electricity.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      This is why we don't try to test it, yeah. Black starts take forever in part because there's no solidified procedure for it, but producing such a procedure would require causing the disaster we're trying to avoid. So far nothing quite as bad as a real black start has yet happened, and here's hoping it never will.
    - 5y ago
hypersoar 5y ago
There's a crazy detail in here that I don't get. A big part of this article is about the price gouging which led to a windfall for gas companies and huge debts for Texans. > In the hours after the blackouts, ERCOT tried to shore up electricity reserves to stabilize the grid. The computer system that runs the market, though, interpreted this as an oversupply (in the middle of blackouts!) and dropped prices. When ERCOT and the PUC realized what was happening, officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.) So, ERCOT officials decided to basically input a fake number to short-circuit the broken market, and now everybody is on the hook to pay that price for real? Am I understanding this correctly? It sounds completely insane.
- dflock 5y ago
  - GlassKingdom 5y ago
    Seeing lots of these Reddit-tier comments recently. Hope HackerNews stays high quality and doesn’t become populist garbage.
    - Aloha 5y ago
      I live here. For example, The Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production, but not railroads, while insane is not the word I would use, some things about Texas are extra quirky. The utility (electricity) rates during part of the crisis are rational if eye watering.
      - scollet 5y ago
        Was forgiven on my end, which is some social justice.
        SaintGhurka 5y ago
msravi 5y ago
Can someone knowledgeable explain this? > But the situation was only growing more dire. At the precise time of the third call, the frequency reached a critical threshold: 59.4 hertz. > Automated turbines across the state began spinning even faster to produce more electricity, but when the frequency dips below 59.4 hertz, the turbines reach speeds and pressures that can cause catastrophic damage to them, requiring that they be repaired or replaced. Is this actually a way to bump up power generation capacity - by getting the turbines to "spin faster" rather than spinning up more turbines? Also, if the turbines are spinning faster, why does the frequency of the generated AC drop?
- beerandt 5y ago
  Deviation from 60 hz is a measure of overloaded or oversupplied grid. They were "dialing up" the turbines to compensate for overload but it was insufficient and causing the turbines to redline/exceed operating allowances.
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  This is a hypothetical explanation because I don’t know how grids work in practice. The faster turbines turn, the more voltage they generate because the rate of change in flux with respect to time increases as per Faraday’s law. This means they can compensate for the voltage drops across the network due to increased current as per P=I*V. I think frequency dropped because there was too much load on the grid. More load produces more impedance in the grid, this means that, without additional power on the turbines, they respond by turning slower. Like having to bike up hill.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    If grid scale equipment works like 80kw generators, the voltage is electronically controlled by changing the excitation voltage. An overload condition manifests as a decrease in frequency with the voltage still fine.
- totalZero 5y ago
  My understanding is that the author is not a technologist and that these aren't literal physical descriptions of what happened with the turbines. The simplest generators maintain a steady angular velocity that (when normalized for the number of poles) corresponds to the frequency of the output signal. To give the benefit of the doubt to the author, it is also true that a turbine shaft can be connected to a generator via a gearbox, in which configuration a faster turbine would correspond to more power delivered to the generator at the same generator RPM.
Johnny555 5y ago
officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.) I don't understand why the max price is so exorbitantly high -- if they capped it at, say, 10X the 30 day rolling average, then they'd still incentivize everyone with energy to sell to bring it online, but without bankrupting utilities and customers who have to pay over 300 times the normal cost of energy. A family that normally pays $20 for a day of electricity in cold weather can probably manage to pay $200/day for a couple days, but probably not $7000/day.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  With renewable energy, there is an amount of storage or peaker capacity you need to handle a typical day. The sun shines during the day, people want to use a lot of electricity at dusk, you have to be able to deal with that. Then there is the atypical amount of capacity you need for when something goes sideways. There is no wind for a week or it's cloudy and hot so there is less solar even though everybody wants to run their air conditioner. The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price.
  - jabl 5y ago
    > The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price. There's a lot of economic theory pointing to the economic efficiency of marginal cost pricing. But the wholesale electricity market is a pretty "synthetic" design, and combined with the technical limitation demand must match supply exactly every second, marginal cost pricing leads to huge volatility. I'm not really sure what the solution would be, though. I'm not aware of any workable alternative (competitive) market model. There's of course ye olde regulated utility model, but, yeah, maybe we don't want to go back to that.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
[flagged]
- roenxi 5y ago
