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Comment by bink | Hacker News Reader

He talks about several generation facilities catching fire and going out of service in recent days, but focuses primarily on the causes of the energy shortage being regulation and bureaucracy taking too long to approve new generation rather than lack of regulation preventing these fires. Then he talks about how Texas actually approves new generation faster than other states. It seems like an argument made to support a predetermined opinion.

The mention of quick approval of transmission lines is interesting, but I do have to wonder how those that live near these new lines feel about quick approvals.

I worked in the industry for several years so I'm not at all suggesting all regulations are good. And I realize how hard it can be to get approval to run a new transmission line or pipeline is most of the country. But that doesn't mean the answer to every energy shortage is just to loosen regulations and build more of everything.

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>He talks about several generation facilities catching fire and going out of service in recent days, but focuses primarily on the causes of the energy shortage being regulation and bureaucracy taking too long to approve new generation rather than lack of regulation preventing these fires. Then he talks about how Texas actually approves new generation faster than other states. It seems like an argument made to support a predetermined opinion.

Huh? That was only mentioned to point out that the classic "renewables are so risky" line hasn't borne out for Texas. Fossil fuel plants have repeatedly been an issue as well. But it was just an aside, more importantly was it saying those generation facilities all being online wouldn't actually make much difference. That power generation will sometimes need maintenance or have failures or under production at awkward times is just the nature of the beast, certain safety regulation might help but everyone on HN should have some sense that chasing 9s gets very expensive very fast. What's really needed is to just have enough overall capacity (both steady and peaker) ready that a reasonable amount of failure is always ok. In a large energy grid a few generators dropping should never register as an immediate possible emergency. Texas needs more generation/storage approved faster.

And other states are tied into vastly more massive grids, they aren't islands, and they haven't had the same obvious increasing demand due to demographic/business shifts that Texas has been very actively encouraging. Their connections lets them help cover each other, which is a perfectly valid strategy, and they will have a more gradual increase. That other states are slightly worse than Texas isn't presented as an OK thing, but rather something they should be working on too. But they have less immediate need. That's just how it is.

I'm not sure how you came to your conclusion there. I don't know if he's right, I'm not from there, but his message is self-consistent.

Besides more generation capacity, the Texas grid also needs more interconnect capacity with the adjacent regional grids. That would allow importing more power when necessary to make up for local shortages.

Texas would have to cede regulatory authority to FERC, and it’s likely those in power would rather power consumers suffer than give up regulatory authority. The only solution long term is regime change.

> ERCOT is largely independent of FERC and federal regulation because it does not engage in significant interstate trading — it operates under its own system islanded off from the eastern and western interconnections. Glick during last week’s open meeting questioned whether this structure was still appropriate, and called on Congress and the state’s legislature to potentially “rethink” that approach.

> “Does it really makes sense to isolate yourself and limit your ability to get power from neighboring regions, just to keep FERC at bay?” Glick said. “That strikes me as the proverbial cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-electric-reliability-p...

It would not need to cede any authority. The Texas grid already has interconnects with the East, West, and Mexico grids at four different interconnections, and imports/exports electricity through them continuously, while still having its own regulatory authority. The person you are replying to is suggesting to increase the capacity of these interconnects.

There was/is a plan to create a large hub for sharing up to 30 GW of electricity between the East, West, and Texas grids, but unfortunately it was scaled back significantly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

So if they’re not going to increase interconnector capacity, nor add interconnectors, sounds like their power grid will simply remain brittle. That’s a very Texas position to take.

This is a no-go politically, since tge entire reason ERCOT exists was because of bad experiences for Texas with tying into the surrounding regional grids where issues in other states would spill over and adversely effect Texas.

I can't blame Texas for coming to the decision that it's better to implement one's own isolated grid so that mist problems are self-contained to that, and there is a bit more freedom to experiment.

That freedom comes with tradeoffs, and Texas has only itself to blame. I find it amusing because for the most part it's always out of staters that get out of shape out about it.

I can say, I can count on my fingers and toes the number of brown /blackout out periods in the past couple years we've had in Texas, qnd trace those failures to somewher in State. My mom back in VA however gets to deal with several hour irregular blackouts with no explanation whatsoever. There were two or three just in the time I was back there visiting.

Oveeall, it seems to me like the peaks may be more troublesome to Texas, but the overall consumption does seem to have fewer hiccups involved, and for somewhere where AC is a must, I'm pretty okay with that.

As long as they effing winterize. Winter a year or do ago was a boondoggle of epic proportions, and ERCOT's and PUC's leadership was as damn close to beng transparebtly corrupt as I've ever seen.

They can definitely go up fast here. The wanted to route one through our neighborhood (some towers!) and those things were up within a year of the public hearing, the possible routes discussed, and they were placed and a huge substation built. probably 7 or 8 miles of them

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