<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>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></item><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>From an engineering standpoint, I agree that you want a true RCA and this event&amp;#x27;s RCA will be a bit different than 2011&amp;#x27;s. And this RCA (and its political consequences) will take time, doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be done right this minute, etc etc.&lt;p&gt;However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political.  While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It&amp;#x27;s bayesian truth and bayesian politics.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll note I didn&amp;#x27;t draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are.  I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems.  Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven&amp;#x27;t cited here. I also wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I&amp;#x27;m open to saying we shouldn&amp;#x27;t blame follower-type politicians who were scared of &amp;quot;raising electrical rates&amp;quot; and we should blame ourselves, but let&amp;#x27;s all acknowledge that some costs that weren&amp;#x27;t borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn&amp;#x27;t occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?</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>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></item><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>dalbasal</author><text>This is meta&amp;#x2F;tangent, but I&amp;#x27;ve had similar conversations a few times recently. Seems to be in the zeitgeist.&lt;p&gt;Re: &lt;i&gt;everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It&amp;#x27;s been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We&amp;#x27;re more likely to stop and say &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The classic example of this is governments taking credit&amp;#x2F;blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn&amp;#x27;t. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn&amp;#x27;t a major factor.</text></comment>