If California is a guide, the "optimization" is for share holder dividends. PG&E in particular, in the last twenty years in particular, gutted needed repairs, a gutting which has lead to periodic shutdown due to different bad weather (high winds). I don't know the exact situation of Texas but if this is a similar situation, I would be unsurprised.

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).

In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down more and more for frequent high wind events.

I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent them from charging any more money for the service they provide, they are going to have to reduce risk elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service when fire risk is the highest or by doing more maintenance, whichever is least expensive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "people expected".

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...

It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation on themselves.

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

There is little to no fine for stopping service during the high wind events.

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

> a highly consequential long-tail event

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.

That "hip jargon" is concise, specifies characteristics, and clarifies meaning.

They aren’t that expensive, seeing as probably most states can operate their power grid at reasonable cost at these temperatures. They definitely aren’t expensive compared to the economic damage of an event like this every 15 years.

"Expensive" is all relative. If it costs say ... 2% of the utility shareholder dividend, would shareholders be ok with that?

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've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.

"I wouldn't pay any more money to avoid this" is a remarkable low cost tolerance.

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.

Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.

When I was living in California (no, not a large scale event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small houses)...

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.

Isn't it reasonable to expect people reliant on powered medical devices to include a plan B in case the grid goes down? It's not like the grid is perfect. Even in high-reliability countries like the USA there are unforseen events.

You can expect whatever you like. But the reality is that lots of people don't. Maybe they're short-sighted, maybe they're poor, maybe their backup plan wasn't tested to best-practice standards.

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.

Exactly, and it almost certainly makes sense for the few people who rely on them to get generators rather than to pay to improve the entire grid.

California has rolling blackouts every summer (and winter) with power that cost about 3x more than Texas. Rolling blackouts also affect hospitals. I think OPs sentiment is that overall Texas is a better system. Compared to CA I agree.

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.

It seems unlikely and reductionist to think that taking Texas' existing power system, and investing more money in reliability, would make it LESS reliable. But this is what happens when you compare two very complicated things (different states' utilities) and consider price of service to be the only relevant factor.

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.

> Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.

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.

The real issue is frozen pipes which can be pretty expensive/catastrophic. As someone in New England, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't find a power outage all that big a deal--at least for a couple days. But frozen pipes can lead to $10K's of damage.

There's a .gif on Imgur - https://imgur.com/gallery/yvIAcvB

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 have a colleague where an upstairs neighbor had a pipe freeze and leak because of a crack in the outside brickwork. Had to move out for a year. And, for many people, insurance won't really fully cover this sort of thing.

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

Glad you are doing so well. There are a lot of people out there who are not.

Hey great. My blue-lipped toddler is very happy for you.

Hour 42.

Hey man, ignore the comment above, I hope things get better quickly and ya'll are safe, special the little one!

I get that cold isn't fun, but if that's something you're worried about, why not get a small generator or back-up heater ahead of time? We had a close call with this back in 2011. Unless you're really saying that you want to socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm.

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.

> socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm

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 is a valid point of view.

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

Really it means that many many people end up paying for safety measures individually - if they can afford them. The total social cost is likely higher than building adequate infrastructure in centralized places.

Yes. It depends on whether individual house holds pay their own way or if the costs are shared.

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

The parent stated their experience (one day without power) and the willingness to pay more for a specific change, they didn't say anything about longer time frames. If a single day of power outage will cause a person to die, such as those with certain medical issues, you must make preparations for backup power. I hope you can agree at the extreme that treating the entire power grid as if it were a hospital's internal power network would be absurd.

People are dying because of this.

This is not hyperbole:

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

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

Thank you for having a sane reasoned look at this.

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.