Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas | Hacker News Reader

Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas

judithcurry.com

35 points740273 comments

She makes some good points about capacity, then tears off on an anti wind rant. Wind has performed well in a number of extreme weather events around the world, including in Texas. Why harp on about wind reliability when gas and goal are offline completely?

She seems to have difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. Why might there be such storms, anything to do with all that fossil fuel consumption? It's something she refuses to even mention, which makes the essay hard to take seriously.

Her complaint seems to be that the way Texas' system is structured penalizes excess capacity.

"This article from GreenTech media praises energy only markets as do many green interests. Capacity markets are characterized as wasteful. Andrew Barlow, Head of the PUC in Texas is quoted as follows, “Legislators have shown strong support for the energy-only market that has fueled the diversification of the state’s electricity generation fleet and yielded significant benefits for customers while making Texas the national leader in installed wind generation.” ... Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. ... The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy."

As a result, no one pays for backup capacity: wind and solar can't (without electrical storage) and fossil fuel can't afford to have it since they have to compete with wind and solar.

This is the first I've heard about the cause of Texas' lack of capacity.

In addition to the failure of some major baseload providers, another point missed was that the grid management was hampered by an out of date control system that didn't have ways to micromanage brownouts. Typically you might have the ability to shutdown 75% of the grid in a crisis (while maintaining power to critical facilities (hospitals, water supplies). If you've only got the ability to shut down 40% of the grid, your ability to control the crisis decreases.

I didn't see an anti-wind rant. She criticized an energy-only market, which ignored capacity, and as a consequence promotes deployment of wind and solar. Further, by ignoring capacity, Texas is now in this dire situation.

Except that it is framed as a renewables problem, when it has just been demonstrated to clearly be a problem for gas and other thermal generators. It is playing a shell game to transfer the capacity risk from one fault risk (extreme cold, effect on gas lines, icing, transmission lines) to capacity risk in renewables.

The "wind outperformed expectations" quote that everyone is repeating out-of-context conveniently omits the fact that those expectations were for wind to produce a small fraction of its capacity. It "exceeded expectations" by dramatically underperforming every other power generation source, because expectations were far lower for wind than for anything else. The defense of wind is essentially, "Wind was not projected to be able to provide much power in this weather", and fossil generation is blamed because it was expected to be fully operational. The fact that fossil generation produced 2-3x what wind did relative to capacity is conveniently glossed over.

If I go into town with buildings flooding from broken pipes and tell people that we've invested billions for years in wind generation which was projected not to be able to provide heat when we needed it, they're not going to say "oh, it's not wind's fault then because it was expected to be garbage in these conditions". They're going to want to know who decided to give out billions in subsidies to become a world leader in wind capacity knowing that it wouldn't work when we needed it. We could have invested in any other source of capacity instead, be it green, nuclear, or dirty, since they all performed at least 2-3x better than wind did.

Wind has only been outputting 15-30% of its capacity, and around 15% when we most needed it. The article's analysis is spot on. The very last thing that Texas needs is capacity that only works in favorable weather conditions. Fossil capacity had very serious problems, but still left wind in the dust. The solutions are very debatable: Properly winterized wind generation is definitely worth looking into, as is nuclear (which had the best output of any generation source relative to capacity). But our current wind capacity is absolute garbage in this weather, and this must be acknowledged in order to make progress. Stating "wind exceeded projections" without explaining how pathetic those projections were is manipulative and dishonest.

Well it wasn't me saying that, though it has been said frequently. It is meaningful in normal situations, when you can spin up other sources and what you need is predictability.

Another aspect which hasn't been mentioned in terms of availability is the centralised vs distributed aspect. Big thermal plants tend to be off for extended periods for maintenance, whereas PV+wind have thousands of small units. Previously this downtime had been scheduled during winter, but with worse winter storms it might need to happen over summer. PV has been a huge benefit in meeting the AC peak in summer, avoiding the need for huge quantities of diesel backup generation.

The issue is that a lot of people are hunting for a way to prove their ideological priors, rather than actually seriously considering the situation at hand.

very true. wind turbines work fine in very cold climates (see the Netherlands) but you have to get the "winter" package with de-icing capabilities but it costs more. Typically, you wouldn't need that in Texas but this wasn't a typical weather event by any stretch.

Texas relies on wind production to a much greater extent than the Netherlands.

"Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of energy in Texas' power grid. In 2015, wind power generation supplied 11% of Texas' energy grid. Last year it supplied 23% of the system's power, surpassing coal as the second-largest source of energy. ... An ERCOT report on generating capacity listed the top sources of power in the state:"

    Natural gas (51%)
    Wind (24.8%)
    Coal (13.4%)
    Nuclear (4.9%)
    Solar (3.8%)
    Hydro, biomass-fired units (1.9%)

(https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy...)

"Energy from renewable sources accounted for only 7.4% of total final energy consumption (TFEC) in 2018, the third-lowest share among IEA member countries and well below the IEA median of 12.1%. ... Bioenergy is the primary source of renewable energy and includes transportation biofuels and direct use of biomass in heating and electricity.*" (https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020)

Except that the faults had occurred a number of times regionally in the last decade, and nothing had been done about it. Possibly an investment problem but some of the fixes (lubricant heaters) are not expensive; I would guess a general culture of 'no one told me it could happen', i.e. limited depth of experience in the utility company.

> wind reliability when gas and goal are offline completely?

This is false. Natural gas and coal increased production during the week of Feb 9-16. Natural gas energy production in TX on Feb 14 was over 10% the high summer spike of 2020.

So how did they lose >30GW? Are you saying significant numbers of generation plants didn't go offline?

Seriously, go cherry pick somewhere else.

That is from its peak. Even after the whole market losing 30GW, natural gas production on the 14th was higher than the 9th.

The cherry picking is that natural gas energy production increased dramatically to make up for the collapse of wind power on the 9th. Yes, it dropped 30% on the 14th, but from a dramatically higher point.

On 2/15, natural gas energy production was even higher at 44GWh. Wind went from 23GWh to 3Gwh.

Blame is super simple - who USA has embarrassingly outdated and fragile infrastructure after many decades of neglect and short term bandaids (like whole discussion about green energy now - it’s distraction from overall state of the grid).

What’s most fun is seeing California and Texas taking stabs at each other when failures happen. It’s like two homeless people arguing who has warmer tent.

"We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand."

That was my first thought on hearing about Texas' problems. Air source heat pumps don't like cold temperatures outside---I've noticed ours here hitting the resistance heat when the outside temps were in the 20Fs and the indoor setting was 65F. With the population growth and all of the infrastructure using air-sourced pumps (once we got rid of the swamp cooler), cold temperatures mean a step change in energy usage.

There are residential air source heat pumps that can work well at those temperatures. Mitsubishi has some [1] that provide 100% capacity down to 23 F and then fall off fairly linearly to 76% capacity at -13 F. Fujitsu has some [2] that go down to -15 F.

It's probably a good as people's existing systems reach replacement age to replace them with that kind of system.

[1] https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/technology/keep-w...

[2] https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/xlt...

What they really need is a facilitator to run a blameless postmortem for this incident.

Plane crash investigations are remarkable post-mortems.

It seems so unique, and it could be applied to many areas.

> facilitator to run a blameless postmortem

Here's Etsy's 2016 guide[1]. A bit old, but if it's been obsoleted by something, I'm not quickly finding it. Other suggestions? Its CareSets fork[2] saw a bit of work in 2020.

[1] https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-g... https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf [2] https://github.com/CareSet/DebriefingFacilitationGuide_FromE...

I am not sure if you are joking or not, but I had exactly this conversation yesterday morning with a friend who was heading into an after incident review meeting. Wouldn't it be nice.

When a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other earthquake hits - do we 'assign blame' in the same way? Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?

When infrastructure is built in areas where hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes are expected and said infrastructure fails, we do assign blame. And we should!

The attempts to rationalize this as a “once in a century” event are full of it. This nearly happened in 2011, and similar freezes happened in 1989. This is a “once in a decade” event, and those responsible for building critical infrastructure should have a plan for it.

1989 was 30 years ago. I was in Dallas and remember the 2011 event well, it wasn't anywhere near the same. The major problems in 2011 were trees falling on power lines it wasn't core generation facilities failing.

Your summary of 2011 is in complete contradiction of the FERC report on the incident. And frankly, I trust them more than I trust you.

The report in particular said that 67% of the lost capacity was directly attributable to cold weather, specifically frozen sensing lines, frozen water pipes, windmill blade icing, etc. A remaining 12% of the shortfall was secondarily caused by the weather, specifically plants running low on fuel. This leaves a remaining 21% for “other”, which presumably includes downed lines. I wouldn’t call that the “major” problem, not compared to the 67% caused by the plants freezing.

https://www.powermag.com/ferc-nerc-february-blackouts-in-the...

