“The Grid is fixed.” ERCOT warns of rolling blackouts.

Building and improving infrastructure isn’t cheap but how much is having to continue to repair and infrastructure and how much economic activity is lost when infrastructure fails?

I don’t have the numbers but I suspect that it is as expensive or more than building new robust infrastructure.

 

This is a cost to a private entity. So eventually it would be on election bills

 

Good Texas Monthly article on burying power lines

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-p... utility said the cost,to fund such a project.

 

@mtbrays is right. This was just local distribution equipment having trees fall on them from the wind. Nothing to do with ERCOT and everything to do with CenterPoint. You could argue that maybe PUCT should have made them harden distribution more, but again customers have to pay for everything they do.

You could bury some mains, which would reduce the number of single-pointof-failure mass blackouts. But in Houston you would still have a mass of above ground lines for the last mile to each home and business. I haven't been able to follow this news as well since I didn't have power, but it looks like we had a ton of little faults from down trees on local lines. Unrealistic to bury each of those wires, and they are the most tedious repairs because each repair will only get a handful of customers restored. Maybe they should be more rigorous about vegetation control, but mostly I think they have the right approach - throw 12,000 people at it after a storm.

 

@JuanValdez


I understand people's frustration. Do you remember how long it took centerpoint to get everyone back on line after Ike?
I think Abbot was grandstanding talking about holding centerpoint accountable. I think they have done a pretty good job. This is a big city at the bottom of a national preserve forest

 

Now dumb ass (not dip ****) Houstonians threatening linemen

That being said the sister of an out of state lineman on the news was saying they won't come back to Houston. Believe me they make way too much money on these deals.

For instance when I did it in Florida we were on the clock 16 hours a day everyday but obviously you're not working all those hours. Work hours include breakfast and dinner which are provided and the lunch that's provided.

The 16 hours are 6am till 10pm but you're eating by 8pm and back hotel by 9pm. I was on the bottom of the totem pole as a general laborer but those 16 hours a day add up to 72 hours of overtime a week. Linemen are killing it. A cash grab

 

Abbott definitely doing some grandstanding. He won't do anything to CenterPoint. PUCT neither. CNP submitted a detailed plan in their last rate case and the PUCT approved it. If they thought it would get wrecked in a hurricane, that was the time to say something. They put Texas' name on it so now Texas will wear it. Regulated monopolies face very little risk themselves.

I do think people's expectations that power will be 100% of the time and be cheap is a bit naive. At the same time, because it is a monopoly, we don't get any market discipline that ensures they do as well as they can. At best, they can be compared to other utilities facing different realities. Economics, though, tells us that monopoly encourages inefficiency so I believe CNP has failed in many ways, I just don't know which.

To my last point, the feasting of lineman is the same as you will see in the rest of that monopoly. They pass operational costs to ratepayers, so what do they care if hours are padded? What do they care if a crew from another state is slow because they don't know the land? What do they care if their tax team has 30 FTEs when they can do it with 20? All that inefficiency gets baked into the price. Out of state linemen doing a hard outdoor job in disaster situations getting generous compensation is my least concern when you think about the excess the utility will take on a daily basis.

 

I had an awesome hurricane cleanup experience. When I got to Florida we were separated into going to different cities. Hurricane Irma if you remember it hit Miami then went into the gulf and landed in Naples maybe.

Anyway when we were separated I ended up in Miami. We drove in during the Hurricane, no hotels were open. A world class resort opened for us, Turnberry. It hosted PGA tournaments. It opened 3 days after we got there. Bentleys and Ferraris in the parking along with working girls in the lounge at night

 

Short article about Abbott getting tough with CenterPoint that, for me, drives the point that he is all bark.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/...tt-really-have-power-over-centerpoint-energy/

Those are all legit levers, and ones almost never employed by any governor. After the winter storm, there was pressure to disallow the expense for all the natural gas bought by utilities in Texas and all the Great Plains states, arguing that the purchases were not prudent. Except for some skirmishes in OK and MN, those billions just sailed through. It might be a little easier for Abbott to single out CenterPoint, which is on theme with bullying all things Houston, but it would also be seen as anti-business and probably get him sideways with the wrong people.

And the demands are not even demands. Make more plans? Utility rate cases are routinely thousands of pages between the filing itself and all the testimony and attachments. Can CNP spend more ratepayer money to write a few more pages about what they would plan to do? Of course, and they wouldn't even feel it. Will the plans be useful in an actual disaster? No. They likely did have plans already and this was the result.

Abbott just feels like he needs to be seen doing something. But there is nothing effectual he can do.

 

Do you know anything about the process for removing trees for maintenance. I know that CenterPoint cleats vegetation from lines regularly but they own the lines.

Removing trees seems tedious in terms of negotiating or coordinating with property owners

 

They paid Abbot $2m to not force them to fix anything.

DD

 

I don't know much. Utilities have a right to the easement, so they are empowered to cut whatever is in the way. But they can get complaints when they make someone's stately live oak look like garbage. Their compensation model does give them a perverse incentive to underspend there - if a hurricane knocks down lines, they can replace old, depreciated equipment with new assets, and then they get a return on the new, higher asset balance.

 

The blackout in Spain is pretty interesting, I think, in view of the debate in Texas over renewables. Here is the short version of what happened in Spain. They were running at that moment on a high percentage of renewables with only 15% dispatchable. For reasons still unknown, two large solar farms were knocked offline. Because supply has to equal demand, an imbalance causes the frequency to leave its narrow band of control. When the frequency is off, other generation equipment can be damaged, so there are failsafes to take them offline before they break. The interconnections to other grids tripped off, and then other power plants also turned off until they had a complete shutdown that required a blackstart. Losing the solar farms wasn't the real problem. Conventional generation will go down sometimes and we solved that problem long ago. The problem is that conventional plants that turn a magnet have a physical rotating mass that sets the frequency, but renewables don't spin anything. They use grid-following inverters that match the frequency that is prevailing on the grid. So, when there was a sudden loss of generation, the frequency got noisy because there were not enough conventional sources of generation that would define the frequency and the wind and solar on the system had no ability to do it -- and that noise tripped the failsafes to cause the other plants to shut down too.

Here is a good discussion of this problem: The Iberian Peninsula Blackout — Causes, Consequences, and Challenges Ahead | Baker Institute

Maybe Texas is not vulnerable. We have a sophisticated ancillary market (which does frequency control) in Texas, hopefully better than whatever they have in Spain. But, it's an aspect of grid management that never sees much airtime when people debate how much and how fast we can decarbonize our electric grid. If we get too cavalier, people can die.