Here in the Seattle area, we regularly have a big blow which knocks trees onto the power lines and vast portions of the power grid go down. While it happens to some extent every year, about once a decade it's a several day outage, even in the city. The last time it was 10 days. The power cables were down for miles everywhere.

And yet, everything gets rebuilt in place, the same way, the same risks. No engineering improvements. No buried cables (which do just fine in storms).

Most everyone in my neighborhood has some sort of generator, and we're well inside the dense part of the city.

Buried cables tend to have a higher lifetime cost, which is one reason why Seattle has stuck with aerial cables in so many neighborhoods.

West Seattle neighborhoods have more buried cables than most, and they're facing some very expensive reliability issues due to IIRC dielectric breakdown.

If Seattle wanted to squeeze better reliability out of their aerial transmission systems, they could move to a four-year tree clearance pruning cycle, like Portland. Last I heard, we're still on a five year cycle and every time changing it comes up, it's seen as cost prohibitive.

We get the reliability we're willing to pay for.

Is there any reason why Europe can do buried cables just fine (and has been for a good few decades), but the US can't? As I understand even new neighbourhoods in the US often have overhead cables.

I live in Europe, and in general we don't distrust the state, and we don't want to pay less taxes (we would like more efficiency managing them, though).

Interesting, somehow I never thought of that. Lowering taxes is just not a major talking point in European politics except maybe for certain types of taxes, or distributing them differently, but there are no big divides on this.

The situation is highly regional. Walter's experience is specific to Seattle, but he's right that each region has its own infrastructure problems. Denver metro area (my neck of the woods) has mostly buried power, but a long-term fresh water problem.

Buried infrastructure also tends to be down for longer. Above ground lines go down more often. But they're easier to fix when they do; fixing buried lines can be a nightmare.

As an example, a mall near me was without power for weeks after flooding destroyed some underground electric infrastructure. The flooding didn't even do any real harm to the mall! They just got unlucky: underground lines and other equipment that should be waterproof weren't, and they shorted out in such a way that a bunch of stuff had to be dug up and replaced.

In 2019, some contractor got lucky while doing drilling works and scored a hit on both the main cable and the backup cable connecting the neighborhood of Berlin-Köpenick to the grid - severing each of the three phases in both cables. Establishing the construction site, digging the hole and fixing the two 110KV cables took a mere 31 hours - and that includes 6 hours of setting time for the couplings used. This was pretty much the worst case scenario that could have happened. It's possible to maintain good uptime with buried infrastructure, as with most things it's a matter of spending the money to do so.

Also anecdotal here but I can't remember the last time power was down for a long time where I live in Belgium.

If I hear about issues it's generally extremely local or an issue with power generation (we're predicted to have more issues in the future due to our gov being idiots void of long term thinking when it came to replacing old nuclear plants)

So all in all I haven't experienced this being down longer issue (and yes flooding shouldn't be able to destroy underground lines and such.)

It seems we are generally unwilling to pay for a higher level of availability-- that the current level is generally speaking good enough. We prosthelytize that we must do better, but voting with our pocketbooks is another matter.

Usually the fallen trees are removed, aren't they? Isn't that an improvement?

The next year another tree falls. It's a continuous process. Trees grow faster than one thinks - in 25 years it's big enough to threaten the lines.

Which is why you spend a lot of time maintaining the ”power cable streets”, whatever that is called in American.

See https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/org/centrb/cbm/bilder/for...

using a glorious flying saw attached to a helicopter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MpD-sootTs (classic german kids tv show)

I'd have loved to be in that design meeting: "Look, we could just build a huge saw and attach it to a helo." - "Ok, sounds fine, what could possibly go wrong?

Underground costs about 10x as much as overhead.

Just in the time I've been living in this neighborhood, they've restrung the overhead wires, with new poles, more than 10 times.

