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I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're

I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference. It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know. I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.

andsoitis 2y ago
> There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it." — https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-solar-1847348 https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-so...
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  So if they're making so much power, why is their grid having trouble keeping up? Or is it not and I've misunderstood?
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    There's only so much you can do with old infrastructure in an area that's already highly developed and prone to hurricanes.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.
  - noddingham 2y ago
    I don't think it's power generation that is the issue, but more distribution and protection of the infrastructure. As a commenter above mentioned TX produces lots of wind power (in the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms), but there's not strong regulation on the power companies to ensure the grid is working well. Case in point the cold snap a few years ago with TX govt officials and others crying "you can't make wind turbines work in the cold" despite evidence in New England and the Midwest to the contrary. Much of TX energy infrastructure is above ground poles running along the highways. I don't know what the lifespan is of those but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them could be classified as antiques. If they aren't being regular inspected/replaced, they are likely to go down Also, the energy companies can sell electricity to other states, and I won't be easily convinced that during this event they stopped doing that (because profits). Lastly, see previous winter event and direct recorded quotes from energy companies about how much money they were making by increased prices and I think there are several reasons why this keeps happening in TX.
    - roughly 2y ago
      > the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms It really was not long ago that “free non-polluting energy” was a thing that Republicans could get behind. Even Bush got very into biofuels, albeit going about it in the worst way possible. That party’s taken a strange turn in the last decade.
blitzar 2y ago
Who's going to pay for this investment? Government? Thats socialism.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cl0ckt0wer 2y ago
This is the natural outcome from their anti-government politics. Any legislation that would increase their reliability is shot down as ideologically "wrong". Practical Engineering has a great review of their outage in February 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
shagie 2y ago
> I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... You can save money by not preparing for a 100 year storm. When there is a 100 year storm, you can make money by selling your power at a higher price.
pjc50 2y ago
Poor governance. ERCOT are simply not very good at achieving reliability, and the tendency to culture war of modern US politics is very bad at focusing public attention on any kind of problem that requires wonkish detail work to fix. The state needs a lot of new power lines to connect up renewables. I believe there's a huge queue of renewables projects that have money and planning permission lined up and just need their grid connection approved.
- vel0city 2y ago
  These outages from the hurricane have zero relation to ERCOT.
IgorPartola 2y ago
Texas has its own electrical grid and insists on not connecting it to the Federal grid because I guess they think someday they really would want to be independent or some such. As a result their funding is different as is disaster recovery. Also consider that when you have a state where taxes on like 80 acres of land end up being $70/year, there just isn’t much government money to go around to keep the infrastructure running well.
bob1029 2y ago
It's a transmission problem not an energy problem (this time). There is more than enough energy and generation capacity in the state. It just can't delivered to the last mile. Based upon press releases from Entergy[0] (north of Houston/Centerpoint) a quarter million feet of wires need to be fixed. This doesn't include transformers, logging operations, etc. I would estimate that Houston itself (Centerpoint) is probably dealing with a million+ feet of damaged transmission lines based upon the stats up here and their reported customer outage #s. The area I (used to?) live in wont have power until the 14th because of the damage to the distribution infrastructure. This is 99% a game of trees falling on lines and everything cascading from there. [0]: https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX
- vidanay 2y ago
  250,000 feet of wires isn't very much (480 miles). Are you sure that isn't a quarter million miles?
  - cthalupa 2y ago
    480 miles is quite a lot to repair when it all breaks at once due to a hurricane.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      And then to think that's just the Northeast corner of Houston that didn't quite take the full blast of the storm. The South and Southwest are likely worse, we just don't have accurate public maps of the outage. So that 480 miles or so is probably less than a fifth of the total repairs needed.
    - vidanay 2y ago
      I got the impression that OP was referring to total deferred maintenance of transmission lines in the entire Texas grid. If it is only storm related, that that seems more ballpark-accurate.
sickofparadox 2y ago
The electricity is ready and waiting, its the transmission lines that are down and out for people that were hit by Hurricane Beryl. CenterPoint energy (the owner of the lines around most of Houston) dropped the ball massively, underestimating how much damage the storm was going to cause and did not send out the call for linemen from other providers until it was too late. If you're in the Houston area and don't have power - here is a status map from CenterPoint: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...
cameldrv 2y ago
It’s a hurricane. Hurricanes always knock down power lines and you need a bunch of crews to fix the wires. I don’t know if the power companies are doing this faster or slower than normal, but multi-day power outages after hurricanes has been a thing since the invention of electricity.
- Log_out_ 2y ago
  How many hurricanes make up the cost of one burried powerline? It seems "state_naturally_inefficient" social Engineering is similar always cheaper to solving problems.
  - cameldrv 2y ago
    I don’t know, you tell me. How much would it cost to bury all of the power lines in the Houston area?
    - playingalong 2y ago
      Or have more redundancy?
    - bob1029 2y ago
      It might cost less to relocate all of the residents somewhere else. The Houston area is absolutely enormous.
  - rigrassm 2y ago
    The ground in Houston is mostly clay and extremely wet. I'm no civil engineer but I imagine It would likely result in more issues that take longer to fix. Not to mention Houston is huge and dense so switching completely to underground would be a massive project that no one is going to enjoy.
- caustic-view 2y ago
  [dead]
- stalfosknight 2y ago

andsoitis 2y ago

> There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it." — https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-solar-1847348 https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-so...

