Texas-Style Blackouts Are the Future | Hacker News Reader

Texas-Style Blackouts Are the Future

wsj.com

34 pointsBostonian81 comments

And this also will lead to further divides where the wealthy get batteries and generators while everyone else is literally left out in the cold.

Seeing the failure of American politics recently is sad - it feels like society has just given up any ambition in favor of petty in fighting. The article touches on an important point - we are hopelessly short term in our thinking, and the political system reflects that.

Look at China's Belt and Road initiative, it's a 40 year, ambitious plan. Do we even have any serious 10 year plans? 5 year? And why not?

I agree that short term thinking is a huge problem. Almost all the reps/senators are optimizing for winning the next election 2/6 years away. It's just a sad state of affairs. I have no idea what the problem to the soliton is. But unless we do something concrete, seems like things will get worse as weather patterns keep changing.

Reasonable term limits?

> And why not?

Expectation management. There's such rancour about basic questions of what people in society owe one another than it can't be any other way. The rancour is stoked by people who have the most to lose from a redistributive and rights based model of society. There used to be organised resistance to them, but it was comprehensively broken in the late 20th century and has yet to return.

We seem to have replied to OP at the same time, and with the same thoughts.

Most to lose? A lot of republican voters are poor, no? They would have the most to gain from a more equal distribution of wealth.

A lot of those voters don't want redistributed wealth. They want a job to earn a living and the self respect that comes with it.

Bingo. The overall problem is that technology is eliminating meaningful jobs while central bank policy consolidates the wealth upwards (trickle up economics). The blue tribe is focused on the lack of distributed output from traditional production, while the red tribe is lamenting the lack of distributed input required by traditional production. The red tribe doesn't have much of a plan besides looking wistfully towards the past and blaming foreigners for taking away jobs. The blue tribe doesn't have much of a plan besides gifting ever-more after it has been collected centrally. Meanwhile what we really need is a distributed economy that gives autonomous individuals self determination while recognizing that total labor demand is continuing to drop. I fear we won't see the return of this until a currency crisis, as it seems nothing is going to make the Fed change course at this point.

OK. How does Fed policy influence whether or not we get universal Healthcare? Whether or not we have reliable grids? All these are still very much (one could argues even easier) possible in low interest environments...

Universal healthcare is exactly one of those blue tribe proposals that addresses the lack of distributed output, but rings hollow with the red tribe because it does nothing for their sense of self-actualization. You need to be able to understand this if you want any hope of understanding our current impasse.

Pragmatically I do agree that universal healthcare is a way forward out of the current ongoing catastrophe. But I'd much rather live in a society where most everyone were able to pay for most of their own healthcare out of pocket, rather than needing fake "insurance" in the first place.

And yes low interest looks appealing for short-term business reasons - that's exactly why we're in a spiral. The lower the rates, the more things get financialized, and the more accountants take over pushing myopic models of how much safety margins can be cut.

So, they think they are owed a job but others are not owed Healthcare or basic dignitt

You're on a fishing expedition.

No. They just want more opportunities for jobs. Healthcare is a product/service and the very basis of individual liberty is you cannot coerce someone to provide a service to you against their will.

Dignity is not given or an entitlement, it is built and earned.

But capitalism has optimized those jobs away, and they're never coming back. So now what?

Maybe government tariffs on foreign imports produced with cheap labor? Actually ban products that use child labor? (Looking at you cobalt)

OK but the jobs still aren't coming back. Companies are just going to charge Americans more to make up the cost of the tarriffs, or leave the US as a market altogether. If the goal is to encourage domestic manufacturing, most of that work is automated now, and the rest will be competing with child and slave labor around the world.

It would be better to plan for a future where human labor is no longer worth the value of human life, rather than longing for the past.

And the US is never going to ban products that use child labor, because that would ban too many goods manufactured overseas, just as it's never going to be serious about illegal immigration, because the agricultural and service industries depend on under the table slave labor.

Any artificial economic system that is not at it's foundation an [1] evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) will bubble and pop with negative consequences regardless of the systems altruistic intent. Ultimately causing more suffering in the long term from.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...

Most "optimization" of menial or low skill labour has been in response to government intervention into the market via things like minimum wage increases, or over-regulation. That's not capitalism.

All economies which are considered capitalist exist, and have existed, within the context of a state which regulates markets to some degree. A definition of capitalism which presupposes a pure free market isn't useful for discussing the real world - most people would consider the United States and the state of Texas to be capitalist, despite also being regulated. The incentives of neoliberalism and globalism are also unquestionably capitalist to almost everyone, the decisions to seek cheaper labor and more business-friendly regulatory environments as well as automation are made by businesses in order to reduce costs and create value for shareholders. Moving wealth to the capitalist class is literally the purpose of capitalism.