  You need to make an argument beyond just observing that things went wrong and the market is deregulated. The real world is messy and there will always be emergencies and crisis. Just because an emergency happened somewhere that believes in laissez faire principles doesn't mean that those principles caused the problem. On net, people would much rather move to Texas than away from Texas. The mobile people think it is better than the alternatives. The historic approach to policy by the Texans is a major contributing factor to that.
  - thinkcontext 5y ago
    While true, there was a huge amount of Texas swagger about how ERCOT was so much better than everyone else under the thumb of freedom hating FERC. And that the nanny state was not needed to protect consumers from the wisdom of the market. And that power outages in California were a direct result of their godless Communism.
comex 5y ago
> The overwhelming majority of Texas homes are outfitted with electric heaters that are the technological equivalent of a toaster oven. During the most severe cold fronts, residents crank up those inefficient units[..] What does this mean? I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy. Well, gas heaters are a lot more than 100% efficient in terms of heating per unit of electricity consumed, so better for the grid. (Before anyone else points it out, yes, electric heat pumps are usually more than 100% efficient, too, but that's not relevant here because in severe cold, they are less efficient than direct heating.)
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Air source heat pumps aren't efficient in extremely cold outside air, and so you're back to resistive heating - but for ground source you should see very little change, because the temperature of the rock under you doesn't change suddenly on a cold day. If we have a century of cold weather the rock will cool down, but one particularly icy week won't do it. The ground effectively is your heat battery, pump heat into it in summer (removing it from your home), pump heat back out in winter (to heat your home up).
    - bluGill 5y ago
      This is Texas we are talking about. What they consider extreme cold is still within a modern heat pump's useful range. If this was about northern Canada or other such climates you would have a good point.
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
    ..and when a heat pump isn't moving enough heat / hitting set point inside the home, emergency heat (electric heat strips) is activated.
Gareth321 5y ago
I hear a lot about how Texas is going to descend into Mad Max style powerlessness, but the data is not nearly as grim as the media seems to imply: https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/ https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/ Between 2015 and 2019, Texas didn't even make it into the top 10 list of power outages; and they're in #10 spot for outage hours per outage. In a state with extreme temperatures and large, unpopulated areas, this strikes me as extremely good. I have no doubt that their power grid isn't perfect. No power grid is perfect. I just like basing my opinions on the facts and, currently, Texas isn't doing badly.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  I wonder how Texas looks if you add 2020 to the data and/or exclude the small portions of Texas that are connected to the national grids?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
    It might also be interesting to add 2011 and 2021 to the data. 2011 was the last time a major winter storm caused widespread outages in Texas and spawned the recommendations to winterize that were ignored and resulted in the 2021 catastrophe.
- draw_down 5y ago
- gglitch 5y ago
  I'm not a statistician, but if we're trying to collapse to numbers, a couple that come to mind are deaths due to power outage and total dollar cost of outage.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  Read the full blogpost. Texas is in the top 10 for most electrical downtown and this doesn't include 2020 or 2021. Also, realize that all outages aren't the same. Thousands of homes scattered throughout Maine losing their power because an ice storm brings down power lines isn't that big a deal. Houses there have oil or gas heating, and town centers have more robust electric lines so people can wait it out there and still get supplies. In Texas, the issue was the the whole grid went down and for two weeks. Hospitals, fire stations, grocery stores, ... were affected. There food and water shortages, and 250-700 people died because of it.
chmod775 5y ago
One thing I don't understand about these kinds of articles is that contrasting statements are often kept paragraphs apart, severely reducing their impact. This is going easy on the people directly responsible. > “We’re going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell happened, and we’re going to fix it.” There's no "going to the bottom of this". It was known what would happen a decade before it did, and most of the people responsible were in office for nearly that time. They were warned. They chose to do nothing. A failure cannot become more complete, yet people still place trust in these individuals?
carlossmneto 5y ago
Does someone know what kind of SCADA they run? Here in Brazil we have automatic load shedding if frequency gets below a level.
- Filligree 5y ago
  The article mentions they have the same automatic loadshedding, but also implies it doesn't have enough authority to shed necessary load in a situation as bad as this one.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
> One year after the deadly blackout, officials have done little to prevent the next one—which could be far worse. Why would they: > During the February freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion—creating debts that residents and businesses will pay for at least the next decade.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
