I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy.
It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference.
It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know.
I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.
> There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind,
According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it."
I don't think it's power generation that is the issue, but more distribution and protection of the infrastructure. As a commenter above mentioned TX produces lots of wind power (in the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms), but there's not strong regulation on the power companies to ensure the grid is working well. Case in point the cold snap a few years ago with TX govt officials and others crying "you can't make wind turbines work in the cold" despite evidence in New England and the Midwest to the contrary.
Much of TX energy infrastructure is above ground poles running along the highways. I don't know what the lifespan is of those but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them could be classified as antiques. If they aren't being regular inspected/replaced, they are likely to go down
Also, the energy companies can sell electricity to other states, and I won't be easily convinced that during this event they stopped doing that (because profits). Lastly, see previous winter event and direct recorded quotes from energy companies about how much money they were making by increased prices and I think there are several reasons why this keeps happening in TX.
> the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms
It really was not long ago that “free non-polluting energy” was a thing that Republicans could get behind. Even Bush got very into biofuels, albeit going about it in the worst way possible. That party’s taken a strange turn in the last decade.
There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.
It’s a hurricane. Hurricanes always knock down power lines and you need a bunch of crews to fix the wires. I don’t know if the power companies are doing this faster or slower than normal, but multi-day power outages after hurricanes has been a thing since the invention of electricity.
> August 25 – Hurricane Katrina moved ashore southeastern Florida as a minimal hurricane, producing a peak wind gust of 97 mph (156 km/h) at Homestead General Aviation Airport. Heavy rainfall accompanied the hurricane, peaking at 16.43 in (417 mm) in Perrine, which caused flooding in the Miami metro area. About 1.4 million people lost power during the storm. Later, when Katrina made its devastating landfall along the northern gulf coast, its large circulation produced high tides, light rainfall, and gusty winds along the western Florida panhandle. The hurricane killed 14 people across the state, and damage was estimated at $623 million.[54][55][56][57]
The ground in Houston is mostly clay and extremely wet. I'm no civil engineer but I imagine It would likely result in more issues that take longer to fix.
Not to mention Houston is huge and dense so switching completely to underground would be a massive project that no one is going to enjoy.
It's a transmission problem not an energy problem (this time). There is more than enough energy and generation capacity in the state. It just can't delivered to the last mile.
Based upon press releases from Entergy[0] (north of Houston/Centerpoint) a quarter million feet of wires need to be fixed. This doesn't include transformers, logging operations, etc.
I would estimate that Houston itself (Centerpoint) is probably dealing with a million+ feet of damaged transmission lines based upon the stats up here and their reported customer outage #s.
The area I (used to?) live in wont have power until the 14th because of the damage to the distribution infrastructure.
This is 99% a game of trees falling on lines and everything cascading from there.
And then to think that's just the Northeast corner of Houston that didn't quite take the full blast of the storm. The South and Southwest are likely worse, we just don't have accurate public maps of the outage.
So that 480 miles or so is probably less than a fifth of the total repairs needed.
I got the impression that OP was referring to total deferred maintenance of transmission lines in the entire Texas grid. If it is only storm related, that that seems more ballpark-accurate.
This is the natural outcome from their anti-government politics. Any legislation that would increase their reliability is shot down as ideologically "wrong". Practical Engineering has a great review of their outage in February 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
The electricity is ready and waiting, its the transmission lines that are down and out for people that were hit by Hurricane Beryl. CenterPoint energy (the owner of the lines around most of Houston) dropped the ball massively, underestimating how much damage the storm was going to cause and did not send out the call for linemen from other providers until it was too late.
Texas has its own electrical grid and insists on not connecting it to the Federal grid because I guess they think someday they really would want to be independent or some such. As a result their funding is different as is disaster recovery. Also consider that when you have a state where taxes on like 80 acres of land end up being $70/year, there just isn’t much government money to go around to keep the infrastructure running well.