Night_Thastus 2y ago
So if they're making so much power, why is their grid having trouble keeping up? Or is it not and I've misunderstood?
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  There's only so much you can do with old infrastructure in an area that's already highly developed and prone to hurricanes.
- vel0city 2y ago
  There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.
- noddingham 2y ago
  I don't think it's power generation that is the issue, but more distribution and protection of the infrastructure. As a commenter above mentioned TX produces lots of wind power (in the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms), but there's not strong regulation on the power companies to ensure the grid is working well. Case in point the cold snap a few years ago with TX govt officials and others crying "you can't make wind turbines work in the cold" despite evidence in New England and the Midwest to the contrary. Much of TX energy infrastructure is above ground poles running along the highways. I don't know what the lifespan is of those but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them could be classified as antiques. If they aren't being regular inspected/replaced, they are likely to go down Also, the energy companies can sell electricity to other states, and I won't be easily convinced that during this event they stopped doing that (because profits). Lastly, see previous winter event and direct recorded quotes from energy companies about how much money they were making by increased prices and I think there are several reasons why this keeps happening in TX.
  - roughly 2y ago
    > the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms It really was not long ago that “free non-polluting energy” was a thing that Republicans could get behind. Even Bush got very into biofuels, albeit going about it in the worst way possible. That party’s taken a strange turn in the last decade.

blitzar 2y ago

Who's going to pay for this investment? Government? Thats socialism.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cl0ckt0wer 2y ago

This is the natural outcome from their anti-government politics. Any legislation that would increase their reliability is shot down as ideologically "wrong". Practical Engineering has a great review of their outage in February 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM

shagie 2y ago

> I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... You can save money by not preparing for a 100 year storm. When there is a 100 year storm, you can make money by selling your power at a higher price.

pjc50 2y ago

Poor governance. ERCOT are simply not very good at achieving reliability, and the tendency to culture war of modern US politics is very bad at focusing public attention on any kind of problem that requires wonkish detail work to fix. The state needs a lot of new power lines to connect up renewables. I believe there's a huge queue of renewables projects that have money and planning permission lined up and just need their grid connection approved.

vel0city 2y ago
These outages from the hurricane have zero relation to ERCOT.

IgorPartola 2y ago

Texas has its own electrical grid and insists on not connecting it to the Federal grid because I guess they think someday they really would want to be independent or some such. As a result their funding is different as is disaster recovery. Also consider that when you have a state where taxes on like 80 acres of land end up being $70/year, there just isn’t much government money to go around to keep the infrastructure running well.

bob1029 2y ago

It's a transmission problem not an energy problem (this time). There is more than enough energy and generation capacity in the state. It just can't delivered to the last mile. Based upon press releases from Entergy[0] (north of Houston/Centerpoint) a quarter million feet of wires need to be fixed. This doesn't include transformers, logging operations, etc. I would estimate that Houston itself (Centerpoint) is probably dealing with a million+ feet of damaged transmission lines based upon the stats up here and their reported customer outage #s. The area I (used to?) live in wont have power until the 14th because of the damage to the distribution infrastructure. This is 99% a game of trees falling on lines and everything cascading from there. [0]: https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX

vidanay 2y ago
250,000 feet of wires isn't very much (480 miles). Are you sure that isn't a quarter million miles?
- cthalupa 2y ago
  480 miles is quite a lot to repair when it all breaks at once due to a hurricane.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    And then to think that's just the Northeast corner of Houston that didn't quite take the full blast of the storm. The South and Southwest are likely worse, we just don't have accurate public maps of the outage. So that 480 miles or so is probably less than a fifth of the total repairs needed.
  - vidanay 2y ago
    I got the impression that OP was referring to total deferred maintenance of transmission lines in the entire Texas grid. If it is only storm related, that that seems more ballpark-accurate.

sickofparadox 2y ago

The electricity is ready and waiting, its the transmission lines that are down and out for people that were hit by Hurricane Beryl. CenterPoint energy (the owner of the lines around most of Houston) dropped the ball massively, underestimating how much damage the storm was going to cause and did not send out the call for linemen from other providers until it was too late. If you're in the Houston area and don't have power - here is a status map from CenterPoint: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...

cameldrv 2y ago

It’s a hurricane. Hurricanes always knock down power lines and you need a bunch of crews to fix the wires. I don’t know if the power companies are doing this faster or slower than normal, but multi-day power outages after hurricanes has been a thing since the invention of electricity.

Log_out_ 2y ago
How many hurricanes make up the cost of one burried powerline? It seems "state_naturally_inefficient" social Engineering is similar always cheaper to solving problems.
- cameldrv 2y ago
  I don’t know, you tell me. How much would it cost to bury all of the power lines in the Houston area?
  - playingalong 2y ago
    Or have more redundancy?
  - bob1029 2y ago
    It might cost less to relocate all of the residents somewhere else. The Houston area is absolutely enormous.
- rigrassm 2y ago
  The ground in Houston is mostly clay and extremely wet. I'm no civil engineer but I imagine It would likely result in more issues that take longer to fix. Not to mention Houston is huge and dense so switching completely to underground would be a massive project that no one is going to enjoy.
caustic-view 2y ago
[dead]
stalfosknight 2y ago