But you can replace "capitalism" with whatever you prefer in this discussion, the incentives and outcomes in the real world remain the same.

I was referring to billionaires

> Seeing the failure of American politics recently is sad - it feels like society has just given up any ambition in favor of petty in fighting.

It looks more and more to me like there are those who prefer the petty in-fighting to the kind of societal upheaval that could result if the U.S. enacted the kind of changes that improved life for the "masses".

The memes you see passed around on Facebook seem to show that nobody is willing/able to stop and think something through. They just get outraged at a perceived slight and then pass/amplify the stupid thought. People are being lead about by the nose through their emotions.

Jealousy is a little misplaced. History has seen a number of countries with strongmen and with ambitious multi-decade plans, and generally those plans went up in smoke as soon as the strongman died or otherwise exited the scene. It turns out that the strongman was powerful enough to sustain a marketing push and put some pressure on the state machinery, but society actually wasn’t very united behind the plan after all.

I don't know if that's necessarily true though. America had pulled off plenty of ambitious long term things within the constraints of democracy - the Apollo program, the Interstates, the NYC subway system, the internet.

But none of those were very multidecade plans. The Apollo program was basically the 1960s before democratic pressures ended it (society no longer saw as much value in space after the first moon landings). The interstates were largely a mid-century project, and they have infamously been neglected since. The internet was only a public project very early on, and most of what we now know as the internet was a product of the private sector, etc.

> Seeing the failure of American politics recently is sad - it feels like society has just given up any ambition in favor of petty in fighting.

Please don't both-sides this:

* https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/31/the-repu...

* Source PDF: https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/b6/55/b6553f85-5c5d...

> Look at China's Belt and Road initiative, it's a 40 year, ambitious plan. Do we even have any serious 10 year plans? 5 year? And why not?

The GOP had major control of the federal levers of power for a good portion of the last few years, and yet "Infrastructure Week" became a running joke:

* https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/611389675/why-its-infrastruct...

* https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/10/21173209/infrastructure-w...

I'm not trying to both sides this - but it shouldn't be controversial to say that the net output of the political system isn't great. This isn't just a reflection of the parties, but the will of the people.

Yes, the net output of the US political system is somewhat garbage. But there are specific sources of that garbage in recent years.

Obama accomplished next to nothing of note in his 8 years. ACA, while a start, largely doesn't change anything about how the healthcare industry operates. He accomplished nothing with regards to our failing infrastructure. The alphabet agencies sure loved him though.

So far with Biden, we were promised an additional $2000 stimulus check...oh actually it's just $1400...oh actually, we're not so sure now. What did he do instead? Marched the military right back into Syria on his first day in office.

So yes, this is a "both sides" thing.

ACA significantly impacted my life and the lives of others around me. My friends in medical school were able to purchase health insurance to cover the 2 months between graduation and starting residency. Graduating from school doesn't make you eligible for COBRA. The ones with pre-existing conditions would not have been able to obtain meaningful health insurance for that gap period otherwise. I'm grateful that the ACA made meaningful steps to solving that problem. I still want us to do better. But the accomplishment of the ACA has been the difference between having health insurance and worrying about catastrophic medical debt because of an 8 week in-between period when you're unattached to a large institution.

You know Biden doesn't have the power to issue $2000 stimulus checks, right?

> ACA ... largely doesn't change anything about how the healthcare

The ACA utterly and profoundly changed healthcare for some 20 million people.

Maybe you're not one of those people. But it's really hard to see how it can be called "largely doesn't change anything".

This IS both sides.

Both sides try to undermine when the other side is in power even when those actions hurt America overall. It's like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Thinking that your "team" is the good guys and the other are the bad guys is exactly why politicians get away with this. There is nuance in the world.

Both sides are guilty to some degree, but, and this is the crucial point, not to the SAME degree.

>Both sides are guilty to some degree, but, and this is the crucial point, not to the SAME degree.

Yep, those other guys are way more polite as they destroy the future of my country for their own short term gain! If only they could rule some cities or states exclusively for decades I'm sure we'd see the kind of America that we all deserve exemplified at the local level!

One side wants to bleed government out with a thousand cuts, drown it in a bathtub and then shoot it in the head, and is willing to commit ̶t̶r̶e̶a̶s̶o̶n̶ light sedition to get what it wants, whereas the other side seems terminally allergic to any exercise of its own power on the rare occasion it can seize any.