It was interesting. Good to see the sources cited :) Then I got to this: > there is compelling evidence [1] that such extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common [0]. The links looked interesting, so I followed them. The second one was an abstract [0] saying, basically: "the last 50 years have seen more of these types of events", fair enough. The first one [1], though, had a paragraph that stuck out to me (apologies for the long quote): > “It’s tough, though,” Butler continues, “because we don’t have a very long record of observations of the stratosphere. We’ve only been observing it directly since the 1950s. That’s not very long to understand what kind of natural variability the polar vortex might be capable of. One researcher did a historical reconstruction by correlating the overlapping portions of the North Atlantic Oscillation index—which goes back much farther—and the polar vortex record, and then extrapolating the polar vortex record farther back in time using the NAO index. It showed no long-term trend, and no big differences in recent decades compared to previous decades.” and then near the end, as the conclusion: > Still, by most of the metrics experts use to describe winter climate, Overland agrees the big picture is clear: on average, winters are warmer and cold extremes are less likely than they were a century ago. How is this article cited as evidence that extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common? How is the science.org article able to claim that there have been more in the last 50 years when we've only been observing them for ~70 years? Anyone able to shed some light here? [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167 [1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/understanding-arctic-polar-vortex https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
- Kon-Peki 5y ago
  If you want to limit yourself to the polar vortex phenomenon, then you really just need to look at historical weather data. To claim that it is happening more frequently, you don't have to completely understand it, just observe the occurrence. In the central US, winter temperature is highly dependent on wind direction and strength. We've been measuring that for a very long time. The polar vortex is very distinct. Strong winds from the north cause a temperature drop of 30+ degrees basically overnight. It stays like that for a few days to a week, and then goes away. The day/night temperature differential is much smaller. Anecdotally, people in the upper midwest will tell you this happens more frequently than it used to. Perhaps 3 out of every 5 years, maybe? Honestly, do we need to get more scientific than that? No, seriously - do we? This is why it matters: here in the northern parts of the US, we can handle it pretty well. It's within the operating range of our infrastructure. We have modern clothing. We have modern forecasting. When it happens, it doesn't last that long, and we move on. What doesn't seem to get talked about is this: if you consider distance from the arctic circle, the polar vortex that froze Texas only went a few percent further south than the ones now happen almost every year. A few percent. To my dear friends in Texas: just spend the money to winterize and then get on with your lives. It's not that much money - you can afford it. Honestly, this just reminds me of the mindset differences between the chemical companies and gas companies in Texas. All those chemical plants that surround Houston are giant rats nests of pipes because the chemical companies won't waste a drop of anything they can sell. They pull in chemical engineers from all over the country to come find ways to turn a waste product into a revenue stream. The gas companies, however, have their heads so far up their rear ends that they'd rather flare off their waste from gas pumps than bring an outsider in to help make money off it. You practically need to have been born into a gas family to work in that industry. Whatever, what I really mean is that winterization has a positive ROI, but good luck getting a gas person to see that.
_8j50 5y ago
Is there another polar vortex this year?
every 5y ago
Here in our corner of Austin we had 100+ hours without electricity and 60+ hours without water followed by multiple days of having to boil it to make it potable. We had zero notion that the grid was that fragile. We also have zero confidence that fragility will be effectively addressed. OPEC, after all, was modeled on the Texas Railroad Commission. So we are stocking paper plates and bowls, excess (and rotated} canned goods, a weather radio with a hand crank generator, a folding tin camp stove with a flat of sterno, plenty of oil and wicks for our hurricane lamps, etc. We're too old for this shit...
baby-yoda 5y ago
somewhat related to this, i came across the following blog the other day (possibly an HNer?) https://blog.networkprofile.org https://blog.networkprofile.org which details steps taken by the author to mitigate any future outages like what they experienced in the past. really thorough and interesting to think through what grid independence takes, plus any related costs/maintenance.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Wonder if someone calculated breaking point where it's cheaper for the grid operator to install home batteries than upgrade the grid itself?
bcrl 5y ago
I'm shocked that nobody has mentioned Enron in the context of grid collapse and insane spot market prices. Granted, Enron specifically manipulated markets to create scarcity of supply, but the effect was the same: prices skyrocketed when electricity producers were unable to meet demand. In my view, electricity shouldn't count as a commodity. Virtually any other commodity in the world has some amount of buffer in the supply chain. Oil can be stored in tankers, grain in silos, etc. Electricity doesn't work like that. Production and consumption must always be in perfect balance. Sure, it's possible to address that by implementing grid scale batteries, but very few electricity grids in the world have done so. Australia is an exception, and the Telsa batteries are able to blunt a lot of the price gouging caused during periods of increased demand. I can't see Texas investing in batteries to create a diversity of supply given how hydrocarbon-centric the state is, especially if they can't even mandate the easy/cheap fixes to their existing infrastructure. Markets are great when they work, but governance matters when they fail.