The street I live on has underground cables (the overhead lines go underground for my street) has never had a cable failure, though fallen trees have blocked the road. That latter gets straightened out by the neighbors, as many have chainsaws and always look for an opportunity to use them :-)

(Seattle neighborhoods have lots of trees!)

This is not a fair reading of the article. It actually discusses national winterization versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days.

That is a reasonable point, but it is only half the story when it leaves out regulatory capture (which certainly is not confined to Texas), the deliberate adoption or rejection of policies on the basis of whether they conform to a counterfactual ideology (climate-change denial), and the brazen attempt to shift blame for the problem onto policies that actually attempt to mitigate problems that really are happening.

Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing. It doesn't have anything to do with climate-change denial or the current governor. By allowing your evaluation of the situation to be influenced by that sort of thing, you are engaging in a kind of recency bias -- imagining that the future can cause the past.

> was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing.

Wasn't it so Texans could continue to live in the fantasy world that they could secede from the US any time they wanted?

Surprisingly, Texas' pathological urge to secede every time a Democrat wins the White House seems to have been abated by recent events[0].

[0]https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-17/texas-seve...

All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities. That is not an adequate justification for the current situation. The idea that Texas alone is somehow constrained, by forces beyond its control, from changing with the times, is absurd.

Is Texas doomed by its history to live with the cold-vulnerable infrastructure that led up to these problems, on account of the way things were decades ago? Of course not - things will be fixed.

Texas's policy decision, to remain separate from the other grids, dates to the 1930s. It's not about being constrained, it's about this policy choice. ERCOT, the current organization that manages Texas's electricity, dates from the 1970s.

Trying to explain this policy choice in terms of the current political climate is ahistorical and a little strange. How could an informed person believe the current governor has anything to do with decision dating to the 1930s? However, that's the kind of explanation you were offering, and that's what I'm objecting to: this curious recency bias, so prevalent in tech forums, where everything that happened more than 10 years ago is not real.

I see you are still pusuing the ridiculous idea that Texas, unlike literally everywhere else on Earth, has been constrained* from upgrading its infrastructure on account of decisions made nearly a century ago.

*Denying that it is a constraint does not alter the fact that your argument, such as it is, depends on it being one.

What you posted earlier is ridiculous because you're trying to explain the Texas grid in terms of current political trends, like the decision was made in the last few years.

So, despite your argument being in tatters, you insist that something I wrote must be illogical, somehow? well, you are at least doggedly wrong, I'll give you that.

If you are tempted to post further (I am sure you are), I suggest that you first read what I actually wrote in my original post in this thread.

I suggest you read what you wrote in reply to me, and what I replied to.

Unsurprisingly, nothing has changed. Not only are you arguing against a statement I did not make, but if someone else had said that, your response is nonsense because it requires that Texas, alone, has been completely constrained by decisions made 40-90 years or more ago.

What is that leads you to say that?

The stream of nonsense with which you have replied to me with, of course - and maybe you know it is nonsense, as you have stopped trying to defend it.

At this point, it would be better for you to acknowledge it is nonsense, rather than give the impression that you still cannot figure out that it is.

What is that you leads you to say "...it requires that Texas, alone, has been completely constrained by decisions made 40-90 years or more ago."?

Are you uncomfortable supporting your position?

> Are you uncomfortable supporting your position?

Unlike you, I am not. It simply comes back to an issue that you have been avoiding for quite a while:

All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities. That is not an adequate justification for the current situation. The idea that Texas alone is somehow constrained, by forces beyond its control, from changing with the times, is absurd.

Where are you getting the idea, that it comes back to Texas being constrained?

That is a very odd question, as it could hardly be clearer that the point here is that as there have been no special constraints preventing Texas from following the rest of the world's example in improving its energy infrastructure over the decades, your reply to my original point is irrelevant.

Texas was not constrained when they made the choice to develop an energy grid that remained separate from the other grids developing in the US. ("All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities.")

The point that is actually relevant here is that Texas has not been constrained from modifying its energy infrasrastructure, to make it more resilient than it has proved to be, at any time since then.

