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Comment by kbar13 | Hacker News Reader

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us?

imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders in line and cash in on the trend, and save the world in the process! or go the way of detroit when oil demand tanks...

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A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty that the climate is changing.

This cold snap is due to the polar vortex destabilizing and pushing arctic air down South. Normally the polar vortex stays stable and that arctic air oscillates at higher latitudes. But with warmer temperatures in the higher latitudes that stability has been disrupted and a large part of the vortex air has been pushed South.

The arctic is warming much faster that the rest of the planet, so these events will probably become much more common. Other sorts of extreme weather events are also going to become more common with climate change

Some explainers on the polar vortex: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-is-arctic-warming-linked-...

Okay but we do have that. Nobody is saying that this is the entirety of the evidence, just that this could be the wakeup call where people realize it affects them personally and they should do something about it.

Weather isn't climate... or something..

The reason this might be 'climate change' related is because the warming Arctic is impacting on the jet stream, which then leads to these unexpected hot/cold events:

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/03/07/climate-change-may-...

The slowing of the jet stream, therefore, could cause weather patterns to remain in place for longer, resulting in prolonged heat waves or cold snaps.

Ha. I love how ‘global warming’ transmogrifies into ‘climate change’ to suit the argument.

Not everything is as big of a crisis as your Facebook posts make out.

A few days without power... big woop. The power goes down longer in most coastal cities every summer during hurricane season. Not to mention the usual outages of a day or two due to tornados and ordinary storms. And the cold? Who cares? Kids are playing in the snow, most everyone in my neighborhood had been grilling out, if it’s been a wake-up call for anything, it would be to maybe buy a quieter diesel generator.

Jesus H... can’t we have a winter storm any more without using it as grist for ideological arguments?

It will be 70f in a few more days. All this will be forgotten.

Climate change _is_ a result of global warming. It's not that complicated, so let me try and explain: climate patterns will change as the earth warms up. Jet streams change, hurricanes get more powerful and occur more frequently, etc.

As for "no big deal", I don't know what else to say other than 15 people have already died. When it's below freezing and people are without heat, they will freeze to death. Not to mention people who have medical equipment they need to stay alive that requires electricity.

Many areas see this temperate every year and they're prepared for it. It's not the same thing in Texas.

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days, and you're sitting here on the internet saying that they're a bunch of rednecks who don't understand science or climate change. Pretty rich.

This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.

edit: to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that. This is not the time to be gloating about green energy.

> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.

While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and a misreading of the book.

The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on standard distributions derived from historical data generates predictions and confidence intervals that misrepresent the underlying phenomenon by assuming away "fat tails" and ignoring changing circumstances. If there's not some good reason why an event can't happen, any forecast or plan which precludes that event is necessarily flawed.

To describe this as a "black swan" event assumes nobody could've seen it coming, there was no reason to suspect it would happen, and it's unlikely to happen again. All of those are false. Every bit of climate forecasting over the last ~decades has pointed towards increased weather variability and increased likelihood of extreme weather events. Specific to this case, increasing the overall energy levels in the atmosphere increases the variability of the polar jet stream and increases the likelihood of polar vortex events like the one Texas is currently experiencing.

So, no, this wasn't a "black swan" event, this was a predictable - and predicted - outcome of climate change, which is a predictable outcome of burning as much coal and carbon-based fuels as we have over the last couple generations.

It's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity.

And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/February%202011%20Southwest%2...

It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population of 7 million, it does not.

This is unprecedented in the modern era. Statewide load on the grid, for this time of year, is unreasonably high. Black swan.

There are objective meteorological records that definitively prove that you are wrong.

Where are they?

It got down to -1F in Dallas on December 23 1989. Houston saw 7F on the same day. Houston saw sub-freezing temps during December of 1985 (25F), 1989 (7F), 1983 (11F), 1979 (26F), and 1996 (21F), among others. And that's just December.

So yeah, it happens. Not often, but at least a half dozen times in living memory

It gets cold in Texas, especially north Texas. I never claimed otherwise. It regularly snows in Dallas, but it does not regularly snow in Houston.

I listed half a dozen times when it got well below freezing in Houston in December alone. Don't move the goal posts to snow, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented in the modern era, which is just simply not true.

I said that it doesn’t get below freezing in Houston every year. Certainly not for days at a time.

> I said that it doesn’t get below freezing in Houston every year. Certainly not for days at a time.

Yeah, but you did not say that.

You said:

> It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population of 7 million, it does not. This is unprecedented in the modern era.

If you want to change that to say "this is an unusually long and wide freeze across the entire state", or "this is an unprecedented power outage" that's arguably true. But you didn't actually say that, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented, which is objectively not true.

