This misses an explanation why the suit was brought against the wholesale providers, and not the retail electric companies. I would expect that in general if there a dispute over services rendered, you need to work things out with your supplier, and not someone else further down the chain.
The split between retail and wholesale puts the retail arms at the mercy of wholesale. This went all the way up the line to gas providers, who just decided to declare force majeure and closed up shop. Vistra tried desperately to keep the power on, and wound up losing over $1 billion for their troubles.
Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
> Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
You’d want to look over a longer period of time since those figures have big seasonal variations, and we can’t forget that California has a considerably larger economy and population – there are around a hundred countries with populations smaller than the difference between California and Texas - so it would probably be better to make that comparison per-capita or per-gigawatt. Since we’re talking about renewables, greenhouse emissions would also be a good point and it looks like California’s grid is substantially cleaner than Texas’ by that metric according to the EPA, but that’s complicated by California having the option to buy power from outside the state.
In any case, my point was simply that if we’re seeing a system with recurring widespread life-threatening outages described as great, I think it’d need to be almost free or 100% non-polluting to balance that out. The 2021 outage alone was responsible for hundreds of deaths and damages in the hundreds of billions range, so I kinda expect better than “a top competitor to CAISO”.
That would mean that California is producing more renewable power since its grid is considerably larger, and again my point was simply that Texas is not doing enough better to justify their failures. If they were much higher, maybe we could debate something like the number of lives saved from not polluting versus the unreliability, but the state still has huge pollution issues and isn’t far ahead of the competition. As it is, it looks like the primary beneficiaries are the finance guys getting a chunk of those wild surge prices.
Are you under the impression that the utility business is wildly profitable? I’d like to disabuse you of that notion. Not everything is a reinforcement of your priors.
It’s a guaranteed profit on a very large amount, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if you read my comment note that I specifically referred to the financialization. The way the market is structured means that suppliers see very large upsides during high demand. Going back to that 2021 crisis:
> The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX).
I don’t think most parts of the chain enjoy the volatility. Perhaps the generators who could capture the spikes but it seems that for most parts of the chain, stability in prices would drive more consistent margins. Spikes in prices would suggest market inefficiency and drive more generation.
> Iowa reached an impressive clean energy milestone in 2020, according to data recently released from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Iowa produced the highest percentage of electricity by wind of any state, at 59.6%. This figure represents a sharp increase from 2019, which had the state at 42% electricity from wind.
> Although Texas has the greatest installed wind turbine capacity of any state, it provided just under 20% of the state’s electricity in 2020. Iowa’s wind generation capacity of 11,660 megawatts in 2020 provided just shy of 60% of the state’s electricity. [1]
Iowa's grid is almost done changing. Texas is playing catch up.
There's literally several states with >80% renewables and one with 99.7%. More than a dozen way ahead of Texas. All you had to do was look up a single Wikipedia page to check your argument. Good luck with your goalposts.
Most of those have had a high renewable mix since electricity was a new thing due to natural hydro available. Hence my original question being scoped to the last 20 years. You still haven't answered it, and there were no goalposts moved.
The challenge was "Name 10 other states with faster adoption of renewable energy in the past 20 years." Please point to where you've answered that.
The claim was that states moving from a small percentage togenerating 30% of their total energy from renewables in a couple of decades is a common thing. I'm asking for other examples. There should be many if it's common.
It depends on where you live and what timeframe you’re comparing - the renewable capacity varies more so you need more overcapacity, which means that when conditions are good the price is really low. I think there’s going to a big boom figuring out how to adjust business practices to optimize use of over-production when that happens.
The not interconnected with neighbors was an intentional decision driven by previous degradations of QoS way back in the 50's/60's era when they were intercinnected with the coastal grids.
It's downright shocking the difference in frequency between power losses I experienced on the regular in Texas vs. what my out of state family experience. I started keeping track of it a couple years ago. My family can have dozens of sporadic outages in a span of time with 100% uptime for me in TX. Smaller, less interconnected networks can be a godsend. Hell, it's a lesson that's immortalized in our interstate highway system.