But hey, at least they find common ground in being in the pocket of corporate interests.

> Thinking that your "team" is the good guys and the other are the bad guys is exactly why politicians get away with this. There is nuance in the world.

This is really annoying to me /because/ I'm a liberal -- I sometimes /wish/ the more liberal in Congress would be more of a "team," but they're just /not/.

And it /really/ pisses me off when people both sides the current political climate, because you have -- on Republicans' side -- an actual fascist uprising, multiple acts of terror, active dismantling of federal governmental agencies, rampant corruption /in the open/ ... while on the Democrats' side, they're corporatist and generally status-quo, which is not good, but it's /not/ the same.

God, I /wish/ we could have a debate in this country about the benefits and drawbacks of different foreign policy initiatives, or tax policy, or whatever, but we /can't/ -- and I'm stuck with the lesser of two evils because you basically have one party that's actively trying to turn the US into a one-party state and another that isn't. I /wish/ we could say that "both parties are the same," because I'm pissed at both. I'm mad that Joe Biden is only pushing for $1400 in relief for /a year/ of Covid. I'm mad that the Democrats still aren't talking about getting rid of the camps at the border, that Obama did air strikes in the Middle East, that they haven't done anything about college debt, that they're so deep in pockets of business. But they are NOT the same as the Republicans. So stop saying they are.

i argue that in the US, the private sectors actually lead the country and not the govrt. every 4 yrs we can have a new administration and the new administration can cancel the previous administration's orders. what we are seeing is the private sectors leading the way and a lot of time influence the govrt.

Tesla have effectively changed people's mind about the electrical car and move the auto industry and even govrt. to "green energy". you can also see it in the covid19 vaccine development. the private sectors step in to develop the vaccine and the govrt. remove a lot of barriers to speed up the process.

>Look at China's Belt and Road initiative, it's a 40 year, ambitious plan. Do we even have any serious 10 year plans? 5 year? And why not?

that required a authoritarian govrt and a president for life like Xi. Xi break the CCP's norm on the term limit and consolidated more powers onto himself than even Mao. that's kind of govrt that you needs in order to push for 40 years or even 10 year plans.

You don’t need an authoritarian government to plan ahead, just leadership.

If my state can sign a 99 year lease with a sports club, surely they can plan for real issues for longer than 6 months, right?

> And this also will lead to further divides where the wealthy get batteries and generators while everyone else is literally left out in the cold.

On the other hand, if the wealthy get batteries and generators then that would turn wealthy neighborhoods into neighborhoods where it is safe for the power company to cut power when they need to shed load.

- America: The Fairwell Tour - book, C. Hedges

- Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - book, C. Johnson

-The Unraveling of America - article, book W. Davis

America is slowly boiling on the stove of corruption and apathy to become another failed state like Brazil, and has been unraveling for decades. It's not doomer hysteria to suppose it when it's demonstrably happening. Look at the burgeoning number of homeless, extreme budget expenditures on global MIC militarism, horrible leadership, lack of plans, lack of achievements like the JFK days, lack of leadership, lack of organizational effectiveness, lack of disaster containment, violence, political divisions, prevailing social hermitage and animosity, personal habits/escapism/conditions of despair (drug use, alcohol, hikamori isolation, friendlessness, depression, anger issues, road rage, screen addiction, virtual lives, extended adolescence, negative attitudes, poor social skills, fatalism, no families), cannibalism of public commons by corporations, power/influence of corporations, lack of accountability of public officials, lack of community, unequal distribution of wealth, and false beliefs by the middle-class and rich that everything is good enough.

To pull the republic out of this fatal dive towards the ground, nonviolent but assertive direct action is needed to undo the neglect and revitalize the American psyche. Better days are ahead when, not if, people pull-together to solve the big problems and advance breathtaking goals. The universe is malleable, not inevitable.

Since I appreciate your list, here’s a couple more about the growing class divide.

- The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class - book, Guy Standing

- Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? - book, Thomas Frank

Oh thanks. Yeah, the American empire is socially divided-and-conquered against itself and economically pyramidally-narrowing with ultra rich vs. growing favelas / ultra poor.

Americans have to escape their ruts, become more unified, and act more sensibly, determined, and rationally to assert for a fair shake and better leaders focused on public works, reinvigoration, and better services.

I also like:

- Death of the Liberal Class - book, Hedges

- Collapse - book, Jared Diamond

- Upheaval - book, Jared Diamond

- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 1-6 - book set, Gibbon

- Screw It, Let's Do It - book, Branson

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve hit bottom enough yet. Maybe when we do we can break from the cult of the individual. Though it can just as likely turn into civil war and bloodshed.