220 points by 0x53 5y ago

hmmmcurious1 5y ago

More like a cooling down in my case

mrintellectual 5y ago
I see what you did there.

vorpalhex 5y ago

I'm surprised that Texas Monthly says nothing has changed. The major issue was due to gas generators (the companies that produce natural gas) not being able to operate in winter conditions. 321 of 324 facilities have winterized since, with 304 inspected by ERCOT: https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-plants-ready-winter-163300606.html https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-plants-ready-winter-16330...

mikeyouse 5y ago
To be clear - the generators didn't winterize, they "passed" the new ERCOT winterization rules. Texas Monthly briefly addresses this, but the new rules are mostly a checklist of readiness actions designed to ensure that generators can perform in what they consider a 'normal' winter. Phase 1 at least includes such amazing winterization requirements as, "Attest that you repaired everything that broke last February" and "Inspect your insulation". There are more useful requirements like adding temperature monitoring, wind breaks around components, etc, but there is literally no enforcement mechanism yet so it's all basically on the honor-system for now.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Are ERCOT inspections and $100,000 daily fines not an enforcement mechanism? Yes, the fix for cold temperatures are insulation requirements and wind breaks, etc. Not exactly exciting stuff but still correct.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    IIRC the article said that producers could exempt themselves by attesting that they weren't prepared to stay operational and paying a $150 filing fee.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    A $100,000 daily fine is a pittance compared to the $9000/MWh prices of electricity during the grid failures. Even a small generator could have been making millions during that time. Perhaps a tiny stick is more motivation than a much larger carrot for operators that were so unsophisticated as to miss that initial carrot, however.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    The inspections are only occurring at facilities that voluntarily declared themselves as critical infrastructure... {https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loophole/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loo...} If you notice the ERCOT press release, "321/324 facilities" passed inspection. Last February over 1,000 generating units failed, and over 600 of these were gas generators. So 320ish generators passed inspection -- it's unclear how many of those were in the 600 that failed last year or how many total there are in the state (e.g. the 320 that passed could have already been winterized?). And the daily fines are for "repeat offenders" who don't "remedy within a reasonable period of time" deficiencies that are reported to the commission. It's basically toothless because "reasonable" isn't defined anywhere and it's all at the discretion of the PUC. Obviously things will be directionally better now, and likely even more so in the future, I just wouldn't want to be in Texas during a cold streak in the next couple years.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      Those 324 represent 88% of capacity. Any fine system has time limits and reasonableness clauses. I will continue living in Texas, and continue not being very concerned during the winter other than our lack of salt trucks.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    The fines will just be passed off to the customers.
- bryananderson 5y ago
  A friend of mine is an engineering manager overseeing winterization of gas generators for a utility company in a southern state. His utility hired a company from Texas to do the winterization. My friend commented to his counterpart at the winterization company that they must be getting a ton of business close to home after what happened last year. His counterpart said nope—the Texas utility companies are very much treating it as a one-off event, and the winterization company is not seeing an increase in business there.
programmarchy 5y ago
> Nearly all of Texas' electric generation units and transmission facilities have passed the state's new winterization rules That is very slippery language and the rest of the Yahoo/Reuters article reads like a puff piece. According to Texas Monthly's investigation, sounds like there's fuckery afoot: > When Schwertner sent his bill to the House, the legislation also created a committee to map the gas-electric supply chain and determine which gas facilities were critical to the operation of power plants. It authorized the Railroad Commission to use its hundred new employees to inspect and, if necessary, fine gas companies. When the bill returned from the House, though, the language had been revised: only companies “prepared to operate during a weather emergency” were considered critical. This created a troubling loophole. Once the bill had passed, the Railroad Commission was responsible for implementing it, and the agency proposed a rule allowing gas companies to exempt themselves from winterizing simply by paying a $150 filing fee and claiming that a facility wasn’t prepared to stay operational—a dizzying bit of circular reasoning.
- wildzzz 5y ago
  Good to know that you can just say you're ineligible to get fined for breaking rules because you weren't going to follow them anyway. Like at least create a government incentive program for being prepared for winter weather other than lost profits during downtime. Why would I, as a power company, want to spend any money on hardening systems against the cold when the only downside is a potential small financial hit? It's like a consumer product recall, how much does it cost to do nothing versus how much does it cost to fix the problem?
bigyikes 5y ago
I wonder how many were considered “winterized” before last year? This article doesn’t tell us what the delta is. The “cold snap” terminology is also confusing to me. Is Texas expected to have one this year, and if so, at what point does a “cold snap” become part of normal climate? (I am a Texas native and never experienced anything like last year’s “cold snap”. I was living in California last year, and now I’m worried about another “cold snap” this year)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  Having grown up in a place where cold is normal, we still use the term "cold snap" to refer to a sudden drop in the temperature. So, even if it is a somewhat normal occurrence, it can still be called a "cold snap."
- chasd00 5y ago
  I live in Dallas, weather is notoriously hard to predict. However, the big freeze last year gave plenty of warning as a big blob of cold air moving south out of Canada. It was exceptionally severe and long lasting. I’ve lived here through other extreme (for Texas) winter events but that affected a larger portion of the state and longer than any other one I have experienced. I expect hard freezes and occasional ice during winters in Texas but consecutive days of single digit highs I do not.
- reddog 5y ago
  The 2021 Feb cold was very tramatic but rare. I live in Austin. Since 1927 we has only gotten into single digits in 5 years: 2021, 1989, 1951, 1949 and 1930. 1949 was coldest at -2 F. And it wasn't just the cold that was the problem -- it was the cold over 5 days and unprecedented amount of snow. It is rare for Austin to ever see snow.
willis936 5y ago
They didn't do it after 2011. I don't see why 2021 would be different. These once-a-decade events cost very little compared to winterizing. TX is on year 23 of a deregulated essential utility experiment.
- nxm 5y ago
  Would still take it over California’s utilities and their costs. How many hundreds of millions can be spent and still have regular blackouts…
  - whoiskevin 5y ago
    I’ve lived in both places and if you think not having power during a week of sub 20 degree temps compares to not having power when it is 40-60 degress outside then I guess we have different ideas of what is better.
  - draw_down 5y ago
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    There's 48 other states who all have their electricity infrastructure more or less together. Here in Maine we experience the weather Texas had basically bi-weekly in normal winters (it's been very mild the past few years) and IF your power goes out, it's back on in 4 hours, 20 if it's a particularly bad storm and you are a low priority area. Meanwhile the wind turbines up north will happily keep spinning, and at no point has generation failed.
hypersoar 5y ago
TFA explains at length that the power generating facilities are only half the problem. The other half are the gas wells and pipelines themselves. Fully winterized gas plants still can't make electricity if they can't get any gas. But the gas industry profited handsomely from the crisis, and it's very powerful in Texas. They successfully fought back a winterizing requirement for themselves.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Yep - another huge issue. None of the winterization requirements have been applied to the wells/pipelines yet: https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-11-18/as-power-plants-winterize-in-texas-gas-companies-get-a-pass https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-11-18/as-power-p...
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
  Macquarie Bank made an absolute killing
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  TFC applies to the gas wells/pipelines, as explained in detail. "Gas generators" in ERCOT terminology are not "generators run by gas", they are "producers of gas". 88% of gas producers by volume are winterized.