As far as 1989 being 30 years ago: it’s still within living memory. It’s not like we’re talking about the 1899 freeze or whatever, lots of people in Texas remember it! So far Texas has had power issues due to the cold in 1989, 2011, and 2021. I think by the point you’re having this every 10-20 years, it’s time to start planning for it, no?

Not really, from your link

"A total of 210 individual generating units within the footprint of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which covers most of Texas, experienced either an outage, a derate, or a failure to start. The loss of generation was severe enough on Feb. 2 to trigger a controlled load shed of 4 GW. Spot prices in ERCOT hit the $3,000 per MWh cap on Feb. 2, the worst day of the event. The following day, local transmission constraints coupled with the loss of local generation triggered load shedding for another 180,000 customers in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas."

that is not close to the severity of what happened over the course of this week.

"According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages 75% of the state's deregulated electricity market, the single-day record for demand, set in 2018, was smashed on Valentine's Day. And as the weather has gotten worse, the capacity to generate electricity has diminished: By Tuesday, per ERCOT's CEO, 45,000 megawatts of generating capacity was offline — up from 34,000 megawatts offline the day before, representing more than half of what the state typically uses in a day.

https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-a-majority-of-lost-pow...

> that is not close to the severity of what happened over the course of this week.

Right, but I wasn't claiming that 2011 was as bad as 2021, which would be an obviously silly claim. I'm claiming that in 2011 the grid failed in a similar way to what's happening today, due to the cold, and that it was a failure of leadership to not learn from that and prepare (El Paso excepted). This is why I talked about why power failed in 2011, rather than talking about how long the outage in 2011 was or how cold it got.

Meanwhile I am saying that this claim you made is in contradiction with the official report:

> The major problems in 2011 were trees falling on power lines it wasn't core generation facilities failing.

The FERC claims that 79% of the lost energy production in 2011 was caused by either power plants failing directly due to the cold (67%), or indirectly as fuel production and transport failed due to the cold (12%). Between your unsupported assertion about falling trees, and the report produced by experts who spent six months studying the failure, I'm going to trust the latter.

Unless if you'd like to provide some evidence beyond happening to live in Texas in 2011.

I read an explanation earlier this week (which I can't find at the moment) that preparing for the 2011 event would not have mitigated most of the issues we're running into in 2021 -- this is much, much worse than 2011.

The level of mitigation required to prevent 2011 wouldn’t be enough to stop 2021’s outage, absolutely. But it would’ve helped. Rolling blackouts are not good, but they’re far superior to losing power for days in freezing weather.

Also, consider the fate of El Paso, who followed the 2011 report’s recommendations. They’re still experiencing some issues; some plants have failed and they’ve had to cut off gas exports to Mexico. But their lights are on. All in, you’d much rather be in El Paso right now than Dallas or Austin.

El Paso, like Beaumont and Lubbock, are not on ERCOT's grid.

That’s also a factor, no doubt.

Because the lack of winterization of elements of the energy supply chain in Texas was and is a known issue.

When the levees failed during hurricane Katrina, we blamed the levees and not the water, because we can plan for and prepare for adverse weather that we know is absolutely going to happen.

What was the cost benefit analysis of winterizing for a once-in-30 years event?

Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?

I don’t know. Are you suggesting that we blame neither the weather nor the known lack of winterization but instead a C-B analysis?

Definitely the analysis is important but this feels like moving the goalposts to divert blame away from the known lack of winterization.

Edit: Getting off-track here, but “Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?” For the record, that 10% also buys you other perks, such as 47 human lives so far. To intentionally tug the heart-strings, check out https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+deaths where you can read about, for example, a little boy freezing to death in his home.

Also, lord knows how much spent in insurance payouts, property damage, and wasted food when the power went out. Plus the economic drag created by infrastructure being wrecked for the next couple of months, diminished tax receipts, etc.

Have you seen the videos of hotels flooding after their pipes burst? Fixing that stuff isn’t going to be cheap at all. I would bet that those hotel operators are now going to spend a lot more fixing up their buildings than whatever reliable energy would have costed. Oh, and any damages building won’t be generating any profit until it’s fixed and everyone else is doing well enough to spend on discretionary items, which will take a while since every plumber is probably booked solid for months.

I think this is fundamentally a problem amenable to a cost-benefit tradeoff discussion provided you get the costs and benefits right.

If the argument is “this went badly because of a lack of winterization because the costs were improperly considered”, I can follow that logic and agree. If the argument is “this went badly and this is an engineering problem for which cost-benefit analysis has no proper place”, I disagree pretty strongly.

