Basically, there was a time (1980's) when fabs in Austin had their own power generation. AMD, which used to have its own fabs, had its own power for them. Then, they (not just AMD but everybody with fabs in Texas) eventually decided it wasn't worth the cost, and started using the regular power grid, because Austin's power had become more reliable. Obviously, as the percentage of solar, wind, and natgas has increased, and the percentage of coal has decreased, this reliability has been thrown into question. Also, the rapid population increase has also just meant a general problem of building new capacity fast enough.

My guess is that they have an eye on it, and it is also possible they will build their own power generation, but more likely they are just getting guarantees of some sort that enough power capacity will be built.

Renewable power throws a wrench in how Texas does grid planning. In every other ISO, there is both a capacity market, which pays providers to commit to making certain generating capacity available, and a generation market, which pays for actual electrical production: https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c.... In Texas, there is just a generation market.

Ordinarily that isn’t a big deal. Generators build adequate capacity so they can be in a position to receive payments for generation at times of peak demand.

Renewables break this down. They undercut traditional generation sources in the summer, but can’t be counted on to be there at times of peak winter demand. So last winter renewables didn’t fail in the sense that nobody was expecting them to generate much power begin with. But the natural gas plants that are irreplaceable for dealing with winter demand are dealing with reduced revenue because renewable sources are underbidding them in peak summer months.

Which might be right! But are the externalities all correctly priced in here?

It’s not a choice of “free market versus regulation.” It’s a heavily regulated market. The question is only about the design of the regulatory scheme.

I'm reminded of Enron's "grandma Millie" comments.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/deep-freeze-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/weekinreview/word-for-wor...

The only partisan bickering is the attempt to incorrectly blame renewables for the lack of capacity when in fact planned downtime, ordinary logistical failures, and failure to winterize are in fact to blame.

Everybody ought to have expected them to need that much power. Not every day and not every winter but everyone ought to have expected another bad winter to come round because they had bad winters in 1957 1960 1973 1985 2015 2017 2021. This includes 3 years out of the last 6.

They weren't prepared because they were short sighted, greedy, and stupid not because solar took so much of the profits and not because insufficient capacity had been built out for lack of such profits. Capacity existed and it sat unused or broke when it was most needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM

The outages were not from any one "main cause", except perhaps "Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't ready". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep operating.

Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.

Events like the Texas blackouts rarely have one sole cause. Reliance on renewables was clearly one factor out of many.

Texas has more wind power generation than any other state in the US by far. Texas is all aboard the wind train. It's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to win. But that doesn't change reality.

In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind generation. On your average summer day, wind generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the day.

Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is still significant demand while solar generation is dropping.

Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we (humans) can choose to burn more oil and create thermal generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.

Pumped storage hydro works very well in many places. You can store as much energy as you can store water, and you can bring a lot of generation capacity online fast. Those facilities are pretty cool engineering projects. Texas hasn't got onboard yet AFAIK, but they've got enough land that they could maybe (water's a big factor, too) make it work to offset downtime of their wind and solar.

edit: I think Texas's largely go-it-alone strategy with their power grid might be pretty strategically misguided, but making it work could at least be an interesting problem

> It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

This could have been a really good comment if you hadn't started it out this way. Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.

We're talking about different events. The Practical Engineers video is talking about the 2021 winter storm, and in the midst of that storm there were republican talking points about wind failure. That's a different event than the one I am talking about in my comment, which is the general unreliability of renewable energy as witnessed in the current summer where lacking wind generation _really is_ a huge factor in the threatened blackouts, but posters like the one I was responding to are still pretending like any decrying of renewable energy is fake news. Sometimes it is fake news, and sometimes its reality. It's important to recognize the difference.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypnja/majority-of-us-power-...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/31/us/power-outages-electric-gri...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-rene...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-u-s-bl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/02/blackout-...

I'll agree with you that there's greed and incompetence all over Texas's politicians and state management. But it isn't unique to Texas. We have a widespread societal problem with our electrical grid that transcends state lines.

The low natgas line pressure was also related to the fact that points north were using more than usual as well. In fact, one of the responses to the power outage was to stop all natgas flowing from Texas to Mexico. So it's not only the power grid, but also the natgas lines, that connects Texas to points outside.

Having the appearance of something is not the same as actually being that thing. They had one outage during a cold snap, and then warned about high usage, but there has not actually been another outage.

California is also warning about an outage.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20... the graph on page 6 (labeled as page 5) should be more instructive.

That said, the failure and piss-poor government response to it makes me almost viscerally angry. Texas has promoted itself as an energy leader, from traditional oil and gas production, to large (and growing) production of renewables, we shouldn't be having these failures.

The issue for me isn't the failure of the power grid, extraordinary events happen - its that:

One - it's happened before (twice before).

Two - we should have had a governmental response to adequately winterize the grid.

Three - the deregulated power system in Texas creates perverse incentives to building more capacity in - and power usage in Texas is growing faster than either base load or peaking capacity is.

These are all governmental and regulatory failures, and ones that were both foreseeable and preventable.

Rolling blackouts would be documented here if they were happening: https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages

More info: https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/do-you-know-the-difference-b...

And they just increased the price of electricity by 20%.

I want to leave this place, for a better standard of living.

> Texas's power grid has gained a reputation lately for being unreliable.

As stated, there's nothing to be confused about. You'd want to build new fabs in Texas for the same reason you want to buy stocks while they're down rather than while they're up.

