But this leaves for potentially unethical situations like vulnerable populations who cannot afford batteries or winterized electricity. Im thinking someone disabled living on disability probably can’t afford premium electricity bills even if they need to maintain their lifesaving and expensive equipment yknow?

That's not an argument for overpaying to winterize all the electricity, though - it's an argument to subsidise winterized electricity for those vulnerable populations, and the most efficient way to do that may well be to directly subsidise behind-the-meter or community-level batteries (it may instead be most efficient to subsidise or socialise winterizing of the grid as a whole, though).

In Texas when you are filling information to your RETAIL provider, you can notify them that you have health equipment that relies on electricity. I do not exactly know what kind of actions they take -- when you provide that info but I am assuming they are legally required to make certain accommodations.

The solution is to cut off industrial and commercial sites first, which draw the most power anyways, and keep residential zoning online as much as possible. The economy can take a break for one day.

Depends.

Some industrial customers like datacenters have strict availability agreements with customers and won't be able to accept prolonged cutoffs.

Forcing non residential customers like these to curtail their use would likely end up driving the industry (and corresponding tax revenue) elsewhere.

But what you're talking about does already exist, and it's called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/...

If people are freezing in their homes, then damn any availability agreement a datacenter has.

I'm inclined to agree, because I think our civilization should exist to serve humanity, not use humanity simply as another disposable cog in the machine.

But that's not the way our legal and political system actually works.

I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, but you’re confusing “what is” for “what ought to be”. It’s Hume’s classic “is-ought problem”.

Edit: I’ve interpreted the second part of your comment as an objection to the first part, but if that wasn’t the intended message it’s my bad :)

I don't think I'm confusing the two.

I'm suggesting that what I think ought to be the way the world works in fact is not the way it actually works.

This is a criticism of our current system, not using it as a reason to dismiss the idea of changing it to something better.

Agreed, but one hopes said datacenter isn't hosting, say, the utility company's dispatching systems...

If you shut down the datacenter, then all of the folks that rely on IoT-controlled furnaces will freeze in _their_ homes!

Smart thermostats all fall back to offline manual operation.

I'm sorry, but that's on the datacenter provider to put their operations in such a free-market state. The fact that we would suggest that datacenters be allowed to run freely, and then tell residents that they need to stock up on batteries as opposed to mandating a winterized network is kind of appalling.

Datacenters should be able to stay online even with a full power cut. If your datacenter can't go days without mains power, you need to move datacenters.

This is reasonable, but the grid should support such separation then. Each building needs to be connected to a known tier of power grid, and parts of one building may need different tiers: e.g. an ICU that should stay powered no matter what vs the rest of the clinic that could afford to lose power without hurting anyone.

Unless it's already built, it's rather expensive to rebuild.

I don't think residential customers are any less strict with their minimum needs.

You probably don't want to cut off power suddenly to your water treatment plants, fabs (which have all kinds of dangerous chemicals), medical providers, and so on.

There's still a dark balancing act going on.

We don't have the collective power to save everyone, and if we overextend ourselves trying to do that, then there is a risk that the whole system collapses for everyone, or partially collapses and causes more pain than might have happened without spreading ourselves too thin.

We obviously need to struggle to make a good world for everyone, but nature is fucking brutal and it doesn't care about our sense of ethics.

> We don't have the collective power to save everyon

Except we do? We have plenty of resources if they were distributed more evenly. In this particular example, other states are able to provide energy during rare events because they did not choose to go with a pure market based system. They aren’t on the verge of collapse.

This is a platitude ignoring the actual facts of what went on. Producers of natural gas and electricity didn't implement the winterization mechanisms they needed to, in spite of the rest of the country doing so and decades of recommendations to do so. No one required them to do it, though, so they didn't.

The grid is a tiny fraction of our economy but the economy is extremely dependent on it. Ensuring the Texas grid could survive a winter storm costs less than 1% as much as even a single large scale blackout in cold weather. The difference is simply who needs to pay.

Grid operators only see the costs they don’t see the benefits thus an inefficient allocation of resources is guaranteed.

Back before electricity deregulation we were paying more for electricity but in the process of rate setting we were looking at it from a systems perspective in which reliability was considered holistically.

(The lower rates were not just from ‘efficient markets’ but also it being possible for high cost producers such as steam turbine coal fired power plants to go bankrupt in the fracked gas age w/o bankrupting the whole utility.)

Saving everyone isn't even a consideration. Saving the wealthy's profits is, and we can't save all the wealthy people's profits, so we prioritize the richest's

Truly mission critical sites don't rely batteries, they have diesel or gas generators, with UPS batteries or flywheels that keep key circuits live until the generators can take over. It's incredibly cost and size prohibitive to build a battery system capable of handling megawatt/hours of load, particularly when it's only going to be used on average a few hours per years.

In sparsely populated or geographically difficult areas (islands, semi-frontier areas, etc) that is common. It's not an exact comparison, but Texas has roughly equivalent GDP to Canada. They could certainly match Canada's power reliability if the state government cared to do so. Instead the single-party majority has been content for decades to let major events keep happening instead of making commercial entities meet more rigorous reliability requirements. It would certainly be significantly more cost-effective than eating 100-billion USD disasters.

Every home that uses electricity for heat is a mission-critical site when it's 0 degrees F outside. Kids froze to death in their own beds.

> Kids froze to death in their own beds.

Wow, that sounds horrible. I tried googling this since I hadn't heard about this before. I came across one 11 year old who his parents claimed died of hypothermia. However, the autopsy revealed that his death was due to carbon monoxide.

Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/conroe-police-autops...

This report shows 8 minor deaths, approx 2/3 of total deaths were hypothermia, but doesn't show a cause/age breakdown

https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_...

Thank you. How unfortunate, I am sad to see lack of leadership/determination/vision to fix this issue in the state :(.

I’m not aware of any cases beyond that one - however, that case is still due to the failed electricity grid. When power went out and homes began to freeze, Texans fired up cars and generators to keep heat around. Harris county alone saw almost 600 cases of CO poisoning during the blackout.

Carbon monoxide comes up when you use alternatives to electricity for heating no?

While the freeze to death isn't true, that death is still attributable to the electric grind being down

Yep, that is the case I was referring to. I hadn't heard about the autopsy results. I apologize. My claim was somewhere between imprecise and wrong.

Please cite your claim of "kids froze to death in their own beds".

Source?