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Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis
- hyperliner 2y ago[dead]
- gnabgib 2y agohttps://archive.is/GnzTQ https://archive.is/GnzTQ
- photonbeam 2y agoMillions of tiny generators roar to life
- nothrowaways 2y agoImagine the noise pollution
- while_true_ 2y agoIt's a real head-scratcher why Texas, with abundant oil, gas and wind energy resources, can't build and maintain a hardened and reliable grid to deliver that plentiful energy to themselves.
- theultdev 2y agouhm, a hurricane hit.
- slater 2y agoIf only they'd had literal decades to build up hardened infrastructure. Alas, ..
- UberFly 2y agoTheir population doubled in size over the last quarter century. Maybe that has something to do with it.
- ironmagma 2y agoSo what you're saying is they scaled too fast?
- wiml 2y agoSo half their infrastructure is less than 25 years old and it still wasn't built up to snuff?
- gregw2 2y agoIt doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-centerpoint-best-prepare-power-lines-for-major-storms/ https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce... That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t.
- gregw2 2y agoTrue, but it doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-centerpoint-best-prepare-power-lines-for-major-storms/ https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce... That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t, at least from an eyeball perspective.
- jen20 2y agoAnecdotally, plenty of areas with buried lines have outages still.
- bigthymer 2y agoYes, but only a Cat 1.
- pennybanks 2y agobut the wind was crazy. rain only lasted but a few hours. but that wind was pretty intense. a lot more so then anything iv experienced
- sojournerc 2y agoCat 1 is up to 90 mph wind. That's not nothing.
- reaperman 2y agoWe’d expect some power outage but when Category 1 hurricanes hit Florida, power is back on in 1-3 days. This knocked out 85% of Houston’s power and will take weeks for many customers to get A/C back on. Excess deaths are rising fast, and I know of many pets which have died already. Category 1 hurricanes aren’t supposed to cause this much damage. Most likely, Centerpoint skimped on tree maintenance, which led to excessively large damage.
- nunez 2y agoIN the city. With sustained high winds for hours. And Houston has LOTS of big trees next to power lines.
- sho 2y ago"Well a wave hit it!"
- nvader 2y agoIs that unusual?
- weard_beard 2y agooh yeah. At sea? Chance in a million!
- lurking_swe 2y agosure. and a hurricane will probably hit every few years at this rate of global warming. You realize texas is right by the gulf of mexico, and the trend is stronger and stronger hurricanes every year? Next you’ll tell me we couldn’t foresee this… regularly trimming all trees around power lines, slowly moving toward underground power lines, etc is the way to go.
- theultdev 2y agoHurricanes are not increasing in frequency. And is this your same advice for California? Everyone needs to bury their lines but it costs money. Cali every year has to have controlled blackouts because it's so bad at managing lines, no hurricanes needed.
- lurking_swe 2y ago“not increasing in frequency” - is this a hoax then? https://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/news/more-frequent-hurricanes-raise-risk-us-east-and-gulf-coasts https://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/news/more-frequen... And yes California is another state with a poor grid. 100%. On the bright side i see some action being taken to improve things: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-puc-power-line-undergrounding-program/709846/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-puc-power-line-u...
- theultdev 2y agoyes it is a hoax, NOAA tracks this and they haven't found any significant increase: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ > There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.
- akira2501 2y agoThey have. Centerpoint is just a terrible steward of it. California faced the same problem in the past. Rolling blackouts led to the end of a governorship and to the biggest corporate scandal in history. Notoriously weak government combined with deregulation and with a market that involves natural monopolies lead to corruption if unchecked.
- CalRobert 2y agoIronic that the scandal was related to Enron, hailing from Texas.
- reaperman 2y agoHouston, even. Though in an “Uno Reverse”, the current CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E in California and the CFO of Centerpoint also hails from PG&E. California was very unhappy with their performance and now Houston is unhappy with them as well.
- Dig1t 2y agoCalifornia still has PLENTY of power outages all across the state for a variety of reasons. Wildfires are a particular cause, but it happens all the time for other reasons.
- jahewson 2y agoRolling blackouts are not power outages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout
- trilbyglens 2y agoIt's not all that much of a head scratcher. Texas prioritizes speed and cheapness in building. Nothing is built to last more than 20 years. The entire vibe of the state is that everything is provisional. It's an extraction camp the size of 3 Germanys.
- ironmagma 2y agoI stayed at a hotel outside of Austin and it was on par with my first apartment out of college, smelling something like a blend of plywood and cockroach droppings. That was the most expensive hotel in the area, too.