mcbishop 5y ago

> A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. It’s not a matter of flipping switches. The steps required for a black start are numerous, complex, and delicate. No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least. I understand that it's a challenge to maintain 60-hertz frequency throughout the grid-restart process. But I'd like to know why exactly it'd take weeks instead of hours to restart the grid.

Filligree 5y ago
Because the procedure hasn't been tested. Nothing ever works right on the very first try.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
Cold starts on industrial equipment, turbo machinery, etc is not as simple as just turning the power back on. There are checklists and physical inspections that usually need to take place before re-instating. That's just on a single unit/plant, I have no idea how they coordinate across an entire power grid.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  They basically can't. You run into the same problem that caused the blackout to begin with -- you need to turn on the generators one-by-one, but you also need to find an outlet for the power to exactly match the supply that's being generated. If you run a power plant without sufficient load, the frequency will flip in the other direction, and if you attach too much demand to a single generator that can't handle it, the frequency will drop again. So you need to do this slow 'titration' of turning on power assets, connecting demand to them, balancing that load and then moving on to the next thing. Texas has something like 11 designated 'black start' generators that are meant to be bulletproof but more than half of them failed in some way last February.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago

Helithumper 5y ago

Ignoring the textual content of the article, the photography is really well done.

Scoundreller 5y ago

> It is hard to fathom the devastation a total shutdown would have wreaked. […] “What my team and the folks at the utilities in Texas would be doing is an exercise called ‘black start,’ ” he said. A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. […] No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least. Why weeks? I “survived” the “great” northeast blackout and most areas were back up in 16-48 hours. And that involved a bigger network across multiple jurisdictions.

