> I don't know of a single enterprise customer that doesn't have their data replicated to two datacenters, and then backed up to some other medium (tape or disk-based backup appliance) for anything business critical.
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.
Almost certainly not. AFAIK the technology to do street-level imagery from satellites is still mostly only on government spy satellites, and certainly isn’t cheap
enough to put on thousands of nearly-disposable sats. The type of imagery you see from Google Maps is taken from airplanes.
Elon himself has stated that Starlink is not intended to and should not be seen as a competitor to traditional terrestrial ISPs. It’s meant to supplement people in rural and possibly exurban areas, but it will not be breaking the monopolies that ATT, Comcast, etc hold over urban areas.
> 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."
Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.
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.
I’m in Austin and I have to agree. The media and especially social media would have you believe that the literal apocalypse happened this week (if you dare, go read r/Austin and witness how many people are having ragefits insisting they are going to actually die if Adler doesn’t personally restore their power ASAP). This situation has been very bad, especially in terms of property damage (broken pipes etc), but it still has been an easier situation than something like a hurricane or the floods in Houston, yet I don’t see r/Houston turn into a harbinger-of-doom support group whenever a hurricane hits.
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.
“They turned the power off for many and just left us in the dark” is hard to reconcile with “Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out.”
I mean, yeah, Mother Nature rode in and fucked things up pretty good. But it’s been known for years both how to prepare for this and that it’s been needed (see the FERC report about 2011). There’s pretty clearly someone to blame, and it’s the grid operators, regulators, and the politicians and voters that enabled them to cut corners this hard.
Did you misread my comment? I didn’t say this event was due to Mother Nature, and the entire second half is specifically about how the Austin Energy grid is mismanaged and victim to cut corners.
I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding.
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.
Just a reminder the your junior Senator (among many others[1]) mocked California and our electric grid when we were hit by record wild fires last year. He also voted against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy because it only impacted blue states.
And maybe you should look up the timeline on when your state representatives ran to fox news and tried to blame the green new deal and windmills for the outage. I am sure the national discourse would be a bit more sane if it wasn't kicked off by Texas politicians spreading 100% FUD.
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.
Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.
> 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.
I never liked the meme, but this guy has to be a NPC. Seriously. I couldn't agree more with you assessment about the current news/discussion life-cycle.
Personally I think that the way news are produced and consumed fuels a vicious cycle that is more about tribes than information.
> 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.
One side takes these issues very seriously. We have been fighting tooth and nail to address climate change, improve the nations infrastructure and provide adequate safety nets for when things go bad. The other side spends their time screaming about socialism and stolen elections.
The point I am trying to make is that this is not a "both sides" problem. One side is taking these issues very seriously the other refuses to even engage in a conversation about them. Obamacare is a perfect example of how this played out. The legislation literally originated as a Republican proposal, but Republicans refused to cooperate and instead trotted out the "death panels" talking point. And here we are 12 years later, and they still don't have a replacement plan.
If you are actually interested in hearing about the solutions that are on the table you can get a rough idea by visiting Biden's energy plan[1]. These are very real proposals, with broad democratic support. But to get any of this stuff passed, it will likely require input and support from Republicans. And unfortunately, I have little to no faith that they will come to the table on this. I hope I am wrong.
Winterizing natural gas power plants isn't mentioned once in Joe Biden's clean energy platform. He also didn't mention anything about weatherizing natural gas generators in any of the debates.
Death panels and the ACA have nothing to do winterizing with natural gas generators.
There is a bunch of strong evidence that climate change is man made and real. There is much less evidence that climate change is causing more extreme cold events, or specifically had any influence on this polar vortex.
And wind did slightly worse than coal and natural gas generators when it comes to stability over the last week, so it's definitely not a savior.
There are a million opportunities to argue about the ACA or climate change. But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
Btw I voted for Biden, but the Democratic platform has very little focus on weatherizing natural gas plants.
It is a high level policy agenda, not a 10k page regulatory document. There are literally dozens of references to making infrastructure robust to the impacts of climate change, for example:
"Americans deserve infrastructure they can trust: infrastructure that is resilient to floods, fires, and other climate threats"
If we are going to criticize Democrats for not explicitly discussing an extremely niche grid infrastructure issue in their platform, maybe we should also criticize the fact the republicans didn't even bother to publish one this past election cycle[1]
> But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
What is there to argue? Texas failed to adequately winterize. They should make sure to fix that. End of argument.
Our Junior senator that peaced out to Cancun with his family this week(during a pandemic)? Yeah, he is always in our thoughts.