- guywithahat 2y agoA hurricane seems like a totally legitimate reason to lose power
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoWhy? Underground cables for the last mile wouldn't be subject to hurricane damage. I don't know how often long-haul high voltage lines get taken out by hurricanes but I suspect it is not that often. Why build a last-mile power grid that can be so easily disrupted?
- pennybanks 2y agoi read from some people in that field that it was basically unreasonable to try to fund for something like that. and that it wouldnt completely stop power outage. unreasonable for houston i think it was. houston is i think the largest or second largest city in america besides a city in alaska.
- gmokki 2y agoNordic countries mandate that private electric companies move their cables (last mile and between power stations) underground, even in rural areas to reduce likelihood of outages. The process has been ongoing for many years now. One way to incentivize it is to mandate high reimbursements to customers on outage.
- 2y ago
- benreesman 2y agoThe private sector is an unmitigated disaster on reliable base load power. Full stop across dozens of examples. Enron and the California grid is a conspicuous example, but it’s mostly lesser degrees of that anywhere. Badly refereed markets in essentials aren’t a matter of if a market failure will emerge, it’s when.
- orwin 2y agoI'm not usually an euroskeptic, but EU's directives on the electricity market would have been an excellent argument for Brexit. It's like the ptomelaic solar system: to make it match how the world really work, you had to add layers upon layers of additional rules, and in the end it's still wrong. The fact that my country used to use Copernic's system is make me feel even worse.
- more_corn 2y agoIs it though? They deregulated the industry deliberately removing rules around weatherization and reliability so energy companies could increase profits at the cost of reliability. They disconnected their grid from the rest of the country specifically so they could make those changes. It’s not surprising to me at all. Everyone who is paying attention could see this coming for years.
- dreamcompiler 2y agoThey didn't disconnect it. The Texas grid has always been mostly separate from the rest of the country.
- dreamcompiler 2y agoIt's pretty simple really. Before deregulation and the total privatization of Texas' power grid, the utilities were required by law to spend part of their income on reliability so that all the elements of the grid had reserve capacity for emergencies. Backup generators, extra insulation for fuel pipes, fatter cables, more workers to trim trees and repair damage, etc. When I was a kid in Texas in the 70s, the grid was extremely reliable. Since deregulation the reliability incentive is gone. Any utility CEO that spends money on reliability will be pummeled into oblivion by Wall Street. It's all about maximizing profit now, and that means every part of the Texas grid operates right on the hairy edge of failure. The plan was that competition would provide some incentive for reliability, but that was always fantasy. No home in Texas has two sets of power lines coming into it from two competing companies. We all know what enshittification looks like by now. Texas is where enshittification meets the power grid.
- inamberclad 2y agoBecause the wealth of the state is being raided and hoarded by for profit companies instead of benefitting the people living there
- fh973 2y ago> “Why did so many CenterPoint power lines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away?” Why not put power lines under ground, like other countries do? It's probably more expensive, but large scale repairs or rebuilds several times a year do not sound cheap either.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- burkaman 2y agoMore expensive is an understatement, I think it costs like 10x more to put them underground. It's also very difficult and disruptive in dense areas where there's all sorts of pipes and cables already there. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, and some of their network is already underground, but the reason it isn't universal is that it genuinely is very hard to do.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- alexey-salmin 2y agoWell, still less expensive than power outage i.e. economy outage. Losses must be enormous, logically you should be happy to pay 10x for underground cables.
- kelnos 2y agoLogically, yes. But that's seldom how things go. Burying the wires would be a major capital expenditure. Bonds need to be issued, depending on the municipality, voters may need to get involved. Shareholders, where applicable, don't like it. Yes, the cost for repair is high, but that's part of the operating budget, and each instance of repair is much cheaper than the cable-burying project, so the cost is "amortized" in a weird way that seems more palatable. Meanwhile, the utility isn't held responsible for the economic costs related to the outage, so they don't care about those costs. Even in California, where the utility has been found liable when their infrastructure starts wildfires that kill people, they still aren't doing massive cable-burying projects. I don't agree with it. I think it's stupid and short-sighted. But there are reasons. Most of them start with "c" and end with "apitalism".
- trilbyglens 2y agoI feel for all the residents of Houston, but there is no more deserving place to be wrecked by climate change.
