This is great and all but the real problem was spending all this money on wind turbines when we should have been securing guaranteed fuel for gas/coal. Do not let ideological inclination drown out the facts here.
Well... if one looks at it similar to health care...I spend an exorbitant amount on health care (relatively speaking) on the off chance of a catastrophic health event. I can choose not to, but if that event occurs, I will have to rely on bankruptcy, the kindness of others, the health care system, etc. to bail me out.
there's a difference though, between an individual who freely makes precautionary principle-type decisions on behalf of his or her own self, and making that kind of decision (and imposing that cost) on an entire society, no?
Absolutely. Murica is the type of society where health insurance is a person by person type of thing, no reason reliable and safe electricity shouldn’t be the same. Imposed cost can kiss our free ass!
Folks that don't have insurance implicitly impose their health care costs on society. It's a tricky question. It'll be interesting to see what this event cost.
Texas was "seconds and minutes" away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts...but probably not worth thinking about adding more resiliency to the system. This is once in lifetime event. Risk is widely subjective..esp for business and government. Politicizing those issues generally diminish that fact and we sink for the lowest, cheapest, and most convenient common denominator. If good people didn't haul ass at their plants, the costs to Texas and its customers (let alone the human suffering but hey Dollar$ and Cent$!) might've made that decades long investment worth it.
I've read this article already. My question to everyone is relating to catastrophic failure that was cited by ERCOT. If we have catastrophic failure, then what? The Texas economy would go down the **** hole for a while. Individuals would die because the hospitals could not remain on back-up generators for months at a time. We would have no potable water because our water treatments plants do not have the power to operate. What is the cost of spending money? Does it mean my electricity fixed rates will now be 20 cents per kwh rather than 10 cents? Lets stop pretending as if this cost would be passed on to the investor, ultimately it would trickle down to us. Maybe the answer is for us to provide a loan to the operators at a low interest rate and have the operators pay us back over a term of 20 years or so. Ultimately, the government is not in the business of making money, but they are there to protect us from suffering of life and economic harm. I am a drainage engineer and I see the value in improving flood conveyance at a high dollar cost, rather than allowing structures to flood over and over and over and jeopardize our mobility systems which in turn harms our economy in the short term, and could even impact us long term if companies choose to do business elsewhere because they don't want to go through this every few years. Same in this scenario. Texas Government or ERCOT or somebody needs to pay money to study the long term effects of not winterizing our systems. We also need to project what sort of temperatures we are going to be seeing in the next 100 years. It appears to me that our design guidelines are outdated and we need to prepare for future extreme events. The correct path going forward is protecting human life, protecting our critical infrastructure, and protecting our state's economy going forward. There is obviously a fine line of over-engineering that needs to be figured out, but that's why I suggest the state actually studies the problem at hand if they haven't done so already. The feds already told them what they have to do. I don't want to be at the mercy of idiots like Rick Perry that have a short-sighted view of things.
my understanding is that the state studied the problem after a similar (not as cold though) deep freeze that occurred in 1989 and caused similar outages, a report was done, nobody read it, the report was shelved, and here we are thirty years later reliving history
Is once every 10-15 years that rare? Hell, once in 20 years? It would be around the same frequency of a hurricaine or storm hitting Houston head-on and causing massive flooding.... of course there hasn’t been much infrastructure to improve that since Harvey either. Seems like it would be easier to fix this problem than fix the flooding issues... and yes, everything costs money. When its all said and done, I’d venture the overall “cost” of this event will be right on par with all other natural disasters that have impacted areas of Texas... mainly because it was a total state wide issue.
And that's the problem. Bet it was a money issue. It always is. It's crazy that we can figure out a way to give corporations enough tax breaks to convince them to move to our state, but **** our infrastructure. Jesus.
