The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem

To summarize:<p>* Texas&#x27;s power providers were not adequately winterized.<p>* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.<p>* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they&#x27;re connected to the larger grids.<p>* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don&#x27;t generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.<p>Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.

The head line of the article does not seem to match its contents.<p>The article spends 90% of the time describing problems in the Texas grid.<p>The only mention of the nation problem is this throw away line at the end:<p>&gt; The issue of extreme cold weather and electrical outages is a national issue that needs to be addressed. However, after repeated failings it hasn’t really been addressed.<p>Now that statement would make sense if &#x27;extreme cold weather&#x27; had caused problems in other parts of the USA.<p>But to date I only know of two such events and both occurred in Texas.<p>To make matters worse the national energy regulator warned Texas this would most likely happen again:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-02-17&#x2F;texas-was-warned-a-decade-ago-its-grid-was-unprepared-for-cold" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-02-17&#x2F;texas-was...</a><p>That suggest to me the national regulator has these extreme weather events covered.

&quot;Over the last few days I read online people saying that Texas&#x27; power outages had been caused by Texas being on its own grid… deregulation… Not following national standards…&quot;<p>And he goes into detail and discovers that this is basically the case. And sure, other providers in other states also have problem. Which means ... regulators should be more on the ball. So his summary is correct despite there being more details.<p>It&#x27;s like someone can&#x27;t comprehend that if corporations didn&#x27;t systematically hamstring it, regulation could work, that regulation and leadership did work for a good fraction of the 20th century.

As an Canadian and ex power trader across north america (including ERCOT), I find the political interpretations of events very weird. Poor regulation and deregulation are not the same thing. Do you really think that talking about grid preparation for winter will get any anybody elected? The nuances of esoteric economic principles and advanced egineering are not cool topic which can be understood or debated through tweets and memes. The same can be said about a lot of tangible or intangible infrastructure. I think ERCOT-type failures will become the norm.

I worked on energy trading systems in the late 90s. Everyone knew that the Texas configuration was a unique time bomb, but Texas wanted it that way. They wanted to avoid regulation and if you talked to Texans they liked the idea of being able to separate entirely from the nation.<p>I feel for the people who are impacted by this but they voted for this time and time again.<p>A further footnote here. Anyone involved in power generation keeps an eye on very long range forecasts. This current polar incursion was forecast nearly 60 days ago. Of course they might not expect it to intrude into Texas or be this severe but they knew it was a possibility. I guarantee that someone, somewhere filed reports on this not just for safety but also for profit.<p>Long range forecasts and data play a huge role in energy trading. Day traders are glued to the weather channel. The long range teams look at in-depth scientific reports and there are serious climate modeling systems that feed into contract calculations. I can imagine how much more complicated it is today and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to discover that a lot of “somebodies” placed some very sure bets.

What this really helps point out is how frequently people voice their opinions on matters online without fully assessing the situation.<p>As a Texan, I agree that the situation is more nuanced than what&#x27;s being presented on the news, social media, and on HN. It&#x27;s important to look at the policies in place to fully understand what could have been done to prevent the current problems.

Reminds me of the Great Ice Storm of 98.<p>The North American Ice Storm of 1998 (also known as Great Ice Storm of 1998) was a massive combination of five smaller successive ice storms in January 1998 that struck a relatively narrow swath of land from eastern Ontario to southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada, and bordering areas from northern New York to central Maine in the United States. It caused massive damage to trees and electrical infrastructure all over the area, leading to widespread long-term power outages. Millions were left in the dark for periods varying from days to several weeks, and in some instances, months. It led to 34 fatalities, a shutdown of activities in large cities like Montreal and Ottawa, and an unprecedented effort in reconstruction of the power grid. The ice storm led to the largest deployment of Canadian military personnel since the Korean War, with over 16,000 Canadian Forces personnel deployed, 12,000 in Quebec and 4,000 in Ontario at the height of the crisis<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;January_1998_North_American_ice_storm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;January_1998_North_American_ic...</a>

Be careful about early reports: for example, the claims an entire nuclear power plant tripped, and that it was due to a lack of weatherization. If you drill down to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission report <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;reading-rm&#x2F;doc-collections&#x2F;event-status&#x2F;event&#x2F;2021&#x2F;20210216en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;reading-rm&#x2F;doc-collections&#x2F;event-status&#x2F;...</a> (go to the bottom) only one of its two reactors tripped due to at the time of the report unknown problems with two feedwater pumps. The weather is of course a likely cause, but whatever it was it didn&#x27;t affect the other reactor.

It all boils down to utilities not thinking they needed to protect wellheads from these kinds of temperatures in Texas. I get how that can happen, many of you make the same mistake with outside faucets. I spent the past few days with rolling outages, I would love to find a way to blame this on government, but mostly i blame the weather.

“Region struggles from weather it’s not used to”. That’s enough news for me.

