The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.

But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.

All of this is somewhat conditioned by advancing global warming, which known to lead to more severe weather conditions (more specifically, with the slowing of the jetstream, the polar vortex migrates South, has been doing so for the last few years).

The power companies muscled into place a system where they could scrimp in improvements and pocket the savings.

The disastrous result was devastating fires. The system of civil courts still existed so they wound-up liable for their despicable maneuvers and has to pay a bit back from gains. So their next maneuver was turning off their lines when winds got high rather than engaging in the now even great expense of repairing them.

PG&E is a literally criminal enterprise, found criminally (not civilly) liable for the death of more than 100 people (29 gas explosion, 85 fire, etc).

The well-known Judge Alsop rightly denounced their vicious chicanery but sadly failed to put them in receivership and forfeit the value of their shareholder's assets (IMO, shareholder assets should be forfeit and previous dividends clawed back but natural they can do that to people in nursing homes and Madoff shareholder but they can't do it to these shitheals).

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/05/28/regulators-appr...

I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on to maintain a better than third-world power grid availability.

The incentive pushes them to shutoff, its simply cheaper than repairing the grid.

Hip jargon aside, planning for low-probability events was invented a long time ago.

Unfortunately, so were politicians, who will operate within the parameters they are given. If you want real resilience, you want better governance.

Before this happened, what exactly were the incentives that led them not to prepare? Was it really an unforeseeable event? Was the risk understood but downplayed (like the oil industry with climate change)? The answers to these will hopefully come out in time.

I would love to know just how much we'd be talking about per-customer. Ten cents over ten years? A dollar over ten years? Twenty dollars? More?

Without knowing that "I wouldn't pay any more" seems foolhardy.

The mother in law of the guy who handled the property would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and would have loved to have him sell it.

And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.

She didn't fuss about the RV after that.

If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill many people who depend on the consistent power to keep their medical devices working.

I'm sure everyone has seen the bit about half the country lacking a $400 emergency buffer. You can blame them for their own plight if it makes you feel better. Or you can blame a skewed economy. Or god, or me.

You're still left with a grid buckling due to underinvestment, and a future that's likely to demonstrate that this was just a warning.

Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be improved, but spending 3x more and looking more like California is a huge net loss.

I'm not familiar with rolling blackouts in the winter in CA. And, in fact, I've never been part of a rolling blackout, period, in my 20 years in CA.

But the rolling blackouts that some areas experience now are by and large due to (fire) risk avoidance by the utility, not by generation issues.

No, this is simply a baseless assumption made by you, with an effect similar to poisoning the well. I know people on medical devices, and one day of power loss per 30 years is absolutely acceptable to them, give that they arranged to have backup power.

Its... yea. That's going to be rather expensive.

Also, part of the power problem is frozen pipes - and not just water pipes: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/texas-pow...

> Operations in Texas have stumbled because temperatures are low enough to freeze oil and gas liquids at the well head and in pipelines that are laid on the ground, as opposed to under the surface as practiced in more northerly oil regions. The big question now is how quickly temperatures return to normal.

For nuclear... the cooling ponds froze: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-squar...

> First, Representative Gene Wu, Texas House of Representatives District 137, walks us through the “cascade” of problems that caused multiple generators to go out without back-ups in place. Including, water vapor inside natural gas generators that condensed and froze shutting down the machines and nuclear power plants whose cooling ponds froze, setting off automatic shutdowns. Rep. Wu also advocates turning off all non-emergency electronics to reduce the strain on the energy grid.

Imagine the fun of having those pipes freeze (this is the cooling loop - not the reactor loop so "just" power down the reactor - it's not the loop that deals with the water that passes through the core).

I often debate if I should get a generator for outlier events in a house.

Hour 42.

All that aside, I hope y'all stay warm. I know many cities are opening warming facilities, so maybe check if there's one near you.

This seems like one of the whole points for having a society. Ensuring basic necessities like this are covered at a marginal cost. But I guess the neoliberal capitalist haven of America thinks it's "socialism", and thus evil.

It may be true in a lot of places that we should step back from 100% coverage as the cost is just too high, and it is better (cheaper) to put the resilience in housholds than in utilities.

But your anecdote is just that - a anecdote. We need to carefully weigh those options.

Elected politicians have a bad reputation for making these trade offs sensibly. I have heard it said (by a fictional character I think - no source) that (in popular opinion) the present trumps the future every time

I guess it would depend a lot of the local political culture.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/death....

Folks are dying as a direct result of these infrastructure failures.

People use extremely low probably exceptions to attempt to radically rewrite the way things are done.

Bad shit happens very rarely. Sometime the best action can be just to do nothing.

It seems like there is no shortage of scapegoats, so my money says "no".

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-power...

Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...

That’s simply not true. The only people “litigating” do so in response to dishonest indictments of wind power.

Looks like at June 21 (picking a day around the summer solstice) sunrise is at 4:04 am and sunset is midnight. That's a nice 20 hours of sunshine.

On the flip and dark side, Dec 21 it is sunrise at ~10:30 am and sunset at ~3:30 pm. A sadly short 5 hours of sun. Ouch.

As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself.

Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.

But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.

I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!

Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.

I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off.

After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water