reincarnate0x14 5y ago
Significant parts of the eastern interconnect successfully islanded the blackout areas during the cascade failure in 2003, while the blackout was huge the interconnect itself was still up and running for (geographically) most of it, so thousands of generators worth of power were available to feed in via dozens of major transmission paths to re-energize the faulted areas. In a real "black start" none of that external capability and coordination exists. Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark.
- riskneutral 5y ago
  > Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark. For weeks? Without ATMs, gas pumps, grocery stores, etc? It all runs on electricity. It would get pretty grim. According to risk assessments of EMP risk, 90% of Americans of die after 1 year of not having electricity.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    This is why we don't try to test it, yeah. Black starts take forever in part because there's no solidified procedure for it, but producing such a procedure would require causing the disaster we're trying to avoid. So far nothing quite as bad as a real black start has yet happened, and here's hoping it never will.
  - 5y ago

hypersoar 5y ago

There's a crazy detail in here that I don't get. A big part of this article is about the price gouging which led to a windfall for gas companies and huge debts for Texans. > In the hours after the blackouts, ERCOT tried to shore up electricity reserves to stabilize the grid. The computer system that runs the market, though, interpreted this as an oversupply (in the middle of blackouts!) and dropped prices. When ERCOT and the PUC realized what was happening, officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.) So, ERCOT officials decided to basically input a fake number to short-circuit the broken market, and now everybody is on the hook to pay that price for real? Am I understanding this correctly? It sounds completely insane.

dflock 5y ago
- GlassKingdom 5y ago
  Seeing lots of these Reddit-tier comments recently. Hope HackerNews stays high quality and doesn’t become populist garbage.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    I live here. For example, The Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production, but not railroads, while insane is not the word I would use, some things about Texas are extra quirky. The utility (electricity) rates during part of the crisis are rational if eye watering.
    - scollet 5y ago
      Was forgiven on my end, which is some social justice.
      - SaintGhurka 5y ago

msravi 5y ago

Can someone knowledgeable explain this? > But the situation was only growing more dire. At the precise time of the third call, the frequency reached a critical threshold: 59.4 hertz. > Automated turbines across the state began spinning even faster to produce more electricity, but when the frequency dips below 59.4 hertz, the turbines reach speeds and pressures that can cause catastrophic damage to them, requiring that they be repaired or replaced. Is this actually a way to bump up power generation capacity - by getting the turbines to "spin faster" rather than spinning up more turbines? Also, if the turbines are spinning faster, why does the frequency of the generated AC drop?

beerandt 5y ago
Deviation from 60 hz is a measure of overloaded or oversupplied grid. They were "dialing up" the turbines to compensate for overload but it was insufficient and causing the turbines to redline/exceed operating allowances.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
This is a hypothetical explanation because I don’t know how grids work in practice. The faster turbines turn, the more voltage they generate because the rate of change in flux with respect to time increases as per Faraday’s law. This means they can compensate for the voltage drops across the network due to increased current as per P=I*V. I think frequency dropped because there was too much load on the grid. More load produces more impedance in the grid, this means that, without additional power on the turbines, they respond by turning slower. Like having to bike up hill.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  If grid scale equipment works like 80kw generators, the voltage is electronically controlled by changing the excitation voltage. An overload condition manifests as a decrease in frequency with the voltage still fine.
totalZero 5y ago
My understanding is that the author is not a technologist and that these aren't literal physical descriptions of what happened with the turbines. The simplest generators maintain a steady angular velocity that (when normalized for the number of poles) corresponds to the frequency of the output signal. To give the benefit of the doubt to the author, it is also true that a turbine shaft can be connected to a generator via a gearbox, in which configuration a faster turbine would correspond to more power delivered to the generator at the same generator RPM.

Johnny555 5y ago

officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.) I don't understand why the max price is so exorbitantly high -- if they capped it at, say, 10X the 30 day rolling average, then they'd still incentivize everyone with energy to sell to bring it online, but without bankrupting utilities and customers who have to pay over 300 times the normal cost of energy. A family that normally pays $20 for a day of electricity in cold weather can probably manage to pay $200/day for a couple days, but probably not $7000/day.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
With renewable energy, there is an amount of storage or peaker capacity you need to handle a typical day. The sun shines during the day, people want to use a lot of electricity at dusk, you have to be able to deal with that. Then there is the atypical amount of capacity you need for when something goes sideways. There is no wind for a week or it's cloudy and hot so there is less solar even though everybody wants to run their air conditioner. The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price.
- jabl 5y ago
  > The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price. There's a lot of economic theory pointing to the economic efficiency of marginal cost pricing. But the wholesale electricity market is a pretty "synthetic" design, and combined with the technical limitation demand must match supply exactly every second, marginal cost pricing leads to huge volatility. I'm not really sure what the solution would be, though. I'm not aware of any workable alternative (competitive) market model. There's of course ye olde regulated utility model, but, yeah, maybe we don't want to go back to that.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