It was pretty gross reading about these guys going on national conservative networks playing national GOP politics spreading FUD about renewables... From under a bunch of blankets on my phone because it was 41f in my house.
If you think my reply was attack, then you are probably blinded by your own biases.
I left a substantive and truthful reply. Here is another synopsis in case it helps: Certain Texas politicians are notorious for poisoning the well when it comes to public discourse. And in this very specific example, they literally went to fox news and other outlets and blamed the issues on GND and windmills. At that point the Texas power outages were barely blip on the national radar, but their lies on national media kicked off a firestorm of headlines to counter their lies.
They literally started this. But folks keep blaming the media, and keep blaming the libs. Wake up. If you disagree with anything I said, a substantive reply is welcome. But if you are just going to cry about being attacked, go somewhere else.
What is it you think "they" started? You're really all over the place with these replies. I don't think anyone here would disagree that it's absurd for Texas politicians to blame issues on GND, but had they not done that, it's not as if Texans would be any better off. I can tell you're not a fan of Cruz, but I think the point myself and the GP are trying to make is that there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
They walked away from the negotiating table around 12 years ago and are nearly entirely focused on playing up the culture war games rather than actually doing any sort of governing.
And yet there is a fun little internet subculture that insists both sides are at fault, the media is at fault, tribalism, etc...
> there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
I disagree. Blue side has been warning about extreme weather events due to climate change, about how unprepared our infrastructure is. Red side has been oil money == good, deregulation == profits. I don't think there has ever been a disaster that has so vividly highlighted the contrasting platforms and priorities of the two parties.
> I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor.
In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
> 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.
Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”
Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.
Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
> Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
This seems like the sort of belief system that inspired the story of King Canute and the tide. [0]
> Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.
I understand that a lot of people only care about justifying the expropriation of wealth. But it seems you’ve forgotten to include the part where the expropriation is actually justified on the basis of promises to do something good with that money.
Can you point me to a specific current federal regulation that would’ve prevented this issue? TFA posits that there aren’t. So, you’ll take money to enforce a non-existent regulation?
The trivial proof of the GP's statement is that there are regions of the world and the US that regularly drop below 20F and have a functioning electrical grid (say, for instance, Alaska).
That's not proof at all. Building grid infrastructure that can function below 20F in regions that reach that temperature regularly is easier in important ways - in particular, if a new piece of infrastructure gets built that can't cope, the problem will happen early on and either get fixed or worked around, whereas somewhere like Texas can build up decades of new infrastructure that can't cope with the cold before anything happens to demonstrate that.
Huh? The various law making entities in the US are not always making maximal use of their power, it doesn't make any sense to wave your hands in the air and say that they can only do the things they've already made laws for.
Was King Canute making maximal use of his power when he ordered back the waves, or could he have deployed his army to the beach to reinforce his edicts?
Require that the power companies in Texas winterize their equipment. Done.
The electric company in El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT, did spend heavily to winterize their equipment after the 2011 cold snap. El Paso did not suffer outages this year like the rest of Texas.
Producing heat in the winter is a solved problem. If power companies are not applying the known solutions to a recurring problem, then apply state force to require them to do so. Done.
>In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs. Your post is doing exactly that. Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years, that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
> It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs.
Government is not separable from the beliefs of the people who inhabit it and participate in its processes.
> Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years
Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
> that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
Well if people disagree then I feel it would be better for them to discuss. But it seems like there’s this perception that there is no room for reasonable disagreement and that’s what I was pushing back on.
We can agree that the grid needs more investment and still have differences of opinion on how to generate that investment.
>Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
> The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
> For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
For some reason the people who want to spend more money on publicly funded projects insist on casting aspersions rather than introspecting on why they’re always dependent on expropriation for basic things.
>The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.
> Texans preferring to go cold and starve than suffer the burden of regulation or government. This was not the philosophy of Texas governance succeeding as planned, it was clearly a monumental failure.
Authoritarian government also has failures that result in millions of deaths; I’m unsure how you can be so confident that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises.
To be clear this isn’t about the object-level issue of preferring starvation under one ideology to starvation under another. This is about the inability of other people to comprehend that anyone could possibly feel differently than they do about who starves you to death.
> None of us are trying to die for the glory of a sociopathic libertarian ideal.
None of us are trying to die for the glory of a psychotic marxist ideal but we still pay taxes.
> that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises
These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions, the other survives on the basis of economic values extracted by threats of violence. The pathology is in forcing the people who want to benefit from consensual interactions to support a system of coercion.
