<story><title>What went wrong with the Texas power grid?</title><url>https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Wholesale-power-prices-spiking-across-Texas-15951684.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gregw2</author><text>What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn&amp;#x27;t figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).&lt;p&gt;How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC&amp;#x2F;FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nerc.com&amp;#x2F;pa&amp;#x2F;rrm&amp;#x2F;ea&amp;#x2F;ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials&amp;#x2F;FERC%20NERC%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nerc.com&amp;#x2F;pa&amp;#x2F;rrm&amp;#x2F;ea&amp;#x2F;ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating&amp;#x2F;SLA for a power plant&amp;#x27;s acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It&amp;#x27;d seem pretty basic to be able to ask &amp;quot;How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X&amp;quot;? 
 Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like it.&lt;p&gt;If you want to know some of the specifics about what &amp;quot;winterization&amp;quot; means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It&amp;#x27;s kinda interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roenxi</author><text>It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of &amp;quot;things went wrong!&amp;quot; now.&lt;p&gt;I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don&amp;#x27;t yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.&lt;p&gt;Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.</text></comment>
<story><title>What went wrong with the Texas power grid?</title><url>https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Wholesale-power-prices-spiking-across-Texas-15951684.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gregw2</author><text>What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn&amp;#x27;t figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).&lt;p&gt;How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC&amp;#x2F;FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nerc.com&amp;#x2F;pa&amp;#x2F;rrm&amp;#x2F;ea&amp;#x2F;ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials&amp;#x2F;FERC%20NERC%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nerc.com&amp;#x2F;pa&amp;#x2F;rrm&amp;#x2F;ea&amp;#x2F;ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating&amp;#x2F;SLA for a power plant&amp;#x27;s acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It&amp;#x27;d seem pretty basic to be able to ask &amp;quot;How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X&amp;quot;? 
 Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like it.&lt;p&gt;If you want to know some of the specifics about what &amp;quot;winterization&amp;quot; means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It&amp;#x27;s kinda interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregw2</author><text>Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for &amp;gt;24 hrs (it&amp;#x27;s 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days).&lt;p&gt;Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don&amp;#x27;t have it.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn&amp;#x27;t really work that well.&lt;p&gt;(I haven&amp;#x27;t found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)</text></comment>