txlpo78
Longtime consultant here with BCP/DR insight into 20+ large F500 companies... I think you would be seriously surprised at how common it is for even enterprise customers to not bother with multi-DC or even offsite backups. And even among the ones that do, many of the ones that are non-cloud-based are so immature at it that I would not put money on their backups being restorable if needed. And this is even more true for your “we’re a startup, we don’t have time to worry about backing up our data!” companies, which are in abundance.
For a small peak, go look at how many people were freaking out about losing their entire business due to the loss of a single OVH data center.
Of course, as a consultant I do naturally skew towards customers that need help with this stuff, so my perspective is probably biased towards the companies that are worse off in this regard. But they’re definitely out there.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
...
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
From https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.
I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.
That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.
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 North tie connects to the Western US grid in Oklahoma, while the East tie connects to the Eastern US grid near the border with Arkansas/Louisiana. They’ve been fluctuating between 0-600 this week depending on how much power has been available on those grids.
> the Midwest went into a power emergency of their own, and ERCOT was no longer able to import approximately 600 MW.
I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.
> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.
That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.
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.
That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc).
It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO.
There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
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.
As a data point: the interconnects were not fully utilized, as the Eastern DC tie had to be severed yesterday because power emergencies in the Eastern US meant that grid had no electricity to spare.
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.
TX also has ties with Mexico, but those were useless too because even Mexico was hit hard by this storm and had blackouts all along the US border.
This is an area that you clearly do not have any experience in, yet you insist on being an armchair expert. Quite frankly, we don’t need armchair experts, especially ones that are blatantly incorrect and refuse to educate themselves even when information is put right in front of you. Please reflect on this.
As for your “newcomer” comment, lol. I have been on HN for years longer than your account. Apparently you’ve never heard of the ability to create new accounts, though. GTFO of here with that ridiculous gatekeeping bullshit, it’s not welcome on HN.
And as I mentioned in my comment, utility providers do not consider blackouts due to capacity constraints to be “outages”, and thus are not reporting them as outages on their outage maps, which means this website does not have the correct information on blackouts. They are tracking outages only if the outage is due to something like a downed power line. Please attempt to read the full comment and understand it before replying.
I have family and friends in every place you just said is “not having problems” and I can assure you that you are entirely incorrect.
> I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.
The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that’s not the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn’t the whole picture in the SPP.
All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the one in the article. Many more than 200k people were affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the past three days, not four hours.
https://www.klfy.com/local/cleco-rolling-blackouts-to-be-use...
https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/134700/lr-based-tra...
Again, just because you have excess power in Missouri does not mean that power can magically transfer hundreds of miles away where it is needed. Energy transfer does not work like that.
Do you not remember the blackouts of 2003? Multiple entire states went dark for hours, and the “highly connectedness” was a huge part of the problem. The only reason it wasn’t even worse is specifically because grid isolation stopped it from propagating further, just like what’s happening here.
Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without power?
> Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.
Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.
>If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
No. That’s not how the grids work. Just because Oklahoma and Washington are part of the same interconnection, that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington, which is why Oklahomans are struggling with power outages today as well. Most power still must be generated locally. Long distance transmission is difficult and inefficient, and often requires converting to DC just like a grid-to-grid connection requires, so you have the same issues as you have when you’re on separate grids.
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
Global Fiberglass Solutions Of West Texas https://goo.gl/maps/od4YB3MubUqT5B6a9
It’s a field about 600x600 feet. I wouldn’t call that “giant”, it’s about the size of a typical warehouse and certainly smaller than most landfills. And according to some brief searches on the internet, they are indeed being recycled.