I think you're right. Most people are reactive rather than proactive. In the case of long-term existential threats like climate change, this isn't an option and requires top-down, unpopular mandates that only get necessarily more draconian as the hole gets dug deeper.

Hyper individualists who don't care about anything outside their lifestyle vs. collective community participants for sustainability; easily pigeonholed with pejoratives like conspiracy nuts/deplorables vs. socialists/communists/antifa.

The related issue of power structures excessively dominated by the hubris of the rent seekers refusing to change because of self-serving greed: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK They're asking for it, and will only placate with crumbs, but will never cede power without a fight.

Excellently written and spot on. Unfortunately, I think we'll have to suffer far more before more folks realize what's needed to change trajectory.

Perhaps we need to reach people differently: movies, ads, and spectacles to shove undeniable consequences, testimonials from around-the-world, and plans/hope in their faces to change sentiments sooner.

Another, parallel option is subtly: Crowdfund massively to buy-out the advertising industry to alter beliefs?

As an aside to all the necessary and important conversation about societal infrastructure investment, I think back to something I noticed when I was a teenager spending a lot of time in my basement on my computer as I'm sure a lot of us did.

One thing I noticed was that although it wasn't heated very well, it was cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter. I wonder if we'll see any renewed interest in earth-sheltered homes after this whole episode. There are of course challenges with them (mortgaging restrictions, dealing with moisture over time), but you get a lot of mileage out of it. It's not just high lifetime energy savings, it's also insurance against freezing to death in these kinds of situations.

Nope. Hurricane Harvey. September 19. 2019 - Houston and a good part of the southeastern part of TX was underwater.

Increasing volatility of climate may make a good portion of Texas vulerable to that type of thing. Everyone would have to move to Northen Texas.

For those that don't know, Holman Jenkins is an opinion pages columnist for WSJ. This is not the news side. He's also probably one of my favorite writers at the WSJ. He has done a lot of writing on energy policy and climate change. His pieces tend to be well researched and present unique views on lots of topics.

While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity.

It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time.

The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years.

We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.

I did a podcast episode expanding on this, "How to Fix Texas" https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

What’s the point in fleshing out this idea that like .01% of voters want.

Doesn't explain why European countries don't seem to have the systemic failures that the US is prone to.

Maintenance. European countries seem much more bothered about maintaining things than America ... perhaps because US culture focusses more on new and making money with new rather than maintaining the existing.

When I travel to the US I am always astounded at the level of disrepair, things just look broken and dilapidated, not everything but just enough that it feels like I'm in a "poor" country, which it is clearly not.

Miami is the worst level of richness and poverty next to each other I've seen, New York looks like it is falling apart and San Fransisco clearly has no social services for the homeless at all. I've loved my time visiting America but there is a vibe of wear and tear that I don't feel in other developed nations.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case. America is very spread out: we have hugely more infrastructure to maintain per person than Europe. We also underwent a colossal post-war expansion fueled by a once-in-a-nation's-lifetime economic boom, and the results of that are very costly to maintain. I also believe that Americans are more price-sensitive with respect to taxes than Europeans are: we are willing to put up with worse stuff to avoid tax hikes.

You're right that there is a problem, but the traditional solution of just maintaining it better does not appear to be a workable answer.

The European Union has strong regulation, and you pay for the stability in your taxes. As a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen, who is culturally American, the EU can be quite a good deal.

They have dealt with populism before, unlike the US, and have much more resilience against this.

Even places like Croatia do not look so bad in comparison to the United States.

Regardless, my family lives in Texas, while I am living abroad. I am already making serious plans to take care of my family for the next time this happens. It really is ridiculous, when you think about it.

If my grid was 99% reliable I'd get over my reluctance to buy a generator.

I would schedule a solar panel and PowerWall install ASAP. That way I could survive "on my own", at least for a while.

A 2 or 3 kilowatt generator installed with a transfer box for key circuits is in the range of $3000 and will run for a long time on 5 gallons of gasoline.

(The install cost is the hard thing to know the price for, but it's not a big or complicated job, there are 25 minute youtube videos showing how to do it)

So it's a lot more approachable for me up front, and then there are tradeoffs on the operation side. If gas is available, the generator can supply 10x the power of the power wall every day for a span of days. If there isn't gas available, the solar panels are going to be nice. But there's a lot of bang for the buck in a small generator (I'm basing my price above on Honda).

Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.

Nuclear plants are enormously expensive to build and maintain. Having them idle would be economic suicide for the operators.

