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[Frumple]

How does a place that includes Texas only have a few hours of energy reserves? I thought that was their thing.

By it being only Texas, from what I understand. Unlike more or less every other state on the mainland, Tex's power grid is apparently more or less entirely separated from any other state, so when shit went down they were just flat on their own.

Add in a history of notable mismanagement of their power grid (remember: Texas has been largely GOP controlled for forever now, and good governance just isn't their shtick, especially when it comes to infrastructure) and a situation involving significant power demands (heating due to an unusually intense winter storm in a state largely not equipped to deal with it) and, well.

They were not prepared for a significant disruption in the grid, and now the state's population is paying in lives -- half dozen dead last I saw a count, probably more since then

[Loud Whispers]

China to consider rare earth metal export ban if it would cripple US defence industry production of jets & missiles in response to Taiwan-US arms sales

[martinuzz]

Yeah, sanctioning China is becoming more and more of a catch-22, they are controlling more and more of the rare metals, especially if you take their influence expansion into poor countries worldwide into account.

[Starver]

I'm hearing talk they've also got an (invisible) hand in the relaunched/evidence-wiped Parler (although I think it's more likely Russia, if at all, and those two probably wouldn't knowingly work so closely together).

It'll be interesting to see if Trump partakes, this time, or what other surrogate(s) he might latch onto in leiu of the Big 2.

[McTraveller]

They were not prepared for a significant disruption in the grid, and now the state's population is paying in lives -- half dozen dead last I saw a count, probably more since then

Is this really mismanagement or merely a consequence of generally reasonable tradeoffs of power grid sizing in the face of the coldest weather in 75 years?  "Paying for things in lives" is an appeal to emotion that distracts from actual policy.

It's effectively an insurance calculation - what is the return on spending $X every year for capacity we will use once every Y years?  How much overspend do you do in your personal life to build reserve for unexpected events?  What is the appropriate amount of reserve capacity?  Is it 75-year events? 250-year events?  Should you even think about this immediately after an emotional event, or give yourself a 6 month waiting period to cool down and think about it rationally?

My take is - as individuals, do what you can to help your neighbors survive the crazy weather event.  Then when it's over, critically and rationally evaluate the situation. Don't do the typical thing and just throw blame around; instead spend energy on figuring out how to make an efficient investment to be able to minimize the impact of the next such event.

[Starver]

I thought the point was that the Texas Interconnection area just didn't have enough importation capacity to bulk up its supply of power in the event of such a regional drain.

Texas itself is parallel to the large Western region, the very large Western one (covers far over the midwest, geographically), the Quebec one that services swathes of NE US (or is just considered part of Eastern, being highly tied to it) and the Alaskan and Hawaiian grids that are totally unlinked for genuinely practical purposes (though Alaska was supposed to tie into the Canadian west).

It seems its limited number of connections to Eastern/Western and Mexico grids just weren't up to buffering it (though I imagine the weather also made at least E&W less eager to export their own redistributable surplus power).


As to making decisions in light of an "X-Year event", it seems that every year I'm hearing of "once in a hundred years" flooding/etc happening, so surely there are people noticing the ramping up of such benchmarks, and calling for additional buffering "just in case" for a while. But also those who won't commit because "it's officially been a once-a-century event for the last fifty years!" and so defer contingency funding on such 'proven' but fallacious grounds. I don't think that this emergency could not have been anticipated, and waiting until it's old news (and sonething else fully anticipatable becomes the new news) is probably what the second group have been doing all along.

[Dostoevsky]

One 'funny' thing from this is that FERC - the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - long had a docket open in the Trump era on "reliability." Back then it was intended to be finding a way to prop up less-profitable fossil generation under the guise of it being more reliable than other forms of power, but now FERC is considering reopening it over what's going on in Texas.

On the other hand, the Texas power grid is kind of its own world: unlike most of the rest of the country it's a single-state grid and (partly because of that, I think) FERC doesn't have much authority. Most of the generation losses during the blackouts were natural gas (26 GW natural gas lost, 4 GW wind lost). What I find curious is that the temperatures are relatively normal for other parts of the world that use wind more often, so would be good to know if they just didn't design around colder temperatures there or what.

(And yes, cold weather can indeed mess with fossil energy too. Before this event the biggest generation reliability hits in recent years had been coal piles either getting too wet or too frozen to be used at their coal plants, or in one case the coal plant itself getting too cold to operate.)

I thought the point was that the Texas Interconnection area just didn't have enough importation capacity to bulk up its supply of power in the event of such a regional drain.

That is a part of it, yeah. Texas kind of keeps to itself.

