The Texas state government made a systematic effort to avoid producers being subject to regulation that would have prevented this.

The regulations exist because it is possible to imagine an event like this. Large enterprises that many people depend on should be robust and reliable and not be subject to the kind of mistake a single individual might make.

The Texas producers all currently exceed the national-level recommendations for winterization. Also AFAIK, the natural gas providers are subject to federal regulations (they are not part of ERCOT, unlike the generating stations that use the gas) and they still froze over, which was a huge contributor to the problem.

Then throw in the fact that power producers all over Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were all struggling with power production too, despite the fact that they are all of course regulated federally by FERC, it doesn’t seem like the national regulations were a magical solution here.

Is it possible that more stringent regulation will help avoid repeats of this in the future? Yes. Would the existing federal regulations have prevented this situation if ERCOT was subject to them? It doesn’t seem so.

For absurdly obvious reasons (not all places have the same climate) there are no winterization standards. There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT.

> none of which were implemented by ERCOT.

The NERC recommendations are requirements in Texas. There is the requirement to plan for extreme winter weather events in Texas but not in NERC.

That's all well and good, except they didn't. So "requirements" should probably be in quotes.

According to ERCOT in 2019/2020 there were 80 facilities checked for the requirements. Some did fail and were rechecked in November. There were plans, however it seems that the plans weren't built for sub zero temperatures.

This claim is contradicted in detail by the article, with numerous sources given. Do you have any sources for your claim?

I think the exact opposite of what you're saying is in the article.

>Why didn’t these plants have a winterization plan? Because it wasn’t required

>1989, the PUCT (Public Utility Commission of Texas) issued several recommendations and guidelines for winterization of power plants and gas wells

>What has been done since 2011? Not a whole lot. A request for a new standard was issued to NERC in late 2012, however a few months later it was denied.[15] Also in 2012 NERC put out a set of guidelines for developing a plan for winter weather[16]. In 2017 NERC put out a special reliability report on the relationship between gas and electricity[17]. Finally, after the 2018 event NERC received another standard request that was approved[23], however it won’t be finalized until late 2021[18,19,20].

Starting at the very next sentence in the article:

> From what I can see, ERCOT has more restrictive rules in their Generator Winter Weatherization Workshop than NERC[21]. All generation stations must have plans for emergencies, address abnormal weather, critical failure points, weather design limits, alternative fuels and testing[21,22]. ERCOT reports that there were 80 spot checks done in the 2019/2020 season with 71 being gas plants and 6 being black start gas plants. 23 had to improve and would be reinspected in early 2021 the rest passed.

This directly refutes your claims that "there are no winterization standards" and "There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT." The inadequacy of NERC is irrelevant to ERCOT.

It's not just Texas. it's the entire south and sometimes more. In the NERC report from the 2014 polar vortex, it looks like 20-30GW were lost due to fuel shortages even in the north east.

Exactly; I'm tired of this being conflated into a ~political issue.~

Edit: Sorry, let me specify. I'm tired of this being a Texas-only political issue. I agree that politics are at play but this isn't localized specifically to Texas' grid.

If you read the report from FERC of the 2011 issues in Texas, I'm amazed anyone can see this as anything but a political issue.

The setup of the energy market in Texas makes it pretty much impossible for providers to adequately weatherize their equipment. The only way for this to happen is for government to mandate adequate preparation for this kind of event.

And while this kind of event is obviously rare, it is only "once in a lifetime" for the very shortest of lives. The 2011 FERC report called it a "once in every 10 years" event, which is uncannily accurate.

Depends on how you define "this kind of event". Rolling blackouts due to cold weather, as happened in 2011? Probably a once in every 10 years event... but also not exclusive to Texas. As others have pointed out, the other surrounding states which some have tried to make out were immune due to not thumbing their nose at federal regulations and being part of larger multi-state grids suffered the same problem, both recently and repeatedly in the past. The more widespread, specific to Texas grid failures? Those do seem to be a once in a lifetime event triggered by once in a lifetime weather.