Nuclear isn't something you can just turn on and off like gas

You can build out backup gas without decades long political battles over one of the most singularly controversial issues over the past century or so.

A nuclear plant was also taken offline due to the cold.

Well all sorts of things were taken offline due to the cold—anything can be made to work properly in cold weather.

Right. Clearly much of Texas was built with “it’ll never be below freezing for multiple days in a row”, which unfortunately has caused for an even greater disaster.

Nuclear was outputting about 75% of its capacity, which was pretty good performance compared to the other sources. At that rate, if we'd had 25 GW of additional nuclear capacity instead of 25 GW of wind capacity, we would have had another 15 GW of power available during the cold night hours, when wind was outputting only 3.5 GW of its 25 GW capacity.

We haven't figured out how to control costs with nuclear.

Known costs of a new project make them pretty much untenable, and they don't quite account for spent fuel (not for the full amount of time it will be dangerous). There's likely solutions to storing the spent fuel, but we aren't doing them.

Hopefully regulators take a look at resiliency and do things to improve it that would take less time than building new nuclear. In Texas it seems a modest improvement in natural gas pipelines would do a lot to improve the system. A study estimating the relationship between cold weather and available production would probably be seen as worthwhile by even the most radical anti-regulator.

In the United States...

I couldn't read the article because it's behind a paywall.

ungated: https://archive.is/GfiPd

"Engineering challenges can be solved, but the real menace is an unwillingness, expressed through politics, to pay for the greenhouse reductions we say we want.

Power lines are unwelcome. Solar arrays and wind farms are not everybody’s idea of pretty and so must be located in unpopulated areas. Batteries can’t yet cure an intermittency problem, leaving only conventional plants. Coal is the worst of greenhouse offenders, gas is better and yet still opposed by greens, and forget about nuclear.

...

But I doubt many people will be phlegmatic when Texas-like rolling blackouts come to the Northeast or New England one of these winters, as they almost did in the 2014 polar vortex. Falling trees won’t be the culprit. The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants to support our desired renewables in the face of cold spells a lot more predictable than those that landed on Texas.

This outcome is all but guaranteed unless we get a better discussion than the one we’re having. Then something else will become manifest: When the design performance limitations of utility systems come into play, it will always be in the interest of politicians and utility executives to change the subject to global warming."

>The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants...

The major cause of the outages was that 40% of their gas plants failing due to frozen pipes.

There's a lot that can be solved there just by adding storage. I won't pretend it's a silver bullet, the only silver bullet here is the much more vague "invest in your infrastructure like your economy depends on it" - but Texas is so resource-rich that it treats supply as a solved problem, and has very little buffer storage between gas supply and gas plants. "Just-in-time logistics" carries risks and rewards, and a large part of what we're seeing here is those risks.

How is not winterizing equipment JIT?

It's not - I'm not trying to pretend this is the only problem or the only solution. It's just one facet of a wider problem (as is winterizing). Anyone who tells you there's only one problem here is either being naive, or hand-wavy (eg, the problem is investment. I do believe that stands, but it's terribly hand-wavy).

Texas' overall pipeline, for gas at least, is a pretty straight connection of supplier to consumer - which is the equivalence I'm drawing to JIT logistics. Any fluctuation at the supply (which is most the winterization issues) is a direct risk to the consumer.

Buffers in the distribution reduce risk to the consumer. Winterization reduces risk at supplier. Neither exists in a vacuum, they both contribute to the overall resilience of the system.

There were no major causes it was a systemetic failure across all sectors due to nothing being winterized. Gas failed, coal failed, wind failed, solar failed, the grid failed. Its politics to point only at gas or only at renewables, it was systematic, which might be what you are saying.

Sure, that’s fair, I’m just saying the biggest single reason for losing power was gas plant failures. I’m refuting the idea that that was a particular failure of renewables. I would agree supply continuity means renewables are not usually a complete solution, but that’s a very different argument and not relevant to this incident.

You say that 40% of the gas plants failed. I'm sure you're also aware that wind was only able to produce 15-25% of its capacity, and it was at the lower end of that range during the cold nights when temperatures were below 0°F. Your framing in the GGP makes it sound like everything can be blamed on gas plants, and completely ignores wind output collapsing to 15% of capacity. As a world leader in wind capacity, we can't just ignore our abysmal wind generation situation by pointing fingers at other energy sources which performed much better relative to their share of capacity.

Renewables weren't what caused the Texas blackouts. This is a GOP taking point to distract from their deregulation to the point of failure.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

Bad regulation is not the same as deregulation.

Power plants in the Northeast don't go down when the weather gets cold.

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