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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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