Hence why utilities that are life sustaining shouldn't have a profit motive. Ya it isn't cost effective. Unfortunately for those who died because of this, cost effectiveness could fly out the window for all they care or cared since they are dead I doubt they care now.
well, you could over-engineer and winterize to Canadian specs on an annual basis . . . or . . . you could develop better FEMA-type emergency responses to deal with similar future events. There as a huge ice storm in NYS several years ago--millions without power for a week maybe? a colleague who is high up in the national guard spent the entire week getting generators to all kinds of people and businesses, from all over the state. There was that kind of contingency plan in place, and for the most part it seemed to work. Would that be more cost-effective than the winterization and refitting of these power plants to deal with a once-in-thirty-years event? maybe, I don't know. Presumably that is what planners and engineers will study in the aftermath of this event.
2011 also. We have people running the government that hate government. Until that changes, the problem won't be fixed. This is the fundamental problem with a political party that runs on "government is the enemy" as its basic platform. Covid response was the federal version of this same failure and America kind of shrugged its shoulders. As Texans will likely do in the next Texas election. Biden needs to make this a national issue and use it as an example of the types of projects in a new federal infrastructure program. This, Covid, crumbling bridges/roads, etc. The "new green deal" needs to also include a lot of non-green stuff - dare Cruz and Cornyn to oppose weatherizing the Texas grid.
I love it, make it the poster child of a large infrastructure bill that aims at protecting critical infrastructure while creating millions of jobs along the way.
Update/improve the grid and utilities so that one night of freezing temperature doesn’t leave 4 million without power.... with a downstream (no pun intended) effect of busted pipes, non drinkable water, etc. If it requires winterizing or basic modernization, so be it. Yes, have backup emergency responses improved in case the primary fails... but the solution can’t ever be “lets make the backup emergency response better before fixing the primary problem”. The water issue is causing hospitals to have to close/transfer patients and overall decreased capacity in emergency care. Those are third-world country like decimations that should never be thought of in this day/age.
this author argues that electricity generation should be federalized. Not sure I buy that, but that's his argument: https://theweek.com/articles/967623/disasters-are-not-partisan excerpt: Most important still, we should consider whether official failures, if there are any, are really the sort of things about which we can cheaply moralize, as opposed to the sadly inevitable result of sclerotic institutions. Texas every bit as much as California makes it clear that electricity should not only be a state-run utility of which citizens are not deprived in the interest of profits, but a nationalized industry. No state should be solely in charge of its infrastructure any more than it should be ultimately responsible for the well-being of its own residents.
The issue is responsible regulation. The GOP is against expanding any regulation with the aim of keeping costs lower and profits higher. The ERCOT system is developed and supported by the oil and gas industry and the wholesale electricity industry. So what's lacking is representation for the consumers health safety and welfare. It is supposed to be the job of the Governor and the Texas Legislature to appoint an ERCOT board that has some balance for that interest, someone who will say this system as funded is prone to a catastrophic failure by foreseeable events, some profit must be directed to investments that reduce the chances of that happening. The minutes of the last ERCOT board meeting February 9th spent 40 seconds reminding producers that a cold front was coming. As early as January 28th atmospheric scientist were predicting a massive polar vortex by measuring the heat in the troposphere above the Pacific. They called it on February 15th. So my point is, the Board was incompetent and negligent as configured and it is the completely responsibility of the Governor and his staff. The Board each makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the corporate CEO's make millions a year, The people have a right to expect competence for the money, and everyone involved should be fired or defeated in elections so the focus moves more to the people's side than the industry side. The business of government is people, not business. And that is the basic political difference between Republicans and Democrats. So where is the balance between over engineering costs, energy costs and profit? Well, it's not where we were obviously. And it won't be with a GOP stacked industry Board. And the fact that they have decided to 'go it alone' without the rest of the Country means they better be damn sure this isn't going to happen because you can't just hook up to your neighbors grid. Free market? How is it fare to consumers that wholesale costs for natural gas can go 33,000 %? The game is rigged, as per usual.
What are you talking about? The news media is why we know the claims are false. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wind-turbines-texas-power-outage-electrical-grid/ https://www.newsweek.com/texas-wind-turbines-frozen-power-why-arctic-1570173 https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/17/texas-abbott-wind-turbines-outages/