...Then again, I suppose that there's the case to be made that more frequent outages keep your response teams sharp. There is a drop off among Operations people whereby knowledge tends to end up getting forgotten when too much time passes between completion of repeated periodic tasks.
Which is interesting because, anecdotally, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve lived in Dallas and Austin for a collective 27 years. And the number of outages I’ve had bewilders friends and family that are out of state. Since I’ve moved out of Texas a few years ago I haven’t had a single power outage.
In my family while growing up we kept flashlights and candles handy, and us kids were (very lightly) drilled on where to find them when the power went out. And again, this was in the middle of the metro, not out in any rural parts.
I was in an area serviced by the Bluebonnet power cooperative, which executed one of the smoothest time based multiplexes I've ever seen.
Interestingly, I've found most problems seem to be metro-centric in Texas. Austin, for instance, in patticular has a horribly architected power network, where much of downtown's skyscrapers and what not share a circuit that is never load shed, leaving only the residentials to be. This escalated to tragic consequences during the Winter storms of a few years ago when everyone was told to stay home (and freeze due to lack of power), while all of the buildings downtown where they'd have ostensibly worked kept their lights and heat on.
Families would have unironically been better off braving the streets to park themselves in a heated office downtown rather than trying to make due in their own homes. The landlords, lawyers, insurers, and sadly the fire departments, however, would have had a meltdown trying to figure out who should be culpable for anything that ended up happening as a result of the terrible decisionmaking when building the trunk. Cutting everyone loose on their own recognizance was a brilliant stroke of legal culpability shedding there.
Gg Austin Power on that one. Friends over in Dallas were also reporting a similar situation there during the hullaballo. If it's taught me anything, it's that urban planning of power networks seriously needs some rearchitecting in those locales.
It has a great system for the various entities that own the state legislature.
Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
Agreed, but you should also acknowledge that the system has produced the largest buildout of renewables. In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).
Thanks for raising these points. I think Texas has many challenges but the energy market is actually quite elegant and brilliant. It could definitely use improvements around emergency conditions but we have had incredible rollout of new clean generation both on the renewable front and natural gas.
I would guess that companies are often exempt in cases such as natural disasters or extreme weather events and there are entities responsible to prevent things like this from happening. Electric Reliability Council of Texas sounds like such an entity.
I don’t think that makes sense. The retail companies are at the mercy of the grid.
The miss here is what about PUCT who governs ERCOT. ERCOT did everything in their set of rules. We probably need to change the rules for emergencies, that’s up to the legislature and the appointees of PUCT.
Legal immunity is pretty sweet. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't demanded this of states along with the other tax breaks and free stuff they expect to get when opening a new headquarters or major dist center.
Is there like just a form you fill out to get this?
Power generation and transmission used to be a collection of state-controlled monopolies in Texas. That ended in the 90s, but obviously there was no way to break up the distribution network.
As a Texas resident I think this is a good thing. The real untouched key point is legislature creates the rules and they never designed it with emergency in mind. I doubt it was nefarious at the time in the late 90s.
So you’re saying sovereign immunity is good because that’s how the legislation was created. Since it wasn’t designed to deal with emergency, it’s okay to not update the position on sovereign immunity?
Nope. I am saying like other Texas government services, they all share immunity. If you want that to change then you change the law that covers it.
In the case of ERCOT I am less interested in lawsuits but how we change the rules going forward. Do we want to introduce language about emergency power. Have we worked out a fix for not killing power to the natural gas wells? The governor appoints member to the org that ERCOT reports to. I don’t like him but enough voters do that we won’t get change there.
This is one of the things I find quite surreal about the US. How is it not government's responsibility to ensure citizens have access to basic utilities?
I think there is a difference between "access to basic utilities" and the power is down because a power station caught on fire for example.
Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be. And nobody can expect them to be, if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup. Same as if you host something that needs 3 9s of uptime, you have a primary host and a backup host or region or what ever.
> Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be.