1989, 2003, 2011, and now 2021, I don't think I'd call this a once-in-30-years event. When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released a report[0] after the Feb 2011 hard freeze, they said "While extreme cold weather events are obviously not as common in the Southwest as elsewhere, they do occur every few years," which seems to have been bang-on.

That report, like this article, correctly identifies ERCOT's "energy-only market" as the underlying source of problems, in my opinion.

0. https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...

Broad brush: Is it worth hardening our infrastructure to protect against disasters? I would say yes, absolutely. Whether you use a one-in-a-decade, one-in-a-century or some other metric is up to the bean counters and their C-B analysis. I'm currently working on a $200mm project that is reinforcing some infrastructure against a one-in-4000yr event, there are definitely some differing risk tolerances out there.

To call it simply 3 extra days of electricity is a bit disingenuous I would think. There are massive downstream costs caused by this disaster, not even including the loss of life. How many apartment buildings will need to be torn down to the studs to remediate the water damage? How many buildings won't receive proper repair and end up with residents suffering from the health problems living in those conditions would entail? How much economic output/activity has been suppressed by a weather event that other parts of the country would have/did shrug off?

And to venture down my own political rabbit hole, how much of that hypothetical 10% extra cost of electricity could be absorbed if the utility was public and the share of funds that go to profit instead went to expansion and upgrade of the infrastructure?

30 people and counting have died in Texas, with millions in damages likely due to burst pipes and other weather-related catastrophes. But none of those costs will be borne by the power companies, so cost/benefit analyses by those power companies will say, no, it's never worthwhile to incur extra costs, ever.

> Is it worth paying 10% extra

No, cost-benefit-wise, it isn't: it makes more sense to buy a generator and have it handy. Even if you have to replace it every 10 years, you're still ahead. I'm not being entirely callous here, either: I live in Dallas and just lived through 3 days of intermittent power and heat and it sucked a lot. I'll be investing in a power generator in a few months (when they become available again). If half the homes in Texas had been able to switch to their own generators for a few days, the grid would have been able to sustain the remaining load.

The worse problem we have down here is water, and there's not a whole lot an individual can do about that: if we're going to collectivize the winterization of anything, I'd rather it be the pipes.

Your position is that everyone should have generators instead of having infrastructure that doesn't require everyone to have generators?

Some people have generators no matter what, but it seems a stretch to think you can't rely on your energy infrastructure a bit more than that.

i see your point but you have to realize how unique the situation is. No skyscrapers in Texas are built to withstand earthquakes (that i'm aware of) but if one did happen I wouldn't blame the building codes and builders for the destruction and demand that all buildings be retrofitted to withstand earthquakes.

The entire state of Texas was under a winter storm warning at one point. Texas is a very large state with significant differences in climate from North to South and West to East, having the whole state until a winter storm warning is unheard of.

Stores are already out of water. They would quickly run out of gas to power everyone’s generators.

Definitely generators would have helped, but only to a point.

If you want to do it right, you probably have a generator wired in that feeds off a big propane tank. There's also a lot to be said for having an automatic system that works even if you're not home. (That said, this is the perspective of someone in a northern state who normally travels a lot so I come at this from the perspective of not losing power for an extended period during any random winter.)

right, there are setups that would have helped people get through the situation better but actually needing it is so rare as to not be worth the cost. When it's > 100F in Chicago for three weeks in a row things start to fail because that is very very rare. Three weeks > 100F in TX happens every so often and we have plans for it.

A state wide winter storm and sub-zero temperatures is pretty unheard of for Texas and so, yeah, things fell apart.

TBH, I have never actually sprung for one in New England although I'm periodically tempted. The main culprit for extended power outages in New England tends to be ice storms so the temperatures are usually not especially cold.

I'm also on a fairly major road in an exurban but not really rural environment. I'd probably feel differently if I were at the end of a country road in the middle of nowhere. I also don't have vulnerable people at home. The only thing I really worry about is my pipes. Other than that, I'll fire up the wood stove and get out the lanterns.

The smallest Trane air handler/heater combination I looked at (https://www.trane.com/content/dam/Trane/Commercial/global/pr...) is only around 6000-7000 watts; you'd want a 10kw generator and a Genrac portable would run you about $1000.

Keep up with the maintenance; you'll probably want to try filling it with fuel, running it, and draining the fuel a couple of times a year.

Note: this is just for heating; don't plug anything else into the generator while you're heating---the peak startup loads make generators sad.

If you've got natural gas (uh, whoops) or propane, a whole-house generator would only be a few thousand more (not counting installation). (I've considered one, but we don't have either, which means either getting a propane tank and service or going with diesel, which has maintenance aspects.)