What policies were you referring to when you said "All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities."?

A lot of people have focused on Texas's separate grid policy.

That is not a statement about policies, it is a statement of historical fact about electrical-supply grids in general. What part of that statement do you disagree with?

What's that statement have to do with the discussion at hand? What lead you to introduce it?

What lead[sic] me to introduce it was, of course, your statement that "Texas's separate grid dates back decades". The reason why I untroduced it, of course, was that that it explains why the statement of yours that I just quoted is utterly irrelevant to an analysis of what has recently happened, and, more specifically, is utterly irrelevant to the post of mine that you were replying to.

And do I really need to explain to you how it shows that your comment is irrelevant? I suppose I do, given that we are here. It is just this: since the beginning of Texas' grid (as you say, decades ago - almost a century) there has been plenty of opportunity for Texas to make not just its grid, but its entire energy infrastructure, more resilient. Far from my case being one of recency bias, the reality is that your reply to it suffers from the opposite fallacy - a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name.

Oh, you are right -- "lead" is a common mis-spelling of "led".

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/led-lead/

The reason you "untroduced [sic]" it, of course, was "that that [sic]" it distracts from your backwards projection of current events, which is why your post is is utterly irrelevant to an analysis of what has recently happened, and, more specifically, is utterly irrelevant to the article you were commenting on.

And do I really need to explain to you why your points are irrelevant? I suppose that I do, given that we are here. It is just this: the article actually discusses national winterization standards versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days. Far from my case being based on a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name, the reality is that your reply suffers from one that is well known and quite common among your ilk: recency bias.

Your complete change of argument here is not much better than the reply you originally posted, as the first thing I wrote in that post is that I agreed with what you wrote about the article (but that it and the article are not the whole story), and the only point where I mentioned Texas was to say that the issues are not confined to Texas. There are lessons to be learned here, for all the affected states, about basing planning on the realities of the actual world. Inadequate preparation in multiple states does not somehow excuse any one of them.

You are now attempting to argue against, not what I posted, but an entirely imaginary reply.

At least it seems that it has finally dawned on you that the argument you presented in your first reply to me, which, in its entirety, was "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing. It doesn't have anything to do with climate-change denial or the current governor" is utterly irrelevant, both to the energy infrastructure / climate problem in general, and my specific post - though it took ten exchanges in which it was explained to you, multiple times, why it is irrelevant, for you to get it. We will see if you will have the integrity to acknowledge how utterly mistaken your original reply was.

Your points about climate change and other recent political developments are not relevant to understanding this situation at all. Your comment was an expression of irrelevant emotion, driven by partisan enmity. It detracts from this forum and from public dialogue.

It seems like you still don't get it. We will see if you will have the integrity to acknowledge how utterly mistaken your original reply was.

> Your points about climate change and other recent political developments are not relevant to understanding this situation at all.

Well, it is certainly possible that they are irrelevant, but I see that you have given up any pretense of justifying that claim.

On the one hand, given how badly your earlier attempts to make that case went, I can see why you would want to avoid another try. On the other, as the person making the claims has demonstrated such a poor record on critical thinking here, why would anyone just accept it?

And these are claims, I may add, that you recently doubled-down on once again, as in this statement:

>Far from my case being based on a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name, the reality is that your reply suffers from one that is well known and quite common among your ilk: recency bias.

The thing about parody is that it doesn't work if the premise is false! And what premise was behind this version of your claim of recency bias? Explicitly this: "the article actually discusses national winterization standards versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days."

For one thing, I had only just before pointed out that the fact that multiple states were unprepared does not excuse any one of them. Secondly, what sort of claim could both be an example of recency bias, and be refuted by the statement of yours that I have just quoted? For example, if someone said "only Texas was affected", it would be refuted by that statement of yours, but it would simply have been a false statement about a recent event. That would not be recency bias!