The issue in Texas isn't that power was out for a few hours, the issue is it was out for several days. This should be unacceptable and it is absolutely reasonable to expect a rich, developed nation to guarantee this does not happen. Especially in freak weather events that are going to increase in frequency in the future due to climate change.
Even within a neoliberal country it's entirely within the realms of the government to force corporations that maintain infrastructure to comply with basic service guarantees or at least threaten to nationalize the business, you can privatize it later again. This is critical infrastructure. I know people dying doesn't matter to libs, but this cost other corporations in Texas a lot of money too. How can you have a free market where the basic infrastructure is this unreliable.
I mean this is certainly because it's Texas, I get power outages for multiple days every year. As does most countries where it snows. Some years I get power outages for multiple days every month.
I believe the issue is because Texas thinks it does not snow so they avoid any emergency procedures for snow. Well it does now, so they should prepare for that, as unlikely as it is.
> if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup.
The problem until recently was that gas generators are, in many places, banned. Apartments are a no go, many condos, and even some house HOAs do not allow them.
Now, lithium backup packs are a thing. However, for any extended needs you will probably also want solar panels or some other way to recharge, and you may need a second battery so that you can recharge one while using the other (the units I purchased do not allow discharge while charging)
I live in Texas. While my house was being built, I spent 8 months in an apartment complex to save money (it was just before housing prices and rent skyrocketed across the nation) and I gained a whole new appreciation and perspective over what "paycheck to paycheck" meant for people. I always assumed it meant they got what I thought were necessities but had no spare money. It was eye opening making friends in that apartment complex because month to month for them meant they often went a paycheck with something otherwise critical deferred to another paycheck. They were mastercraftsmen in robbing peter to pay paul, so to speak.
I understand your sentiment of investing in some life saving gear that is cheap for its great value. But I would encourage you to widen your perspective and understand that when faced with the decision to pay for groceries and car insurance to ensure one can keep working, or put back money for a gas generator for something used every 4 years, they're going to pick no interruption to groceries and car insurance. And rightly so.
If you're of the type that promotes larger government, you need to write to your government to encourage them to provide this equipment out of their taxes. If you're of the type that promotes less government, you need to write to your government to encourage them to tax less and/or provide tangible tax breaks for this equipment a la solar.
Yes, they could come with the money but it’d require sacrifices elsewhere. More importantly, however, that’s like saying the cost of car ownership is the purchase price of the vehicle: you don’t just buy a generator once and leave it untouched for decades - you need to have somewhere safe to operate it, store clean fuel safely, test it regularly, have your electrical system modified to allow a switchover, make sure to winterize in most of the country, etc. Every year people have fires, shorts, carbon monoxide poisoning, or unexpected outages from some detail of that going wrong.
Now, consider who tends to have the greatest problems when the power goes out for an extended period of time: the elderly, poor, and disabled people who have the most challenges doing that. Saying that everyone should maintain their own personal auxiliary power supply so the energy providers can be more profitable is the same as saying that it’s okay for those people to die because they aren’t rich enough.
> you need to have somewhere safe to operate it, store clean fuel safely, test it regularly, have your electrical system modified to allow a switchover, make sure to winterize in most of the country, etc.
It's bad, but not quite that bad. The person who suggested a generator was talking about the case of people who have some life threatening condition that they need electricity to survive.
In most cases that will mean they only have to use the generator to power a small number of things. In that case they don't need to modify their electrical system. They can power their things from the generator's normal household outlets. They just need long enough extension cords to get from wherever they have to put the generator to their life saving devices.
They'd probably only need a small generator, maybe a couple thousand watts. Those are light enough (20ish kg) and small enough (small suitcase sized) that it should be easy to store indoors when not actually in use. That should get rid of most of the hassle of winterizing.
Go for a propane generator instead of a gasoline generator. They produce much less dangerous emissions than gasoline generators so should be easier to find someplace safe to operate. Also stored propane does not go bad over time, like stored gasoline, so you don't need to rotate your fuel. Propane tanks are also safer than gasoline tanks so propane is easier to store safely.
Yeah, it’s definitely not impossible but my point was that the people most a risk during a power outage also are least likely to be able to deal with that. If you’re a senior citizen living on a tight income, it’s one more thing to pay someone else to help with.
