The Wikipedia article mentions "The winter storm caused a record low temperature at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport of −2 °F (−19 °C) on February 16, the coldest in North Texas in 72 years.".
A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.
It might make more sense to just have warm shelters ready, rather than try and make the grid robust. Give the market a chance.
Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too. COVID springs to mind as something on a similar timeframe.
> It also happened in 2011, and nearly again in 2014
Texas has cheap power though. If I were moving to the US for some reason, I'd consider Texas for it's cheap power then try to mitigate the risks myself. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean that changing it makes it better.
You're assuming that 100% reliability is the only acceptable outcome. It is possible 99% reliability and alternate mitigation is the best outcome. If people prepare for the power grid going down from time to time that will also prepare for other events and build up resiliency.
People freezing is really bad. Relying on a large and complex system working in extreme events is also bad, however. This is one for Texans to resolve for themselves, but there is a story here where the problem is actually the resiliency to the grid failing rather than the failures themselves. Cheap power + good emergency procedures is probably going to be a really cheap path, plus hit a whole heap of alternative disaster planning scenarios.
Except Texas doesn’t have cheap power. Rather than paying money for peaking power plants that sit idle to handle unusual demand or unexpected failures, regulators instead decided to let power plants charge whatever the market will pay in extreme situations. Net results ends up with occasional brownouts without actual saving anything.
The state with the cheapest electricity is actually Washington where residential customers are paying 8.53¢/kWh. Those dam democrats happen to have a lot of dam cheap green power from all those dams.
That map doesn't really contradict the "Texas is flat" proposition: it takes over 400 miles to rise 3000 feet. OK sure they could have decent hydroelectric near El Paso, if it ever rained there, but the dams listed at your link for the other 95% of the state have less generating capacity together (even if we count the capacity that rightfully belongs to Mexico or Oklahoma) than Wilson Dam in Alabama, which was built in 1924.
The Amistad Dam (254 ft) and Mansfield Dam (278ft) in Texas are roughly twice the height and therefore extract roughly twice the energy per cubic foot of water flowing through it as Wilson Dam (134 ft). Texas has 3 more dams are again taller than Wilson Dam, they just doesn’t get nearly the flow.
So, Texas as I mentioned has minimal hydropower because it lacks rainfall, but it also suffers because it lacks large out of state rivers due to that same huge west to east elevation drop. In fact if you look at it’s rivers they each have a relatively tiny watershed. https://texasaquaticscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/C...
The Rio Grand is famous, but was never very big and currently flows through some thirsty areas.
How does Texas fare in pumped hydro? Seems it's a great place for Solar and Wind (both onshore where there's millions of acres of desert, and offshore in the Gulf), excess production can be used for pumped hydro.
I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.
Other states, provinces, and countries manage to deliver even cheaper power, consistently, without the grid failures and profiteering thanks to regulation.
People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.
> Other states, provinces, and countries manage to deliver even cheaper power, consistently, without the grid failures and profiteering thanks to regulation.
With similar weather patterns? Where are you thinking specifically?
> I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.
You feel that Texas' regulatory state is making it too difficult to extract natural gas? Because the article seems to me to be saying they need more nat gas. I disagree with subsidising nat gas for unrelated reasons, but I suppose if Texas has regulated to stop gas extraction I agree with you that they should change that.
> People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.
> HOUSTON — Some parts of Texas that were battered by the winter storm of 2021 had relatively few homes lose power.
> They are primarily in areas outside of those supported by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the electric grid for 90% of the state and operates separately from federal oversight and regulation.
> El Paso County is one place to experience minimal power outages, despite getting battered by the historic winter storm.
> “We had about three thousand people that were out during this period, a thousand of them had outages that were less than five minutes,” said Eddie Gutierrez, vice president of strategic communications for El Paso Electric.
However, those power companies have connections that cross state lines and so are federally regulated and had to do winterization of their systems as mandated by the regulators... whereas ERCOT said "yea, well, maybe we'll do it - but you can't make us."
The cost to winterize the grid is.. relatively small, like the cost to winterize it would be exceeded by the cost of alternative non-grid generation and "warming shelters". You'd also have to convince people to go, and that's a larger problem - the largest killer during the outage was carbon monoxide poisoning.
I'd also note, the parts of texas that are not part of ERCOT didnt have wide scale outages and they are winterized.
> A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.
This is confusing the record for the pattern: the temperature was the lowest in 70 years, but Texas saw very similar storms (and worsening crises, through deregulation) in 1989 and 2011.
> Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too.
It was the 3rd such event in 32 years. From the wiki article:
"In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state.[26] Many roads around Houston were impassable, and boil-water advisories were issued in several areas.[27] Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems.[28] At the time the blackouts and failures in the power grid were likened to those that occurred in December 1989, after which similar recommendations were made to the state government and ERCOT, which were similarly ignored."
So, first of all, as others have noted, events of this sort are happening significantly more frequently than that.
Second,
> practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance
Where are you getting this? I can think of many, many counterexamples.
Maybe you mean to limit this to utility regulators planning for outage resiliency? I'd be curious about where that came from. (Maybe inverting the rule of 72 and... something?)
Anyway, the simple fact remains that Texas has a small, inflexible grid that's been populated with low-margin providers playing financial engineering games rather than providing resiliency, and it needs a ton of work.
Even if you are correct that the minimax they've arrived at made sense in the past, it clearly no longer does.
It was a total fluke and hit at least 2/3 of the state, most cold blasts don't do that. I was lucky and near a hospital, so my power only went out a couple of hours and I had 2 families (friends) come and live with me for 3 days or so. They cleaned out my larder, but honestly I enjoyed my time with them immensely. However, climatologists predict it will happen more often as the jet stream that usually keeps most of the arctic air out of the state is getting weaker of the years.
The number of times I’ve heard [insert recent weather event] was a 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 tail event just in the last 10 years makes me really want to go to a casino
Wouldn’t weather of neighboring towns be highly correlated? I think Hurricane Ida alone last year brought a 1:1,000 year rainfall to over a dozen states if I remember correctly
The problem is what used to be a 1 in 100 occurance is now 1 in 10 thanks to climate change. The market had a change, and caused this - the externalities of the market driven process which drove carbon emissions over the last 150 years (and one that Texas specifically benefitted massively from) were not borne by those that benefited.
A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.
It might make more sense to just have warm shelters ready, rather than try and make the grid robust. Give the market a chance.
Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too. COVID springs to mind as something on a similar timeframe.