It&#x27;s too bad we can&#x27;t hear from more Texans on this, right now. [edit: I am Texan; 28% of my city was still without power or water just earlier today]

&gt; As an aside I am not an expert in the grid or electricity, I am a software developer, and this is my best interpretation of the requirements I could find.<p>If this kind of sentence isn&#x27;t an example of why society is turning against SV&#x2F;tech, I don&#x27;t know what is.

Threats that cross wide areas incur different costs than ones that are localized. This isn&#x27;t stressed in the NERC report. Tornadoes are a problem but tend not to take out a large number of plants all at once. They&#x27;re localized. Freezes are large-area events and hit many plants simultaneously. So protection against freezes is required for the system even if it is not economic for each unit.

This is a nice overview, but I disagree with the dismissal of the root cause:<p>The interconnects to the East and West coast grids do not have enough bandwidth to provide electricity in a true crisis. This is intentional to avoid federal regulation. As pointed out, there would still be issues caused by a complete lack of winterization in Texas—rolling blackouts would still be likely—but humans would at least be able to keep their homes above freezing and not have to resort to heating their houses with propane grills.<p>That is the difference between a major inconvenience and a crisis. Life and death.

Its only a national problem from the point of view there are millions of people who want that kind of leadership at the national level.

Good write up with some minor technical inaccuracies. First they are spelled &quot;peaker&quot; as in they cover peaks above the base load as base load generation is slower to ramp up or down. Second there may have been frozen wells but natural gas does not go directly from the wellhead to the peaker AFAIK: well gas has other hydrocarbons in it and those along with excess moisture are extracted. These extraction plants create a buffer and there are also sites where natural gas is injected underground and stored for later sale when the price is lower than the producer wants.<p>Natural gas at the burner tip is supposed to be one million cubic feet (MCF) is one million BTU (MMBTU). That consistency is required. I&#x27;m not sure why wellheads freezing would be an issue if there&#x27;s enough gas in storage to cover the demand.

Is the person who wrote this knowledgeable on this topic?<p>The way it is written it seems like they just did a bunch of searches and found some information. It reads like you see when we&#x27;ll meaning internet sleuths find data, but often don&#x27;t understand enough to interpret it with enough context.<p>Do they know enough to be sure they&#x27;re drawing the right conclusions based on what they found?<p>I&#x27;m really not sure the general conclusions are so much wrong (about winterization), there may be events elsewhere, but that doesn&#x27;t mean what happened in Texas also isn&#x27;t what he seems to try to refute.

Half a million in Oregon, many now for going on a week. News? Silence.

Texan here, living in a suburb of Houston. This was a really unique week, but not <i>that</i> bad I think. Everything was totally covered in snow Monday through Wednesday, which was super-weird for Texas. My power was only out on Wednesday, 9am-6pm precisely. Pretty sure it was a rolling outage because it died and came back on the hour. Our water comes from a neighborhood well shared by about 10 houses here. That means when we lose power, the pump stops and we have no water. Our heating is natural gas, but lack of electricity to run the fan motors means no heat.<p>When the power failed, neighbors went door-to-door making sure everyone had enough food, water, and blankets. Some people had indoor fires going and invited others to come and stay warm. One neighbor had a backyard pool and he let us come in with buckets and take back some water for flushing toilets.<p>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. Most of the roads were covered with ice on Monday&#x2F;Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed.<p>Grocery stores had lots of empty shelves, but plenty of food, too. Safely driving to one was the hard part. Again, 15mph is pretty much your limit unless your car has AWD, winter tires, etc. I saw some photos showing huge lines to get into stores, and that was misleading-- it&#x27;s probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they&#x27;ll be open 12pm-5pm, but then not actually open until 12:30. When that happens, people would line up and wait (or wait in their cars). With dangerous road conditions keeping non-desperate shoppers away, I never saw the stores get overcrowded.<p>Overall, things were pretty okay as far as I saw. I feel like some of the media reports were focusing in on the worst of it and gave readers a very wrong impression of how the average Texan was faring. To be fair, though, it would really suck if you broke a leg or otherwise needed medical care on Monday.<p>[EDIT] Couple things I forgot to mention- There was another neighbor who had a generator that she was using to run an electric heater and heat up a single room in her house. She invited her neighbors to come and spend the night there if anyone was too cold, but power came back before the night came. Also, we had every faucet in the house dripping water-- this was enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I saw some burst pipes spraying water when I was driving on Monday, but they seemed to be in &quot;abandoned&quot; businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren&#x27;t dripping.

It&#x27;s not quite a national issue. There have not been regional issues in the Midwest, despite it being considerably colder than Texas, for longer (the average daily temperature in Minneapolis was 0 °F or below from the 6th through the 16th).

They knew how to fix this after it happened in 2011. El Paso fixed it. ERCOT didn&#x27;t. And the reason their small number of wind farms had issues, too, is that they didn&#x27;t winterize those either.

The US must switch to 230V grid. 110 is arcane and full of losses.<p>Likely a centennial project.

Nicely written article. I also like your font and dark color scheme.