Yeah, it’s kinda like healthcare, just put out the hat when you get sick and all your friends and family kick in, right? There are actually a lot of people who think that’s a viable solution.
But wait, it’s not a viable solution for everyone. So we build organizations which formalize this commitment in the form of a monthly payment.
After a while this becomes predatory and sharp, and the need emerges for this to be formally socialized as a part of living in society.
Sure, that works for many people. There were still hundreds of Texans who that fatally did not work for just the 2021 failure alone. Public policy generally works best if you focus on the people who don’t have the reserves & support network to absorb a failure.
You've got replies telling you that you're wrong about what people can afford. I'll tell you that you're wrong about what people should be prioritizing:
Millions of Texans lost power, only a few hundred died. For most people losing power really isn't a big deal they need to be super concerned about. They get more blankets out of the closet and carry on just fine. People vulnerable to freezing to death in a few days without power are a small minority; it's pretty much just very elderly people without much sense living alone and infants with very neglectful parents.
Kinda? Fire service is not provided everywhere. Some cities you have to hire your own / purchase a plan. Granted a lot of cities just factor it into taxes but it's not a mandate to provide.
The "most" of the US fire service is just provided everywhere.
But the US is also a very big place with big empty spaces filled with very small communities. Along with strong devolution in governance, there are "some" very remote communities where the population cannot support a permanent local fire service and relies on locally organized volunteers. They can choose to fund that in a variety of ways, by taxes/subs combination. And of course you may live so remotely that even that is not realistic.
I suspect that the list of countries in which 100% of the territory, with no exceptions, will have a fire brigade arrive in time to do anything productive is a lot smaller than you think it is.
Kind of: none of this was agreed to by a majority of the people – the entire United States law was originally drafted by white male landowners, and Texas has relied heavily on creative policies around voting since the civil rights era banned outright prevention - and over time these principles reinterpretation over time by judges who usually are not popularly elected. That puts us in an interesting situation where nobody voted directly for a position most voters wouldn’t agree to but there isn’t a single villain to vote out or a simple ballot initiative to put in the next election. If you asked whether there should be no obligation to provide power, for anyone to show up when you call 9/11, etc. most people would say that’s wrong but have a daunting path to change it.
It still true in youre electing people who have positions, options and predispositions that are, for all intents and purposes, known by the electors. Yes, you could argue that individuals running for election have hidden agendas, but you can apply simple principals to most individuals running for office and assume their intentions/actions/etc.
This is how everything here works. People who get involved enough to learn how something works stay winning and people who think they do get burned.
Same as insurance, credit cards, real estate, investing, the justice system, health, education, pretty much everything. Also, every one of these potential pitfalls has a zillion dollar budget hyper focused on tricking you through advertising.
It may be juvenile but as a Dutch person “kut.org” and “kut news” is so surreal to read.
Maybe on point: as someone living in a country with relative big government and reaping the huge quality of life reward from it, I just can’t understand why people would want to create a society where you risk losing basic facilities such as electricity.
What happened in Texas is such a string of failures to actually govern and force companies to adhere to regulations, it’s crazy to me.
Pretty much all of Dutch society (trains, highways etc.) shuts down every couple of years due to something that would be considered light snowfall further north in Europe.
The temperature in Texas reliably doesn't go below freezing, except in freak weather events such as these. That's why they had water pipes exploding everywhere.
So I think this is analogous to the Netherlands having a week of >40°C weather (>105°F).
Sure, you could blame the government for some of the resulting chaos, but it's also partly the freak event itself.
Most of the people that died in that event in Texas would be alive if they had sufficiently warm clothing. Is that entirely the fault of the government?
You’re heavily overstating the effects of weather on Dutch society and heavily understating the frequency and nature of weather events in Texas.
In The Netherlands the worst you’ll typically see is some delays with trains, perhaps a couple of trains (of the many per hour) being cancelled.
