Here’s a deep dive if you want the nitty gritty details: https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Pages/February-2011-Southwest...
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Pages/February-2011-Southwest...
2021 was way colder for way longer. Sure on paper the same words are being used to describe it, some power outages over a few days due to the cold. But 2021 was way worse both weather-wise and grid-wise. In scale they're pretty much incomparable. In 2011 it got above freezing during the days and melted a lot of the snow and ice. It stayed well below freezing for many days in 2021, more days below freezing in many decades.
In 2011 a few friends had their power turn off for a few minutes every few hours for a couple of days. Most people I know never lost power. Stores stayed open. Transit was still operating. They even still managed to play the Superbowl at AT&T stadium.
In 2021 everything was shut down for nearly a week. No mail, no shipping services for several days. Stores were without power. Gas stations unable to pump gas because of no power. All the airports shut down. All transit shut down. There was a 100-car pileup on the highway.
I don't disagree about if the operators implemented the weatherization recommended in the NERC's report it would have at worst alleviated and at best completely prevented the issues that would have happened, but 2021 was still way worse than 2011. Other than they were both storms in February they're massively different in scales in almost every way.
Lower temperatures increased heating demand by around 20%, but it’s not like heating was the only thing people use electricity for. Stoplights, water pumps, exterior lighting, etc need power either way.
What made it worse was the triple whammy of more generation going online, slightly higher demand, and prioritization of specific areas which didn’t lose power.
The magnitude of electricity demand increased by more than the entire state of most states' entire generation capacities.
I do agree, the main root cause for the power going out so bad was power was cut to natural gas processing which caused shortfalls of natural gas which couldn't be alleviated until things thawed. But in 2011, that would have just been overnight since it got above freezing every day. It took several days to get above freezing in 2021. Things are pretty different when it's below freezing multiple days in a row, and that just doesn't normally happen in most of Texas. It's pretty different having your highs be in the 20s versus the upper 30s and low 40s.
I've never seen ice accumulate on a pool in Texas. In 2021 it formed over an inch on my pool, and I never lost power. If that's not an obvious indicator the cold was way more I don't know what to tell you.
Your area may have gotten above freezing every day in 2011 but that wasn’t true statewide. El Paso airport recorded February 2 High 15, Low 6f, February 3 High 18f, Low 1f, February 4 High 37f, Low 3f, and that was kicked off by a low of 14 on February 1st.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GH...
And they didn’t see such extreme weather in 2021.
Yeah, my area and most of the rest of the state. And pretty much every major population center. That's a massive difference.
You're pointing to one of the smaller/midsize cities that isn't even a part of ERCOT. It really shows how much you don't understand about the situation if you're arguing the state of Texas' grid and using weather data from El Paso to back your argument. El Paso is one of the coldest cities in Texas in the winter. Its not indicative of most of the state. And its not connected anyways. You should have picked Amarillo if you wanted to single out a cold city for an imbalanced data point, at least it would have been connected to ERCOT.
2021 was way colder for the entire state. That makes a massive difference.
Except not the entire state, I was pointing to one of several areas that got above freezing every day in 2021 while also being dramatically colder in 2011. So your experience wasn’t shared across the entire state just the highest population areas.
As to ERCOT seriously fucking everything up, well yea that’s completely accurate. Yet, Foard County along several other counties are within ERCOT and didn’t lose power from the 2021 storm. Those are low population areas, but understanding why power outages where continuous relates both to lack of power but also an inability to route available power.
Gee, wonder where the majority of the energy usage is...
Roughly 1/2 the population had any power distributions from the 2021 storm, and many of those were fairly minor. The lack of transmission infrastructure meant they couldn’t spread the pain evenly across the state and thus it concentrated on ~4 million customers who got absolutely fucked.
Keep proving to me you don't understand what you're talking about if you want. I'm probably done after having to say 20/29 is greater than 50% and point out El Paso isn't in ERCOT.
As to different experiences: https://publichealthmaps.org/motw-2021/2021/2/17/17-february...
Wilson, Guadalupe and a few outer counties within that metro area didn’t lose power, others had saw only a fraction of their area suffer blackouts.
“At the peak, over 5 million people in Texas were without power,[67] with 11 million experiencing an outage at some point,[22] some for more than 3 days.[68]” out of 29 million that’s a long way from 50%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
Similarly the temperatures experienced across the Texas triangle varied significantly, it’s a big area. (The site I use for weather data seems to be down for maintenance.)
Sure, but not most of the population nor most of power usage. That 20M figure was simply adding those metro areas, ignoring College Station, Corsicana, Waco, Hearne, etc. Only the metro areas, only the dense (for Texas) areas. Empty fields don't use much electricity.
And yeah, many areas never lost power. I'm not arguing against that. After the giant issue most operators stopped trying to do rolling blackouts as obviously operators didn't know what was safe to turn off. Trying to resume rolling blackouts was a massive risk, so most just stayed static. Once again you're showing you don't really know what was going on during the time. I never lost power, but circuits all around me were without because my grid operator did some initial rolling blackouts and gave up after they took out a bunch of gas refineries. If you really think it was mostly a distribution problem it really shows you don't know what was going on.
Keep digging that hole deeper buddy.
Metro area does not imply urban or dense, you’re counting farmers in that “metro area.”
Austin has an urban population of 1,809,888 at 2,921.0/sq mi (4.6 people per acre) covering 620 square miles which is already fairly low average. The metro area is however 2,421,115 people covering 4,285.70 sq mi but remove the urban bits and (2,421,115 - 1,809,888) = 611,227 people across (4,285.70 - 620) = 3,665 sq mi your down or 166 people per square mile (0.26/acre) which is in no way dense.
Hell the state of Tennessee averages 168 people per square mile, good luck arguing the entire thing is dense.