Heck, a long freeze knocking off the Texan power grid isn't even unprecedented in this century. A similar thing happened back in 2011[0].

0 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ercot-rollingblackouts/te...

> the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal.

That’s an outright lie. The vast majority of the missing production is in fossil plants.

Wind only accounts for about 20% of nameplate capacity, and has been performing above expectations for the period. And that’s with Texan wind being as un-weatherised at the rest (hint: when wind turbines work just fine in Montana or Washington State, if they freeze over it’s not because they’re wind turbines).

How do you reconcile with the fact that at the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed. Don't you understand that people are going to blame wind because it only provided 2% of its total capacity. Also even taking into account the dangerously overestimated capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it is way worse, only 11%. Comparatively gas is at worst at 50% of 56GW installed and nuclear at 75%.

…but the primary reason for the current outages is that fossil fuel plants failed. Wind power etc has also failed but is a rounding error in terms of lost production.

> if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened.

If they invested that money in coal and failed to winterise it in the same way they failed to winterise the other plants then there would be absolutely zero difference.

This is kind of a meta point and probably sounds patronising, but you’ve just said a bunch of stuff that’s flat out wrong. It’s time to start questioning your information diet. Where are you being fed disinformation from? What can you do to diversify your sources of news?

> to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that.

If I remember the statistics correctly, there is more coal power offline right now than wind power offline. If that is true, that rather debunks your theory, doesn't it?

What I'm interested in, and what I'm talking about, is judging each method of power production from its total current output relative to nameplate capacity.

All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better than renewables. For every dollar spent on solar and wind, if that built X amount of coal or NG plants, they would have such an excess of capacity that the few plants that have gone offline would be completely irrelevant.

My point isn't that Texas shouldn't have invested in renewables. It's just that this is really not an appropriate time to be lecturing Texas about renewable energy, because had they invested their money in non-renewables instead of renewables, they would likely not be in this situation.

The problem is not a lack of regulation. It gets below freezing every single year in Texas. The problem is that it doesn't get this cold in Houston every year, and they misjudged demand.

As I understand the situation, the problem is that several coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants had to shut down because it was too cold. It's not that there isn't sufficient baseload capacity to deal with the demand, it's that the baseload capacity wasn't sufficiently winterized to handle the situation. Many wind farms were also insufficiently winterized to handle the extreme cold.

With the exception of natural gas (where some plants shut down to allow the pipeline capacity go to people who heat their homes with natural gas instead), the primary driver of the lack of capacity appears to be a failure to winterize for what is objectively a pretty rare situation, combined with an unwillingness to draw the power from those places where production isn't so heavily impacted by the weather.

> All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better than renewables.

You do realize that all of this is happening because a bunch of non-renewable power plants failed, right? You're making an argument that's literally countermanded by the exact situation we're discussing.

1) There are wind turbines in Antartica. There's nothing inherently bad about wind turbines in the cold.

2) This might be a black swan event, but we've seeing a lot of "once in a 100/500 year" weather events in the last decade. Which is exactly what climate scientists predicted would happen if we continued ignoring climate change.

3) and as everyone else said, the fossil fuel plants are also offline.

Most of the capacity lost was fossil fuel based. In fact solar generated more than expected. So how exactly are renewables the problem here?

Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps.

And how is more coal the solution when these kinds of event will just become more common with global climate change?

Should we not push for changes which halts the ongoing climate change?

Wind was supplying more power than forecast right as total capacity plummeted...

> Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps.

That doesn't sound at all like a potential disaster. Presumably the emergency cooling pumps didn't freeze.

> In fact solar generated more than expected.

This is technically true, but kind of irrelevant to the big picture. Solar beat expectations, which is great until you realize how little it was expected to produce in the first place. Solar and wind do not scale to demand as well as non-renewables.

And look, I'm not saying that Texas should have invested in coal, I'm saying that it's tone deaf to admonish them for not embracing green energy when they did embrace green energy pretty strongly, and when their lack of capacity currently is mostly about their lack of production in renewables.

The core problem is that you can almost always burn more coal or NG and get more juice out of the coal and NG plants. But you can't make the wind go faster, and you can't make the sun shine brighter or longer. Had they invested in an abundance of non-renewables, people would not be freezing in their dark homes right now. It's not Texas fault, proponents of green energy need to have a better answer for this.

Doubling down on coal? What makes you think that would’ve worked any better than the natural gas and nuclear plants that failed too?

Isn’t the whole thing about climate change that it makes black swan events more likely (less black?)? It was well known that the most immediate effect would be weirder, stronger weather events.

Wind was performing above expectation throughout the event.

Nah it's because the plants are literally freezing up.

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