In my 30+ years in the Netherlands I’ve never experienced a brownout, much less a blackout. Hell I haven’t even experienced a modest outage. Only once have I heard of a blackout, and that was when a helicopter flew into power lines.
And that’s not even touching on how ridiculous it is that you’re trying to equate being able to stay warm and alive at home with being able to travel, while at the same time trying to blame people for not being prepared for something you claim is rare.
I think some of the blame towards Texas is due to many of their politicians denying that climate change exists. Texas is a major oil producer, and is on the higher end of CO2 emissions per capita. They should probably realize that their once reliable weather patterns are not going to be reliable anymore.
But when Dutch politicians neglect to prepare for extreme weather, they don't have as much blame because they pay lip service to climate change? This seems backwards; failing to prepare for a threat is made worse by you previously acknowledging the threat. The climate change deniers can at least claim to be earnestly surprised; anybody who previously acknowledged the threat already gave up that excuse.
What are you talking about? Freezing weather is definitely not a freak event in Texas. Probably approaching 10% of days in many parts of Texas.
“If they had sufficiently warm clothes”… sufficient is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Besides, if freezing is such a freak event, why do you expect people to prepare and not the government to prepare.
The temperatures in many homes were below freezing for several days. There are normal citizens who cannot survive such an event.
It's a radio call sign: K because it's West of the Mississippi River, UT for the University of Texas, and three letters because the license dates to 1925 before the FCC completely moved to four letters.
The positive part of this is that at least in some degree this will lead to more people going off-grid and the companies losing customers, a win both for general survivability and the need to legitimize unreliable centralized poo you have dependence on.
It’s quite often illegal to go off-grid and the power companies will also create financial disincentives (formalized via regulatory powers) for backfeeding the grid when they don’t want it to happen.
They have made sure it’s a heads they win, tails you lose situation.
I agree that sometimes counties have too many permits and requirements for rural areas but largely in any populated town, it makes sense to prevent off grid buildings. Similar to if you had a home without sewer hookups or permitted septic.
On the back feeding side, I am not sure. While in many areas it’s not as financially lucrative to add back to the grid, it also is a much more realistic number. For too long areas like CA had models that meant homes were not contributing to the transmission they could access and were being paid closer to retail rates instead of generation rates.
So I don’t think it’s quite as one sided as you paint it.
I suspect that is by-in-large the point of the US de-regulatory project. If one deconstructs the state to the point of ineffectiveness then its existence is largely pointless and reasonably easy to discard for a newer state. Of course this presents an opportunity to form a new state in a more desirable configuration for involved parties.
The impression I get from friends living in TX who have been sympathetic to TX for their entire lives, is that it's been a slow process working towards effectively only having behavioral laws for poor people.
And yes, a common trope of their complaints is a kafkaesque system where it seemingly exists exclusively to be underfunded, under performing and practically intended to breed more resentment from the general population so that they're more amenable to just completely dismantling the civilian system altogether since they now see no incentive or convincing argument for it.
It's genuinely scary. Especially since you get to pretend like you're trying and the system just doesn't work, so we need to get rid of it to "save money".
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
As a Texas power consumer I still appreciate the structure of the energy market here compared to other states I have participated in. There is still plenty room for improvement. I think other states could benefit from the general structure.
The good parts are mainly surrounded by the separation of concerns. There are two main grid operators, their only concern is maintaining and expanding the transmission. They get a flat fee for this work. Generators are purely in the business of generation. Of course they are there to make a profit but the beauty of this part is we can move a lot quicker than other states to build out new generation, lots of clean. While other states are still struggling, Texas is leading the front in new plants. Sometimes at night the wind capacity is so large it dips close to negative prices.
ERCOT in my opinion gets a lot of attention and too much of the blame. ERCOT from all the prior readings I have done, did their best given their operating rules. PUCT Who governs them and is comprised of appointed staff from the governor iirc has gotten little to no attention.
This article was a lot of fluff and could have really been summed up with the ending. Providing emergency power was never in the original rule set.