Spoiler:  The regulatory bodies are a little different, but this map is of some help (click to show/hide)

The American power sector is pretty messy - TSOs that are either ISOs or RTOs, reliability councils, FERC, coops, etc. etc. etc.

[Bumber]

Texas probably wasn't expecting all their wind turbines to freeze solid, which they've become increasingly more reliant on over the past few years.

Renowned Leftists Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Not sure what Musk has to do with anything. Mark Zuckerberg claims to be neither R or D, but donates heavily to Dems. Same for Jeff Bezos, plus he bought Washington Post. Jack Dorsey is left-wing.

Well wait, deplatforming is when a platform drops someone.  That's separate from the "mob rule" of large groups of people criticizing a person or entity.

Mobs can coerce platforms to drop people. Businesses, universities, and media find it easier to just fire or ban people than deal with potential controversy.

[Vector]

In what sense is Bezos left wing?

[Bumber]

NY Gov. Cuomo in some shit.

In what sense is Bezos left wing?

I guess he's more Democrat, having double-checked. He supports mainly Democrats, and bought the center-left Washington Post.
Edit: He's also in favor of UBI, but that's probably so he can pay his workers less.

[McTraveller]

Well wait, deplatforming is when a platform drops someone.  That's separate from the "mob rule" of large groups of people criticizing a person or entity.

Mobs can coerce platforms to drop people. Businesses, universities, and media find it easier to just fire or ban people than deal with potential controversy.

That's a much more concise version of what I meant - thanks!

[Vector]

Thanks Bumber, that was the confusion. I tend to think of "left-wing" as being pro-union, pro-benefits, etc.

[Starver]

Texas probably wasn't expecting all their wind turbines to freeze solid, which they've become increasingly more reliant on over the past few years.

The one most unpredictable form of energy there is[1] and there's no anticipation of this?

In what sense is Bezos left wing?

That he's not Right Wing is enough qualification, for some. Personal Liberty For All y'know, except when it comes to not acting in total unwavering support of one's own particular stringent form of belief.

(Ninjaed)
(Edited for punctuation.)


[1] Solar zeros regularly, every night, and dips under clouds/etc, but it's not enough of the grid to count. Winds can drop (or be too much, depending on the generator design) far more irregularly. Otherwise: you know when your hydro-source is getting low,; mostly (prior caveats excepted) fossil fuel is fossil fuel and supply issues are seen approaching; nuclear is even more proof from sudden stoppage, except for actually breaking the complex in one way or other...

[Dostoevsky]

Texas probably wasn't expecting all their wind turbines to freeze solid, which they've become increasingly more reliant on over the past few years.

Wind is increasingly in the mix, up to about 20%, but natural gas is still the plurality with 47%. And while 4 GW of wind went offline (because they hadn't prepared for it - in other parts of the world the turbines can handle it), 26 GW of natural gas went offline. Percentage-wise that actually means the wind was more reliable than the gas, hah.

Edit:

[1] Solar zeros regularly, every night, and dips under clouds/etc, but it's not enough of the grid to count. Winds can drop (or be too much, depending on the generator design) far more irregularly. Otherwise: you know when your hydro-source is getting low,; mostly (prior caveats excepted) fossil fuel is fossil fuel and supply issues are seen approaching; nuclear is even more proof from sudden stoppage, except for actually breaking the complex in one way or other...

Some more data coming out on the TX situation - a nuclear plant actually did fail yesterday, though as of yet it's not clear why. At this point pretty much every power source in Texas has been having problems (there have been frozen coal pile issues too).

Gas did fare the worst, but for them the reliability problems were a combination of frozen pipelines/machinery and fuel limitations - they didn't keep enough redundancies in place to keep up with the spike in both heating and electricity demand.

ERCOT's worst-case scenario planning was a situation with about 14GW of thermal power outages (i.e. fossil outages), but they ended up with 25-30GW in outages. Plus peak demand a little higher than their worst case scenario. Wind generation was a mixed bag in terms of meeting ERCOT's expectations, sometimes going over and sometimes going under their expected levels.

While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, that’s been the least significant factor in the blackouts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid.

The main factors: Frozen instruments at natural gas, coal and even nuclear facilities, as well as limited supplies of natural gas, he said. “Natural gas pressure” in particular is one reason power is coming back slower than expected Tuesday, added Woodfin.

“We’ve had some issues with pretty much every kind of generating capacity in the course of this multi-day event,” he said.

[Teneb]

I guess Bezos is "Left" in the USA's distorted sense of "Left".

In reality he's a massive neoliberal, as we all know. And neoliberalism only cares about the freedom of the market.