The problems are modern US capitalism&#x2F;anti&quot;socialism&quot; problems.<p>Most people do not want to pay for anything that might be more useful to others than themselves. Predictably when things go very wrong, this bites _everyone_ in the ass.<p>Regulations are usually designed to provide some minimum standard, some predictability. Whether they are rules that say banks cannot invest deposits or utilities must build in higher level fail-safes, they are requirements which cost the companies some profit. Naturally the companies fight those requirements.<p>When those companies are allowed to pour money into political campaigns, they naturally help elect people who will return the favor (by fighting regulation, or even deregulating).<p>So yes, it is a nationwide problem. But it is more of a Red-state problem, because those are the places which fight hardest against measures that protect and benefit the general population.

Damn good research!<p>Thanks for sharing it!

You forgot about the trees and the above ground power lines!<p>As somebody who grew up in California but has been living in oklahoma for the last 13 years, I can tell you that honestly this cold front is seriously exceptional, I mean we&#x27;ve had some pretty cold winters but atleast I haven&#x27;t experience anything like this.<p>It&#x27;s so cold the water is freezing in the lines underground. Its so cold I can actually walk and ice skate on my salt pool right now. The snow is so high in some places that if you threw a cat into the middle of it you know that it will die because there is nothing it will be able to do to see to know which way to go in order to get out.<p>I mean its absolutely crazy how exceptionally cold this winter was.<p>And the reality is this.<p>1.) it&#x27;s only lasting 4 days and the last time it was recorded being this cold in the midwest was 100 years ago. (which btw it got even colder in oklahoma than it did in texas and we didn&#x27;t lose power, just food for thought)<p>2.) It&#x27;s not a national problem because the coasts don&#x27;t get as cold. The coldest day in recorded new york city history is -15 f and that was on February 9th, 1934. The coldest day recorded in LA is like the low 40 f, but here in Oklahoma City we&#x27;ve just about hit -15 degrees EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE THE THERMOMETER WAS INVENTED.<p>Like i said we are used to being cold, but we&#x27;ve never actually experienced anything like this before.<p>3.) Being connected to the coastal grids would mean that if we actually had to use it, we&#x27;d end up being forced to saw off limbs in order to pay for it. That is just how capitalism works and therefore we find that it&#x27;s better for us to be independent because in exchange for having to suffer a power outage every now and then, at least we understand that when we pay for energy here it is going to energy companies who create energy here, who employ people who live here, etc etc.<p>The midwest doesn&#x27;t have the same economic opportunities as the coasts have, nor do we receive the same kind of &quot;federal government assistance&quot; when it comes to these matters regardless of which party is in power. Out here poor people vote for lower taxes, because that is the only way they are personally going to see any of that money actually make it&#x27;s way back to their bank accounts.<p>4. The problem with winterizing is that you can really only do so much. The issue is more of an implicit limitation of physics than any individual companies negligence out here in the midwest (because as I pointed out, were used to getting cold weather like this every year and it&#x27;s never been a problem on the scale of a state of emergency until now).<p>The problem is that if you have to raise the temperature so that you can actually produce energy, you have to use most of that energy you produce to raise the temperature and keep it up, and when you also have a bunch of people who need to use that energy to keep spaces like homes that don&#x27;t help produce energy, you can see how this situation becomes quickly and increasingly insurmountable. The reality is that energy companies out here know that when they don&#x27;t do their job well, people out here die.<p>If your argument is that greedy oil men don&#x27;t care enough about &quot;grandma baptist&quot; dying to ensure they go above and beyond to ensure our power grid is prepared to &quot;weather the storm&quot; frankly you don&#x27;t understand that one of the many unwritten rules of capitalism is &quot;It&#x27;s not considered good business to kill your customer.&quot;, while I understand in places like Silicon Valley (be cause like i said i grew up there) the general belief is that Government is king. But out here Business is king. And so while it might be advantageous for a politician to kill off a bunch of old people. It is not advantageous for a business to because in Government you need 75,000,000+ votes to fire the boss. In a corporation you only need like 10 votes to kick out a crappy CEO.<p>And while there are millions of reasons why it makes sense for us to keep firing our politicians. There is really only one reason why a board of directors will fire it&#x27;s CEO. And thats because they stop earning. Like I said blackouts aren&#x27;t good for business, and if you want to argue whether keeping energy surpluses artificially low in order to jack up prices is a problem, then sure let&#x27;s have that discussion. But lets not pretend that people on the coast are on team &quot;cheap energy&quot; here and lets not pretend that&#x27;s because they don&#x27;t know that&#x27;s the only thing we have that they desperately need.<p>All im saying if you isolate the politics from the underlying economics and science, you will surely find that nobody&#x27;s head deserves to roll for this. (unless you can catch mother nature)

Lets get back to the basics here. If Texas was connected to either the East or West grid, would it have power right now? Yes.<p>Edit - Texas can only access a tiny fraction of energy reserves due to weak connections to the East and West Grid. Imagine those connections were stronger or direct. I&#x27;m sure neighboring states will suffer too. I&#x27;m applying general knowledge of distributed systems, I&#x27;m not going to act like I know the specifics of the US power grid. If you go it alone, in any system, there are consequences.