It’s easy for us to just say oh Texas sucks, it’s filled with a bunch of conservatives, this is what they want. I think that’s a weak argument though that is a little childish. Don’t get me wrong, I am not happy with many parts of the government, but in this scenario I don’t believe this was an evil conspiracy by design. Unsure if there is enough want in the people to change it.
Ideally this would require some type of emergency clause on generation but I am not sure what that would look like. Someone has to be on the hook for paying the generation.
With all that said, I am still overall happy with the structure. We generate a lot of clean power and we have the incentives to build more and more of it out. We should not force generators to produce outside of the energy market so we need to figure out how and who pays for this emergency power.
The only time I ever consider the powergrid in this State is summer, or a lighting strike. We don't have wide swaths going without power due to entirely predictable circumstances.
There's absolutely reasons ERCOT and Texas are blamed steadily, and it's because they refuse to interconnect with other systems and refuse to winterize.
I don't see news of people dying around here because of predictable winter storms.
What kind of point are you trying to make? Not rude I am just not sure what your point was beyond saying Texas and ERCOT is to blame? Can you state the point and the reasons behind it?
What are you trying to ask here? You seem to have identified the key points of the argument successfully so I am just not sure what the point of making it was besides saying you disagree? Can you outline your reasons for framing this statement as a question?
Sorry I hit a nerve. I was not clear what his argument was. That’s what I was asking. My reasons were my own confusion. I was asking for actual counter points to my statements as he responded to me. Instead I saw general disdain for Texas. The issue is indeed partly in the voters hands but I already agreed with that so what was being said. Again sorry to have hit a nerve I was genuinely looking for more substance on the matter.
Winterizing is not predictable and the poster said he is concerned in the summer which can be just as deadly as the winter. So yes, I want a further elaboration.
Nobody was arguing that seasons are not predictable. Extreme weather patterns not found in history are not predictable. Are you trying to say we all should have known this storm was coming? Please enlighten us.
For what it is worth, I live in California and would trade our grid for yours, uptime included.
Im paying >$0.50/kwh which is something like 4x the price in Texas, and I still need a backup generator because outages >24hours are common, even in the bay area
If elderly dies from cold weather in a blackout, the community and neighbours do not care for them. I guess most do however, but knowing many elderly, that stubbornly refuse to ask for help, it is probably hard to know if some neighbours are freezing to death.
The power company is way too far up the chain to check in on weak elderly.
Creating laws and regulations that tell power companies they need to design their systems do they don't fall over when it's cold out is a way for the community to handle this particular problem. Arguably a more effective and scalable solution than individually checking on elderly neighbors. We're not a nomadic hunter gatherer society any more, we have better tools to make sure everyone is taken care of. In the 21st century, having to check on your neighbors when it's cold out so they don't die is a societal failure that we should be doing everything possible to fix.
This is really what I thought "defund the police" was all about.
You don't send people with guns drawn to someone if you suspect they might kill themselves by hanging themselves in their own home.
We can't rely on informal / social structures though.
Maybe the old person is like that old man from the Disney Pixar movie up who refused to sell his house.
If your neighbors resent you, it doesn't mean you must die.
A "social" solution could be the county checking in on elderly when there is a blackout. Or the police, fire department or whatever. Which I guess many counties did.
I didn't mean it necessarily has to be a citizen run initiative.
The elderly should clearly have been ready and had a generator installed, have provisions stored and been ready to fight to protect their property. They shouldn't need any handouts.
Being old, poor, disabled, etc, is no excuse for not being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
My point was not for elderly to team up with Sam Altman and Steve Hoffman. But that in a functioning community elderly do not freeze to death (unless ordinary people start to too).
I am sorry if it seemed like that, because I very much do. E.g. I make no claim on whether it is any or all of the local Red Cross, county or state gov., neighbours etc that should handle caring for local elderlies in a blackout.
In most new construction, the postal worker no longer comes to the home or apartment.
They use something called a clusterbox. This is only applicable to the US but my understanding is that the postal service has strict limits when it comes to hiring full time workers. Something about having to account for full benefits or some act of Congress that I don't understand. But the net effect is your postman/post woman likely doesn't know you besides your name.