> The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions
So goes your theory, but not in actual practice. For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way. Which is equivalent to what you would have had to do in the first scenario anyway - both scenarios end up with people who devoted their lives to being independent from the electrical grid being fine, and those who didn't freezing.
The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
> For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
This is true.
> You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way.
This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this. Being subjected to violence if you decline to participate is the opposite of consent.
> The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
I agree with this and I was unclear. I mention consenting interactions because many of the people who oppose increases in the scope of state-sponsored activities prefer to source their necessities from markets. I’m aware that the tentacles of the government are long and broad and no part of the economy (least of all power generation) is free from this interference. There was probably a better way to express this in this thread.
> This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this
I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws. Similarly, the IRS doesn't have a cause of action if you deliberately earn less to pay less taxes (there is no "capitation" tax). So we can call those things consensual in a similar manner as signing up with a privately owned electric monopoly - all have narrow paths whereby you can technically go your own way.
In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
> I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws.
It sounds like you haven’t done much research on this but anyone who has tried to opt out quickly discovers that these things exist. For example, in many municipalities it is illegal to occupy a dwelling that is not served with electricity from the grid. Having discovered this myself because the power company refused to sell me power, because they couldn’t confirm my identity, because they only way they were willing to confirm my identity was through a credit bureau asking me about my credit history, of which for some reason they had no records, (respectfully) I’m unwilling to do the unpaid labor of searching the internet to prove something I know very well from personal experience. Suffice it to say I rented a house and was unable to legally occupy it for a week because I had to get someone else to call the power company and turn on the lights. There are laws that prevent people from opting out.
> In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
Well, considering the Texan senator who is currently planning his return from Cancun was involved in spreading lies that ultimately led to an attempted insurrection against the US government... I think people are a little sick of Texas politics right now, and Texas losing power on large scale for a major weather event for the 2nd time in four years is a nice reminder of the local attitudes about climate change and the failures of Texan libertarianism.
> 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?
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 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?
> 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?
(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.
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.
> 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.
> although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized, we need solid data on whether the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem.
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.
Thank you for that data. Your other comment is very helpful too[0], although I look forward to seeing some good hard data. I've been a bit spoiled by how much detailed data ERCOT provides.
For reference, the Laredo, Railroad, and Eagle Pass ties are all connections to Mexico’s power grid. They’ve been at zero most of this week because Mexico is also dealing with major power outages along the border, and so they don’t have any electricity to share.
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.
People are attacking texas' less interconnected system for being "independent" and others are pointing out more interconnections from places with no power to spare would not have helped.
Assuming there is a planned extra capacity/planned expected failure rate/additional set of regulations and guidelines, its not mainly the literal "connectedness" of the grids, but the "independence" part that is being attacked, specifically being independent from federal oversight.
The Texas producers all currently exceed the national-level recommendations for winterization. Also AFAIK, the natural gas providers are subject to federal regulations (they are not part of ERCOT, unlike the generating stations that use the gas) and they still froze over, which was a huge contributor to the problem.
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.
For absurdly obvious reasons (not all places have the same climate) there are no winterization standards. There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT.
According to ERCOT in 2019/2020 there were 80 facilities checked for the requirements. Some did fail and were rechecked in November. There were plans, however it seems that the plans weren't built for sub zero temperatures.
I think the exact opposite of what you're saying is in the article.
>Why didn’t these plants have a winterization plan? Because it wasn’t required
>1989, the PUCT (Public Utility Commission of Texas) issued several recommendations and guidelines for winterization of power plants and gas wells
>What has been done since 2011? Not a whole lot. A request for a new standard was issued to NERC in late 2012, however a few months later it was denied.[15] Also in 2012 NERC put out a set of guidelines for developing a plan for winter weather[16]. In 2017 NERC put out a special reliability report on the relationship between gas and electricity[17]. Finally, after the 2018 event NERC received another standard request that was approved[23], however it won’t be finalized until late 2021[18,19,20].
Starting at the very next sentence in the article:
> From what I can see, ERCOT has more restrictive rules in their Generator Winter Weatherization Workshop than NERC[21]. All generation stations must have plans for emergencies, address abnormal weather, critical failure points, weather design limits, alternative fuels and testing[21,22]. ERCOT reports that there were 80 spot checks done in the 2019/2020 season with 71 being gas plants and 6 being black start gas plants. 23 had to improve and would be reinspected in early 2021 the rest passed.
This directly refutes your claims that "there are no winterization standards" and "There are merely recommendations, none of which were implemented by ERCOT." The inadequacy of NERC is irrelevant to ERCOT.
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.