Either way, the widespread narrative where Texans suffer through this every ten years because they're right-wing morons who have the government they deserve whilst the rest of the country happily avoids it thanks to their superior government doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all.

I'd encourage you to go find some historical reporting from the Feb 2011 cold snap. It becomes immediately apparent that it doesn't compare to what has happened over the last week. It might even occur to you that people citing it are maybe trying to mislead others.

I don't need a ton of historical reporting because I live in Texas and lived through both events. And yes, having seen my apartment drop into the thirties after three days without power, and seeing the effect on my city, I'm well aware that the current situation is much worse.

But a huge reason the situation now is much worse is simply due to the duration of the cold - without power and heat for days there were a ton of second-order effects, primarily burst pipes everywhere. Yet the power system failed very quickly, early on Monday morning. And a huge reason it failed is because none of the recommendations were followed after 2011. And systems that did follow those recommendations (e.g. El Paso, not on Ercot) fared much better.

I have no doubt the historic breadth, severity and length of current cold snap would have caused lots of problems, even if we were well prepared. But on the contrary, I find the misleading ones are the ones claiming this was a "totally unforeseeable" and a "once in a lifetime" event to deflect responsibility for a complete lack of preparation.

What is a political issue is when political leaders lie to the public about the cause. "It's the wind turbines fault." "This is why green energy can never work."

These kind of blatant falsehoods should be inexcusable, but we're living in a strange world these days.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our lawmakers and politicians should be held accountable for spreading lies. That being said, I still believe that this is an engineering problem first and not a problem with the Texas regulations or the politics behind why Texas has its own grid.

It is a political issue. Texas refuses to regulate their grid to meet certain standards. They're so unwilling to do it that they purposely keep their grid separated from the rest of the country.

Now they have a grid that's collapsed and no way to import power from more reasonable areas.

Which standards should they meet? NERC'S? That wouldn't have helped.

NERC doesn't have winterization standards. It has reliability standards that tend to require winterization. Texas would not be in step with the generation standards without more significant winterization, therefore they'd have to improve their systems to meet those standards.

Edit: Here's a PDF of all the standards from NERC. Search "winter" or "ice" or even "cold" and you'll get zero hits.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Reliability%20Standards%20Comp...

For your enjoyment, detailed recommendations from 2011, none of which were implemented:

https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/08-16-11-report.pdf

Yes, those are recommendations that weren't implemented. Anywhere. The issues identified in 2011 for Texas caused issues in the Eastern Interconnect in 2014 for the north and 2018 in the south. In 2018 many of the same recommendations were made and finally NERC has started the standards process however they wont be approved until November.

This report talks about how areas in Texas NOT covered by ERCOT did invest heavily in weatherization after 2011: https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059...

And the NERC report for the south east failure in 2018 talks about how many of the same issues identified in 2011 were still issues outside of ERCOT. See around page 92 in this: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/07-18-19-fe...

The East, West, or Texas grids didn't implement it, you're right. My point is that Texas' grid is getting called out when that report was ignored by everyone. It's a national issue, not a Texas issue.

Except the east and west grids have enough geographic variation where they are unlikely to have the same grid-wise problems as Texas with a much smaller grid.

The very west (i.e. El Paso) and east parts (Beaumont) of Texas are not covered by the ERCOT grid, they invested heavily in weatherization after 2011, and neither of them are experiencing anything close to the catastrophe in the rest of Texas:

https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059...

Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.

My family in the area lost power for more than a day. And as another anecdote, my friends in Lubbock (also not part of ERCOT) were powerless for two days.

I’m in Austin, and while things indeed seemed worse here than either Lubbock or Beaumont, they were still quite bad in those places, too.

The technical issues are not confined to Texas, but it is Texas politicians who are leading the politicization that you object to.