Poor governance. ERCOT are simply not very good at achieving reliability, and the tendency to culture war of modern US politics is very bad at focusing public attention on any kind of problem that requires wonkish detail work to fix.
The state needs a lot of new power lines to connect up renewables. I believe there's a huge queue of renewables projects that have money and planning permission lined up and just need their grid connection approved.
The outage us website says "CenterPoint Energy’s primary outage management system is currently offline. They are currently only able to provide the number of customers out across their entire service territory."
CMP here in Maine is rated one of the worst in the country for reliability, but they have good, and granular, outage tracking.
However, Spectrum has much more granularity in their monitoring in that they get heartbeat pings from every modem on their network, and will quickly see if a ping stops coming in.
The result is that I often get a notice from Spectrum that my internet is out, before CMP even knows there's been an outage.
This should show up via observability requirements of the National Electric Vehicle Charging Network too.
Chargers need basically realtime status (what charge rates do you offer) & availability information to be publicly available to qualify. Watching where chargers are & aren't should provide a higher resolution feed for this data.
This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation. But in practice, utility companies are incentivized to provide a conservative estimate of how long repairs will take, and to the extent they're training models on the data available to them, the metrics they'll expose to you from their model inference, as well as the model itself, are designed around that conservative outlook.
But by looking at a map, there are clear patterns: if many isolated areas have outages, there may be many points of failure for various neighborhoods, causing a massive queue of crews to repair each area. But if there is half of the state out of power in a contiguous region, there's more likely to be a single point of failure that they're highly incentivized to fix or route around with the full technical staff at their disposal. The map is more likely to give me that insight than their biased spot estimate of timing.
> This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation.
Here in Los Angeles, my utility gives estimates that I have found pretty reasonable - sometimes actual is a few hours later than original estimate, but never more than maybe 6 hours in my experience. Sometimes it is fixed earlier. Along the way, updates of new expected fix time is emailed and texted.
How quick are the stores to marking their status as Closed? It's manual I'm assuming and not some service that's not getting a pingback because the store is offline.
I would guess a modern franchise has significant telemetry monitoring. If the location is unreachable, easy enough for the mothership to note the site is having issues.
Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions?
This is a very good example of bad policy in the USA: in my whole life I encountered two power outtages. None in Germany (where I mainly lived ) , one in Poland and one in Ukraine (both 5 years ago).
Leaving nuclear power was a stupid decision but compare to Texas, this is miniscule.
Maybe some perspective helps, the hurricane would have given probably half of Germany hurricane force winds. Hurricanes cause power outages, I don't think I've ever heard about a hurricane anywhere that directly hit a populous area and didn't cause power loss.
Fact is, these storms are stupid powerful (even the "little" cat 1's) and big trees are heavy as fuck which is going to be the major cause of our outages.
I can get pictures of some of the 15+ meter trees with trunks over a meter wide that ended up completely uprooted and toppled over. It's impossible to just not build around these trees (best we can do is try to trim the ones around power infra but our area is just so dense it's impractical to keep them completely cut back everywhere) so it's just a fact of life that there will be power infrastructure damage during extreme weather.
Now the response speed definitely needs to be addressed but I cover that in my to level post so I won't rehash it here again.
Since this thread is full of bad decisions in Texas hurricanes is a lame excuse. (also nature isn't stable in both countries, flood are a huge problem now)
So I never needed an app to watch for power outtages. So correct the people. Do you claim there have been no outtages. Just during hurican season? Be precise
As someone currently chilling in my car (better than cooking in the house!) on the North side of Houston waiting for power to be restored, I feel relatively qualified to offer some insight. I won't get into any of the politics of things as I'm not an expert on energy policy. Also, posting from my phone so I'll definitely mess up formatting so apologies in advance.
To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc.
Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate:
>> No outage tracker available
No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following:
>> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad?
As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be.
- Lack of preparedness
But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm.
- It's been wet AF the last month!
We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas.
All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon!
Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.