Your other basis for claiming recency bias is "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing", but as Texas was free to respond to more recent warnings about the inadequacy of its energy infrastructure, its failure to do so at that time is, of course, more relevant than the facts you quote about a much earlier time. This is not recency bias!

The grids in the rest of the country are not particularly more robust than those of Texas or the south, so it's wrong to look to local political factors to understand the situation. The poor preparedness of the US grid is well known. The only reason to start talking about peculiar conservative beliefs is to drive partisanship enthusiasm and to sow division. It's a dishonest, cowardly act, and detracts from public dialogue.

Firstly, widening the scope does not alter the fact that the failure of many does not excuse the failure of any one of them. Secondly, none of them failed as badly as Texas. Most importantly, many other areas of the country have solved the biggest problems that occurred in the Texas debacle, those solutions are well-known in the industry, and experts have been telling Texas for a long time that it is not properly prepared. And when politicians start saying things like the debacle being preferable to federal regulation, it absolutely is reasonable to ask whether Texas' failure to heed the warnings of experts was overly influenced by ideological concerns, and that question clearly belongs in the public dialogue.

As for calling this a "dishonest, cowardly act", that's the sort of rhetoric that most people give up after childhood. It is that, rather than the substantive issues that many knowledgeable people have been raising, which does not belong in public dialogue. You seem to be annoyed that this thread has demonstrated a complete failure of critical analysis on your part (a situation that your latest reply has done nothing to repair), but it is entirely of your own doing.

Almost none of what you're saying is true, here -- it's generalizations and false implication. Notice how you don't say which problems or which experts. Dishonesty is the sort of rhetoric...

There are northern states with better winterization, but that is easily explainable with reference to the obvious difference in weather. Even given that, significant blackouts -- like the northeast blackout of 2003 -- have occurred in areas with quite a different political climate than Texas. The US grid has overall shown a low level of preparedness.

And when politicians start saying things like the debacle being preferable to federal regulation, it absolutely is reasonable to ask whether Texas' failure to heed the warnings of experts was overly influenced by ideological concerns...

The only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself. What are you talking about, here?

You started your responses to me in this thread by arguing that because "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing", the mere suggestion that it could have done something to prepare for the recent situation was nonsense. Now you are saying that "the only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself", so, whether or not these were in fact the only recommendations made, your belated acceptance that such recommendations were made represents complete capitulation on that point, and tacitly acknowledges that your response to my original post was the only nonsense to be found at that time.

It is, of course, irrelevant where the criticism of the existing infrastructure came from, what is relevant is that it was not acted on, and therefore, the question of why it was not acted on is very pertinent, just as I have been saying from the beginning. And, for the third or fourth time, you are trying a slightly different version of the nonsensical notion that if other jurisdictions' infrastructure is not perfect, then what led to Texas' debacle is a question that should not be asked.

Furthermore, your newly-found claim that Texas' infrastructure was criticized from within can only raise additional questions of why such recommendations were ignored - was the Texas energy sector prevented from implementing its own recommendations?

>Dishonesty is the sort of rhetoric...

This is just a continuation of the childish outburst in your previous post, which does nothing to rehabilitate your reputation for critical thinking, which has been thoroughly trashed, by your own hand, in this thread.

What is telling here is that you're no longer arguing on the basis of the governor's conservatism, or trends in conservative politics -- but that was the whole substance of your initial reply to me.

Furthermore, your newly-found claim that Texas' infrastructure was criticized from within...

You are not being truthful, here. Consider the comment of mine that you first replied to, where I wrote:

...the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days.

This is pretty amusing: your current situation is best described in terms of cartoon tropes - you are in a superposition of the character who has just sawn through the tree-branch he is sitting on, and the character who has run off a cliff but not noticed it. By acknowledging that Texas was warned of the vulnerability of its energy infrastructure - and by industry insiders, no less - you have demolished your claim that there's nothing to see here.