The reputation only matters if you're trying to sell your new fab to someone else. If you want to use it yourself, what matters is the reality.

Certainly. My point was that (perhaps) the grid in actuality has reliability issues, and the reason I thought that might be true is because of its current reputation.

Just wanted to say that taxes in Texas are less favorable than eg California when it comes to middle class citizens - no income tax, but very high property taxes.

So yeah, great place to build something, and save cash on tech to cleanup your waste. Yay Texas!

I swear people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch.

No Texas county breaks the top 10 for counties with the shortest life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._counties_with_sho...

10 years less than the national average would get you to 69, and be #5 on the list. For comparison, #50 is only 6y below the national average.

CA property taxes are highly regressive. Old boomers get to pay sub 0.1% tax rates because of Prop 13 while new, young, and poorer buyers get to pay tax on inflated property valuations.

When it comes to increasing class mobility high property tax >>> high income tax.

From my understanding part of the problem also is even landlords and businesses benefit from prop 13 and same with people that own multiple properties. Honestly, I think something like Idaho's Homeowners Exemption is better. The owner has to live in it to qualify. https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1051.cfm

Also states like Nevda have done some other interesting things like letting family farms get a Limited Allodial Title for a period in time before stopping. I just think prop 13 was not planned out very well and applies to too many entities, but the idea of not wanting to force people out their homes is certainly a problem other states worry about.

Unproductive assets like real estate should not be enablers of generational wealth.

Property taxes are weird as they are basically one of the few taxes that continue to happen even without any transactions. Almost all other taxes happen when there is a transaction. For example sales tax, when you buy something; Income tax when you get paid; Tariffs when something is imported ect... Property taxes can also can increase without you doing anything so if your income is fixed or does not increase fast enough you could lose your house due to a tax lien.

If your worried about generational wealth that's why we have inheritance and estate taxes. The federal estate tax can get as high as 40%. However, a home is a productive asset if people are living in it. It may not be as productive as some other uses of property like running a business from it, farming the land ect...

Like I said, you won't lose your house within your lifetime at current property tax rates. I see no reason why we should guarantee owners' houses for any longer than that instead of freeing up those houses on the market for new owners.

Tax deferral is a great idea, tax relief not so much.

Check figures 2.c on page 18 and 2.o on page 34 in UT's report on this (https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%28...) for a sense of the scope of how unexpected capacity outages break down.

Yes--a lot of wind was offline. But all of the expected wind capacity could have been met and the grid would have still needed to shed quite a bit of load. In fact, all of the expected wind, solar, coal, and nuclear could have been online and the grid would have still had to shed a meaningful amount.

The scale of the natural gas outages was larger than the entire load-shed, afaict.

EDIT: Okay there was some loss in capacity in wind power, but the greatest loss in capacity was natural gas plants, which lost 15GW of capacity. I confused natural gas with coal as I don’t consider either to be climate friendly. Wind lost about 3GW of capacity.

See at 7:50 here: https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM

By the way, natgas is actually much friendlier (well, less hostile) to the environment than coal, if you're looking at carbon/kWh or all of the other things released into the atmosphere when you burn coal.

However, you can much more easily make a giant mound of coal next to your power plant, than store up enough natgas (LNG is much more expensive to store). So, the power plants required natgas to show up in the pipeline, and when the temperature dropped and everybody cranked up the heat, not only in Texas, the natgas pressure in the pipelines dropped. Oil (liquid) and coal (solid) are just fundamentally easier to stockpile than natgas or wind (gas) or solar (light).

A big freakin' battery would help with this, but that isn't a cost-effective option (yet?).

The Natural Gas distribution system just fell apart two years ago.

What would probably happen is a special grid arrangement. If you are going to build eleven of these things, entire power plants, switchyards and transmission lines will need to be constructed ahead of time. They will likely need to run isolated from the broader grid in some manner. I cannot imagine Samsung executive management agreeing to this many factories (even with subsidies) unless some guarantee could be made WRT power delivery.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...

Texas’s reputation is due to political leaning of major news media.

I've read about chip fabs colocating with power plants, but apparently they just plan to sign agreements with the local utility for guarantees: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2021/09/24/samsung-u...

Yes, a year ago.

I know a decade or two ago IBM was using superconducting magnets for power smoothing to handle sub-millisecond events. Then you have battery and flywheel systems for bigger drops that are designed to carry load until generators can start and accept load (usually a very short period of time if the generator's oil and coolant are on heaters.)

But then water is probably the harder issue.

Germany has a lot of land too, solar has been less than stellar there.

In particular, I was thinking about the power disruptions in Taiwan earlier this year [0].

IIRC, there was concern that a power drop could ruin some/all chips currently in the fab pipeline, and might also require several days to re-initialize the pipeline's equipment.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/03/power-outage-in-taiwan-affect...

The Northeast or the Great Lakes would make more sense.

It's not as 'wet' as some areas, but far from the dusty tumbleweeds people often associate with central and west TX.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/water-...

One alternate hypothesis might be that renewables are cheap and profitable, with low capital requirements. In a place like Texas, with lots of sun and wind, it might be tempting to build more renewables than the grid could support. Combined with weak regulation, this would risk destabilizing the grid.

In a complex system like an electrical grid, failures can occur for all sorts of complicated reasons. I'd be interested in understanding what happened here, based on evidence.