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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

it takes a long ass time to build more power plants. winterizing the grid better doesn't help with more demand from heat waves.

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Sure, but the message after the ice storm was “look, it isn’t cold here very often, who could have foreseen it?”, and some ham-handed attempts at blaming green energy (https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/abbott-republicans-g...) for bonus political points.

That’s a little harder to do with heat in Texas.

For reference for other readers, the situation that happened in Texas to cause the power grid to fall over was widely forcasted as a "once in every ten years" event. It was not an unimaginable extreme. Most other states plan or require planning for such events, either out of caution, or from direct harm caused by similar events

I am willing to accept they are trying to improve if I see it, but everything I saw out of the Texas government seemed to be a denial of any problems at all. The power grid is stressed in the summer under A/C load anywhere that is normally hot, which Texas is, so why weren’t they prepared for it?

I’m just comparing this to my region where the government doesn’t have an excuse for the power grid failing everytime it’s hot or cold and has actually removed utilities who had catastrophic failures[1].

I’m not judging Texas for having unforeseen problems, I am judging them for failing to respond to their issues

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

It doesn't take a long ass time to build new renewables. But it does take competent management to incentivize moving maintenance to the times of year that don't have heat waves.

How long to build out on the scale needed?

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