[flagged]

roenxi 5y ago
You need to make an argument beyond just observing that things went wrong and the market is deregulated. The real world is messy and there will always be emergencies and crisis. Just because an emergency happened somewhere that believes in laissez faire principles doesn't mean that those principles caused the problem. On net, people would much rather move to Texas than away from Texas. The mobile people think it is better than the alternatives. The historic approach to policy by the Texans is a major contributing factor to that.
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  While true, there was a huge amount of Texas swagger about how ERCOT was so much better than everyone else under the thumb of freedom hating FERC. And that the nanny state was not needed to protect consumers from the wisdom of the market. And that power outages in California were a direct result of their godless Communism.

comex 5y ago

> The overwhelming majority of Texas homes are outfitted with electric heaters that are the technological equivalent of a toaster oven. During the most severe cold fronts, residents crank up those inefficient units[..] What does this mean? I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy. Well, gas heaters are a lot more than 100% efficient in terms of heating per unit of electricity consumed, so better for the grid. (Before anyone else points it out, yes, electric heat pumps are usually more than 100% efficient, too, but that's not relevant here because in severe cold, they are less efficient than direct heating.)
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Air source heat pumps aren't efficient in extremely cold outside air, and so you're back to resistive heating - but for ground source you should see very little change, because the temperature of the rock under you doesn't change suddenly on a cold day. If we have a century of cold weather the rock will cool down, but one particularly icy week won't do it. The ground effectively is your heat battery, pump heat into it in summer (removing it from your home), pump heat back out in winter (to heat your home up).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    This is Texas we are talking about. What they consider extreme cold is still within a modern heat pump's useful range. If this was about northern Canada or other such climates you would have a good point.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
  ..and when a heat pump isn't moving enough heat / hitting set point inside the home, emergency heat (electric heat strips) is activated.

Gareth321 5y ago

I hear a lot about how Texas is going to descend into Mad Max style powerlessness, but the data is not nearly as grim as the media seems to imply: https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/ https://www.mroelectric.com/blog/most-least-power-outages/ Between 2015 and 2019, Texas didn't even make it into the top 10 list of power outages; and they're in #10 spot for outage hours per outage. In a state with extreme temperatures and large, unpopulated areas, this strikes me as extremely good. I have no doubt that their power grid isn't perfect. No power grid is perfect. I just like basing my opinions on the facts and, currently, Texas isn't doing badly.

JaimeThompson 5y ago
I wonder how Texas looks if you add 2020 to the data and/or exclude the small portions of Texas that are connected to the national grids?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  It might also be interesting to add 2011 and 2021 to the data. 2011 was the last time a major winter storm caused widespread outages in Texas and spawned the recommendations to winterize that were ignored and resulted in the 2021 catastrophe.
draw_down 5y ago
gglitch 5y ago
I'm not a statistician, but if we're trying to collapse to numbers, a couple that come to mind are deaths due to power outage and total dollar cost of outage.
thesausageking 5y ago
Read the full blogpost. Texas is in the top 10 for most electrical downtown and this doesn't include 2020 or 2021. Also, realize that all outages aren't the same. Thousands of homes scattered throughout Maine losing their power because an ice storm brings down power lines isn't that big a deal. Houses there have oil or gas heating, and town centers have more robust electric lines so people can wait it out there and still get supplies. In Texas, the issue was the the whole grid went down and for two weeks. Hospitals, fire stations, grocery stores, ... were affected. There food and water shortages, and 250-700 people died because of it.

chmod775 5y ago

One thing I don't understand about these kinds of articles is that contrasting statements are often kept paragraphs apart, severely reducing their impact. This is going easy on the people directly responsible. > “We’re going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell happened, and we’re going to fix it.” There's no "going to the bottom of this". It was known what would happen a decade before it did, and most of the people responsible were in office for nearly that time. They were warned. They chose to do nothing. A failure cannot become more complete, yet people still place trust in these individuals?

carlossmneto 5y ago

Does someone know what kind of SCADA they run? Here in Brazil we have automatic load shedding if frequency gets below a level.