That might make sense for you personally but if you consider all the other Texan households also buying generators, and the multi-family dwellings that can't each have a generator, the math starts to look different.

Burst pipes can cause $100,000 worth of damage to a house, although it's usually less. There could have been a million houses affected. And burst pipes won't be the only cost of this event, by far.

So the power companies saved a few million dollars and cost Texas a hundred billion.

This is a clear example of where an ounce of prevention would have saved a pound of cure.

i don't want to be over-libertarian here but you need to take care of your property. I, myself, have a burst water pipe in an exterior wall right now (i live in Dallas) i don't blame the power company for that. I blame only running the cold water side of my sink during the coldest nights. It was the hot water side that froze and burst.

edit: before anyone replies "but the water service failed!" then you turn off your water at the curb. and before you say "the city has to do that!" no they don't. You should have a key (from any hardware store) and know how to operate the valve.

For some people, no power for days plus running all lines does not prevent frozen pipes. The problem is in not knowing exactly which conditions will freeze the lines, we dont have temperature sensors on them, so people run them and hope for the best. Few are so prudent as to voluntarily drain their home for days on just the chance lines will freeze.

I'm not convinced that winterizing for Texas would be a 10% upswing in costs. I assume there's some approach that's not the "enclose the whole plant" approach used in cold weather states.

In the past 30 years, this has happened three times, so it's more like a once-in-10 years event. This just so happens to be the worst of the three

i've lived in Texas for 33 of my 45 years and don't recall anything like this. I could be wrong though because this is just my memory talking. I do remember in 2011, 14" of snow and power being out for about three days for me in Oak Cliff ( just SW of downtown Dallas). I loaded my wife and infant in the car and drove to Plano ( about 45min North of Dallas ) and stayed at my inlaws who had power. I don't recall the power outages being anywhere near as widespread as this event. ..certainly not down South near Austin. I also don't recall water service being an issue at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196774

considering the billions and billions of dollars that will now be doled out in insurance claims, yes almost certainly even assuming your 10% figure is accurate.

What was the cost benefit analysis of winterizing for a once-in-30 years event?

Isn't this exactly what is missing?

Is it worth paying 10% extra (for example) for electricity forever, in return for having 3 extra days of electricity for a few days in 2021 and 2051?

It might well be, yes.

Idk the exact #s but generally yes - that's why you don't see regular blackouts in the developed world.

Regardless, how about .01% of the cost for an effective contingency plan? They didn't have that either.

When a hurricane, flood, tornado, or other earthquake hits - do we 'assign blame' in the same way?

Yes, of course.

Why isn't this whole event just considered a natural disaster?

It is, but unexpected or rare events like "natural disasters" test our systems of emergency response. Disruption is likely in many cases, but if those systems fail it's important to understand why, and how our responses could be improved in the future.

Plus, Texas always has a big target on its back. It's a large, red, opinionated state with a decent economy and growing population. Any time there's an opportunity to knock it down a few pegs everyone on the other team is going to do so.

When the earthquake hit in Armenia, what, 20 years ago?, and the Soviet-built apartments pancaked, people were quite willing to assign blame.

We certainly assign blame when people or groups whose responsibilities include preparing for and responding to natural disasters fail to do so.

It’a interesting that Texas NOT having a capacity market actually makes it more appealing for “green” energy sources. Texas created a market that favored green energy and now several of their prominent politicians are rallying against the green energy that their system incentivized.

> Texas created a market that favored green energy

subsidized green energy. If those sources are truly economically efficient, we should remove the subsidies.

To me, the major failure was planning. We knew it was coming, the weather forecasters were certain and accurate. Warnings could have gone out way sooner that a major weather event is underway and all services may see significant interruption.

This wasn't like a major tornado where it goes from blue sky to total destruction in a matter of 3 hours. Same goes for hurricanes, it's not like they come out of the nowhere. States have plans to deal with hurricanes, there were no plans/warnings to deal with this until it was too late.

Why does blame need to be assessed at all? Snow is to blame, ice is to blame, mother nature happens.

Nature didn't build the power grid or decide which engineering compromises to make.

That’s true, but in order to build that power grid and decide on engineering compromises, certain assumptions had to be made about Mother Nature, and what the likelihood of what may happen. It wound be unreasonable to assume any system is built with all contingencies in mind.

I don’t know how many times this needs to be said, but the lack of winterization in Texas’s energy supply chain was and is a known issue.

Other comments, which are worth reading, go into detail about how this event isn’t even close to some “all contingencies” handwave. (It got cold. This isn’t aliens invading.)

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