Of course the question of why these warnings were ignored needs to be asked, and to anyone who understands anything about human nature, it is obvious that your insistence that certain questions should not be asked is the purely political position here.

What has changed about my situation? My remarks about the Texas regulator's recommendations are in the first comment you replied to. Are you dealing in truth, here? Or is it more of your characteristic dishonesty?

The problem here is not with asking the question, but how you chose to answer it: by bringing up partisan irrelevancies, in order to tell a divisive fable.

> My remarks about the Texas regulator's recommendations are in the first comment you replied to.

The full text of that comment is "This is not a fair reading of the article. It actually discusses national winterization versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days", and I would be interested to see how you can find "the only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself" in there (it does, of course, contain the seeds of one of your absurd ideas - that other entities' failings excuse those of Texas - but that unshakeable non-sequitur is a separate issue.)

- And even if that was somehow what you intended to say, then it would merely mean that you have been flying with no visible means of support for longer than I thought. Anyway, thanks for acknowledging that fact in your recent post, as otherwise I would never have guessed that you recognize it as being so!

I do see that, in another thread, you wrote "there's no solution that works if we don't hold regulators accountable and the regulators don't hold the industry accountable." Yes, indeed - recognizing, of course, that the state executive and legislature have considerable control over the regulatory process, and a corresponding responsibility in the debacle.

It doesn't seem like you've been paying much attention to what I've actually said.

The comment I replied to was not a fair reading of the article, and left out both a lot of what the article said and a lot of what was important to understanding the situation.

Note that this thread has run "below the fold" - see the 'more' link.

Indeed, note it.

The political climate of Texas is at least a generation old, the current governor is part of that set of folks.

The postmortem on this is going to be interesting. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-... They got close to damaging equipment system wide that would take months to repair. there was real time coverage of the system melting down on reddit of all places https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/lk7cgn/ercot_and_th...

> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.

In 2014 the polar vortex brought power down across the Eastern Interconnection (citation 13) and again in 2018 (citation 10).

> That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered.

There currently are not standards for winter weatherization. In 2013 standards were proposed for this however they were rejected (citation 15). Finally in 2020 standards started the approval process however they wont be fully approved until November.

So for that event which states experienced state wide blackouts that lasted for days on end?

Here is a write up of that event:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/us-polar-vorte...

Not a single mention of blackout.

And the reason for that is the grid is well designed and has backup options that makes it resiliently to extreme weather events.

The grid didn’t seem so great back in 2003 when NYC took a dive for two days. It was amazing seeing the whole city just dead in the water. Shit happens, but fortunately our infrastructure is fairly resilient and we can recover pretty quickly from this kind of thing.

For most places that was a 7 hour black out created by a software bug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

Full power was restored to NYC on the 16th. Yes, that seems about right - I stayed at my office for two days until a coworker commandeered a car that was in our parking garage (owned by a guy who was out of town on business) and gave me a ride home to Freeport. The city was pretty much paralyzed for two days. Some places might have done better but NYC was dead in the water for about two days.

> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.

Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri all had blackouts this week. The SPP had to stop sharing electricity with the Texas grid because they had no spare capacity due to dealing with their own power emergencies.

The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.

So are you claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri have experience state wide blackouts similar to those found in Texas in recent days?

Or are you saying these states have experienced short term blackouts?

I don't think there is an electricity grid in the world that is immune to short term blackouts.

> So are you claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri have experience state wide blackouts similar to those found in Texas in recent days?

Yes. That grid operator did have to implement EEA3 load shedding (rolling blackouts). However, I should note that the Texas rolling blackout seemed to go wrong when they tried to bring locations back online.

Texas didn’t have a statewide outage. I live in Rockwall and our power hasn’t so much as flickered all this week. There were a lot of outages in outlying areas for sure, I think it impacted about 1/3 of the population here in some way or another.

You might be on the same circuit as a hospital or fire station or other essential place that power stations avoid load shedding to at any cost.