- pennybanks 2y agoreally? how so. i feel like the people are really nice for such a big city. or do you mean geography wise
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 2y agoI think GP is using "place in Texas" as a proxy for "climate-change deniers". When, of course, most cities -- even in Texas -- are liberal-leaning, or at least politically diverse. So it's just a vindictive thing to say that also happens to be uninformed and lazy. Regardless, it's pretty shitty to wish community and economic destruction on people (not to mention high probability of injuries and deaths), even if they've bought into the conservative propaganda machine wrt climate change.
- freeone3000 2y agoHouston is an industrial city, primarily for oil refining.
- dang 2y agoRegional flamewar is not ok here, regardless of region, so please don't post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pennybanks 2y agonight number 6 here. really sucks. slept one or two nights this week hopefuly three soon. https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ most have power now though
- johnthescott 2y agomy father was born and raised in river oaks, houston before ac. summers were hellish, with little sleep at night.
- guywithahat 2y agoI feel like having a power outage due to a hurricane isn’t that unreasonable? I mean in California in 2019 the power went out for significant periods of time because it was too dry.
- silisili 2y agoIt's not so much unreasonable as dangerous. Like much of the coastal south, it's extremely humid and heat is a problem for all but the best in shape. All modern housing is built for AC, and not breezeways or clearing heat.
- pennybanks 2y agoits expected forsure. happens every time but i think the outrage and noise is because a few reason. Houstonians have had many natural disasters in a row now people are just tired and frustrated first and foremost and have been bottling that up. they want to outrage and have someone take responsibility. the city is blue but texas is red. many democrats have been upset at leadership and sees this as another failure. whether theres truth to it im not sure im not too knowledgeable in politics but to me it seems a lot of people outside the state has been calling out texas as well. i can see that influence with local democrats here. also the rain was very weak, usually power wont go out for this long. but it kind of felt more like a strong tornado that ran through the city. it kind of makes me sad to see people using this for politics, and outraging and what not. i mean i dont think we really know if centerpoint was negligent and at fault yet. but again im not too knowledgeable about the company i just pay them monthly. compare this to harvey where everyone was so eager to help someone. but i understand im so tired too. really am
- reaperman 2y ago85% of Houston lost power. That absolutely does not happen “every time”, especially for a category 1 hurricane. Some power loss, definitely. But not to this extent.
- EasyMark 2y agoThe Texas freeze killed/damaged a lot of trees that were just ready to fall on lines, and evidently Center Point Energy is awful at keeping the trees/branches trimmed back from where they can easily fall on lines/transformers
- hindsightbias 2y agoIt’s fascinating watching my former city and state from a distance. I get vibes like when watching NHK talking heads smiling and reading TEPCO press releases in the foreground while Fukashima #3 explodes in the background. It will be fine.
- kelnos 2y agoI get it, though. I remember when Fukushima happened, I (living in the US) fell for those talking heads, hook, line, and sinker. To me, none of it seemed like all that big a deal, based on what I was hearing from them. Boy was I wrong.
- Animats 2y ago"Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps." You'd think that gas stations would have emergency generators. After all, they have plenty of fuel in storage. But most do not. New Jersey subsidizes backup generators for gas stations.[1] Florida requires a transfer switch so you can plug in an external generator and run the gas station, but doesn't require a generator be present. Texas? Can't find anything. [1] https://www.njeda.gov/retail-fuel-stations-statewide-now-eligible-for-funding-for-back-up-power/ https://www.njeda.gov/retail-fuel-stations-statewide-now-eli...
- reaperman 2y agoI was also very surprised that the Xfinity facilities didn’t have generators, which resulted in me (and most of the rest of Houston) losing internet two days after the storm even though we never lost power (our Xfinity “station” was located in an area which lost power). There’s an argument that broadband should be considered critical infrastructure, because when it goes down, the cellular networks also stop working due to congestion. That makes it nearly impossible for citizens to handle emergencies or for linemen to coordinate repair work.
- 486sx33 2y agoThey do for larger facilities like truck stops.. however those facilities prioritize diesel pump power The trouble with some gas stations not having power during a hurricane is monitoring stops too and you could get water in the gas tanks from flooding
- SilasX 2y agoSemi-related: I went to the gym a month ago, and that block was undergoing a power outage. I tried to drink from the (refrigerated) water fountain, but it didn't work! That model is inoperative when power is out. Huh? You'd think a water fountain would just keep working without electricity, because all it has to do is let water flow from the plumbing, which continues to work? And it just wouldn't cool the water anymore? But no, that design doesn't have a fallback; it needs electricity even for normal water dispensing!
- bitfilped 2y agoThey still have plenty of space for bitcoin mining though apparently.