Filligree 5y ago
The article mentions they have the same automatic loadshedding, but also implies it doesn't have enough authority to shed necessary load in a situation as bad as this one.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

> One year after the deadly blackout, officials have done little to prevent the next one—which could be far worse. Why would they: > During the February freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion—creating debts that residents and businesses will pay for at least the next decade.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

It was interesting. Good to see the sources cited :) Then I got to this: > there is compelling evidence [1] that such extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common [0]. The links looked interesting, so I followed them. The second one was an abstract [0] saying, basically: "the last 50 years have seen more of these types of events", fair enough. The first one [1], though, had a paragraph that stuck out to me (apologies for the long quote): > “It’s tough, though,” Butler continues, “because we don’t have a very long record of observations of the stratosphere. We’ve only been observing it directly since the 1950s. That’s not very long to understand what kind of natural variability the polar vortex might be capable of. One researcher did a historical reconstruction by correlating the overlapping portions of the North Atlantic Oscillation index—which goes back much farther—and the polar vortex record, and then extrapolating the polar vortex record farther back in time using the NAO index. It showed no long-term trend, and no big differences in recent decades compared to previous decades.” and then near the end, as the conclusion: > Still, by most of the metrics experts use to describe winter climate, Overland agrees the big picture is clear: on average, winters are warmer and cold extremes are less likely than they were a century ago. How is this article cited as evidence that extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common? How is the science.org article able to claim that there have been more in the last 50 years when we've only been observing them for ~70 years? Anyone able to shed some light here? [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167 [1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/understanding-arctic-polar-vortex https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Kon-Peki 5y ago
If you want to limit yourself to the polar vortex phenomenon, then you really just need to look at historical weather data. To claim that it is happening more frequently, you don't have to completely understand it, just observe the occurrence. In the central US, winter temperature is highly dependent on wind direction and strength. We've been measuring that for a very long time. The polar vortex is very distinct. Strong winds from the north cause a temperature drop of 30+ degrees basically overnight. It stays like that for a few days to a week, and then goes away. The day/night temperature differential is much smaller. Anecdotally, people in the upper midwest will tell you this happens more frequently than it used to. Perhaps 3 out of every 5 years, maybe? Honestly, do we need to get more scientific than that? No, seriously - do we? This is why it matters: here in the northern parts of the US, we can handle it pretty well. It's within the operating range of our infrastructure. We have modern clothing. We have modern forecasting. When it happens, it doesn't last that long, and we move on. What doesn't seem to get talked about is this: if you consider distance from the arctic circle, the polar vortex that froze Texas only went a few percent further south than the ones now happen almost every year. A few percent. To my dear friends in Texas: just spend the money to winterize and then get on with your lives. It's not that much money - you can afford it. Honestly, this just reminds me of the mindset differences between the chemical companies and gas companies in Texas. All those chemical plants that surround Houston are giant rats nests of pipes because the chemical companies won't waste a drop of anything they can sell. They pull in chemical engineers from all over the country to come find ways to turn a waste product into a revenue stream. The gas companies, however, have their heads so far up their rear ends that they'd rather flare off their waste from gas pumps than bring an outsider in to help make money off it. You practically need to have been born into a gas family to work in that industry. Whatever, what I really mean is that winterization has a positive ROI, but good luck getting a gas person to see that.

_8j50 5y ago

Is there another polar vortex this year?

every 5y ago

Here in our corner of Austin we had 100+ hours without electricity and 60+ hours without water followed by multiple days of having to boil it to make it potable. We had zero notion that the grid was that fragile. We also have zero confidence that fragility will be effectively addressed. OPEC, after all, was modeled on the Texas Railroad Commission. So we are stocking paper plates and bowls, excess (and rotated} canned goods, a weather radio with a hand crank generator, a folding tin camp stove with a flat of sterno, plenty of oil and wicks for our hurricane lamps, etc. We're too old for this shit...

baby-yoda 5y ago

somewhat related to this, i came across the following blog the other day (possibly an HNer?) https://blog.networkprofile.org https://blog.networkprofile.org which details steps taken by the author to mitigate any future outages like what they experienced in the past. really thorough and interesting to think through what grid independence takes, plus any related costs/maintenance.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

Wonder if someone calculated breaking point where it's cheaper for the grid operator to install home batteries than upgrade the grid itself?

bcrl 5y ago

I'm shocked that nobody has mentioned Enron in the context of grid collapse and insane spot market prices. Granted, Enron specifically manipulated markets to create scarcity of supply, but the effect was the same: prices skyrocketed when electricity producers were unable to meet demand. In my view, electricity shouldn't count as a commodity. Virtually any other commodity in the world has some amount of buffer in the supply chain. Oil can be stored in tankers, grain in silos, etc. Electricity doesn't work like that. Production and consumption must always be in perfect balance. Sure, it's possible to address that by implementing grid scale batteries, but very few electricity grids in the world have done so. Australia is an exception, and the Telsa batteries are able to blunt a lot of the price gouging caused during periods of increased demand. I can't see Texas investing in batteries to create a diversity of supply given how hydrocarbon-centric the state is, especially if they can't even mandate the easy/cheap fixes to their existing infrastructure. Markets are great when they work, but governance matters when they fail.