Good point - I’m right off Lake Ray Hubbard, and we have a big natural gas power plant on the other side of the lake.

I live in Houston and I only knew 1 person who had electricity the whole time.

85% of the people I know plus myself had over 24 hrs of contiguous down time.

You asked if extreme cold weather had caused problems in states other than Texas. It did, and I commented so.

But if you want to play “move the goalposts”, I’m not going to bother trying to discuss something with you that you obviously have already made your mind up on. Keep stubbornly believing what you want to believe, I don’t care.

So you are in fact claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri are experiencing the same 'extreme weather' blackouts as those currently going on in Texas.

For example Texas has seen millions people with out power for days, millions people with no running water for days, people dying because of the cold.

And the exact same think is going on in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri but no one is reporting on this in the news or on social media?

I think not.

Yes. https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/

> Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.

That sounds like rolling blackouts, and looking at it deeper looks a lot like a few minutes worth. That's not great, but it's not the same as being without power for multiple days.

Looking in my area of the SPP, they were scheduled to be one hour long, "call us if your power is out longer, especially after 90 minutes."

That's just for residential customers, commercial and industrial customers were required to shed a great deal of their load; for half a work day according to one report I read of someone who what sent home yesterday or so.

Agreed not anything like being without power for multiple days. From what I've gathered so far, the Texas grid operator had the lack of courage required to shed load early before things get catastrophic. After the northeast blackout of 1965 which resulted in a lot of reforms, a common if not nearly universal final cause of these sorts of disasters.

You have suggested this twice as proof of actual rolling blackouts of any significant size, but for some reason fail to note that while SPP did order rolling blackouts to shave about 1.5% of the load within 50 minutes they rescinded this order and returned to EEA Level 2. Why fail to mention this I wonder?

(Not the parent poster) At a press conference, a SPP spokesperson said they had to cut up to 6.5% of load for 3h21m on Tuesday (Feb 16).

https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693

(Just wanting to set the record straight, under the SPP region myself. Given what I've seen, I'm pretty happy with how they've acted considering it could have looked like Texas. I wish there had been more and better communication with the public about the importance of conserving electricity but it's not like I followed their Twitter feed at the time.)

I know there were a few cuts because that let them get the load down, but when I first heard of blackouts outside of Texas they seemed to be of the 15-30 minute variety. Did not know they lasted more than an hour anywhere.

comparable seems like an implicit part of the question? Cold weather caused problems in all states; Somebody surely slipped and fell down somewhere. That doesn't give information on whether their grids are better at handling weather changes though

Had Texas been attached to the eastern interconnect, and remained connected through 25-30 GW of shortfall, yes, rotating blackouts would have been spread across dozens of states.

The blackouts in the MISO and SPP areas were not as bad, but still had to happen to weather (pardon the pun) generator failures.

States like Minnesota and other northern states have had much more extreme cold temperatures than any of these Southern states--yet they haven't had this blackout problem. Why not? Because they seriously winterize their systems.

Not trying to be a jerk, but I’ve lived in MN and WI and can’t count the number of times we lost power in the winter - usually for somewhere between 4 and 8 hours, so no big deal, but it does happen. I never minded it, power outages are a great opportunity to catch up with ham radio friends, ha ha.

How many of those were because the grid went down vs because your power lines came down because of ice?

They’re very different problems to handle.

I agree. The only time I’ve seen a grid collapse was NYC in 2003. Fortunately I was able to sleep in my office and a co-worker had the good sense to raid the deli downstairs the moment the power went out. We dined by flashlight on salami and a bucket of cherry tomatoes. Good fun.

I lived in northern states all my life. Never experienced a power outage due to cold.

> The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.

Texas had huge parts of its grid fail and leave millions of people without power for multiple days. Other states had minutes long rolling blackouts.

They are both cold weather power problems in the way that getting a cut on your hand cutting a bagel and dropping a running chainsaw on your leg are both injuries. The significance comes from the severity.