Thursday Throughput: Texas Power Outages Edition
Photo by Basotxerri, CC BY-SA 4.0
[ThTh1] As you may have heard, Texas was slammed this week with unusually cold weather. The result was a massive rolling blackout that left millions without power and many scrambling to National Guard warming stations to keep from freezing. Pipes burst all over the state, hospitals were evacuated, and generators were fired up. In the wake of the Texas power outages disaster, some Republicans and editorial boards have taken to blaming alternative energy for the problems. Texas gets about 25% of its energy from wind and that was up to 42% the week before the big freeze before plunging this week.
Supposedly, this outage was a preview of what the Green New Deal will bring us thanks to those…uh…liberal Texas politicians?
So, is this criticism accurate? Is it fair to blame frozen wind turbines for Texas’s power outages and energy woes?
First of all, the Texas power outages have come from every sector. Coal plants and gas plants also shut down. Gas pipes ruptured and coal piles literally froze. In fact, the wind capacity in the state declined less than the conventional fuel supply did. And that might have been better except that it’s not really worth it to winterize turbines in Texas.1 The WSJ has tried to double down on this claim, pointing out that wind power generation declined 90% the week of the freeze. But this claim is again misleading. ERCOT had only penciled in wind power for 10% of the winter energy needs. Even with that decline, wind was still providing 8% of Texas’s power. The real story was the prodigious output it had the week before.
Second, Texas’ energy market is… complicated. Texas has created its own energy system and incentivized utilities in certain ways that result in very little spare capacity. Utility prices can fluctuate wildly but utilities cannot pass these price spikes on to consumers. This gives utilities gigantic financial incentives to stop buying fuel when the prices spike.
There is space to criticize renewables here. The energy output can fluctuate quite a lot, so there will always be a need for backup sources such as nuclear. And solar power, in particular, is ill-suited to winter for reasons our friend Kristin has gone into at length. As noted above, the swing from wind providing the plurality of Texas’s power to a minority was a problem. But that wasn’t what set this chain of events in motion.
What you had here was a perfect storm of bad weather and worse incentives. An unusually cold spike in temperatures put strain on a system that had — because Texas is usually warm — foregone the kind of safety measures that would have kept it humming along. And then a bad regulatory system exacerbated those shortages. That was what created the blackouts, not frozen wind turbines.
[ThTh2] Hey, Ask An Astronomer is back! This week’s question comes from Windypundit, who asks what color astronomers would consider the Sun. When I was asked this question I responded, somewhat snippily, with “ultraviolet” because that’s the wavelength range I work in. But the real answer is a bit complicated.
Solar Spectrum (Robert A. Rohde)
The figure above shows a spectrum of the Sun, a map of how much light it emits as a function of wavelength. The Sun has a surface temperature of about 5800 degrees which means its spectral energy distribution peaks in the greenish-blue area. However, if you look in the little banded area — that tiny sliver of light that humans can see and that we call the visible spectrum — you’ll see that the curve is relatively flat. Our eyes don’t see the subtle increase toward bluer wavelengths. So, when we look at the Sun, we see something emitting light approximately uniformly through the visible spectrum. And so, it looks white.
“But wait!” you say, ” The sun look yellow to me!” Well, look at the red area on the graph. That’s the part that gets through our atmosphere. Blue light is scattered and absorbed a little more readily by our atmosphere. That effect, combined with the way the human eye perceives light and our inability to look directly at the Sun, makes it appear vaguely yellow. But if you were in space, you would see the Sun as white.
So, to an astronomer who works on stars, the Sun is greenish-blue. To a human eye on the Earth’s surface, it appears yellow-white. But if you were able to get into space, it would look white.
[ThTh3] There are two aspects to the Cuomo Administration’s lies — and they were lies — about the COVID situation in nursing homes last year. First, as a scientist, I am angered that information was distorted this way. Science only works when information flows freely and any attempt to impede that flows disrupts the process of science. This was information we needed to know, especially so early in the pandemic.
The second aspect is that, like most political lies, it was unnecessary. It’s been a year so we might have forgotten how terrifying those early days were. The virus was spreading explosively and only a tiny fraction of those who had it were being tested. I think everyone understands that those early massive death tolls in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts were hard to avoid. That early wave is the reason those states still lead the nation in per-capita deaths after a year.
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the political fallout. But withholding this information was damaging to the fight against the virus, bewildering in light of the situation and enraging if it really is true that they did it to avoid a possible investigation by the Trump Justice Department.
[ThTh4] Yes, the Large Hadron Collider is still operating. And it’s still seeing unusual events.
[ThTh5] It’s possible we’ve spotted a planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri. I’m not convinced yet. We’ll have to see if it moves.
[ThTh6] There is a lot to say about the question of re-opening school which our own Will Truman has gotten into. But I’m forced to tentatively agree that the Biden Administration is ignoring the science that indicates both that schools can be re-opened relatively safely and that remote learning is not working well. I say “tentatively” because we have yet to see how the math might be changed by the new strains.
[ThTh7] More news from the ongoing quest to find intermediate mass black holes, this time in the centers of globular clusters.
[ThTh8] A new treatment may be able to rescue some of the most desperately ill COVID patients. It’s now in phase 3 trials.
ThTh1: It’s never one thing-always a series of events, that causes stuff like this. However, the bad incentives–that seems just stooopid.
[ThTh3] And now Cuomo is threatening law makers demanding they help cover up his screw ups.
“Cuomo said ‘he can destroy me’: NY assemblyman alleges governor threatened him over nursing homes scandal”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/cuomo-ron-kim-nursing-home/index.htmlReport
ThTh1 and ThTh3 are converging a little for me this week. Campus here is closed, and so we don’t get SO far behind, I’ve been recording lectures with my laptop propped on my piano, just like I did in April 2020, and it’s giving me very bad flashbacks to that time. (Also maybe ThTh4: I would not be surprised if future generations learned that through some weird quantum-entanglement thing, if the fished-up-ness of our current reality was partly caused by the LHC. )Report
The unmentioned:
(a.)How much generation capacity was either reduced or not developed in the lsst 40 years due to regulations+liberal agendas.
(b.) How many fewer people would require electricity if the border rules were enforced, and there wasn’t a basket of social goods artificially drawing people to population centers from other countries.(which also includes the liberal hallmark of minimum wage)Report
(a) Not much and especially in Texas. The lack of reserve capacity is by design.
(b) This has nothing to do with borders. Demand is demand. Supply is supply.Report
(a.) Yep
(b.)demand may be infinite but supply is not infinite, or there wouldn’t be people without power and we wouldn’t be having this discussionReport
(b) You are assuming too much for the given situation. All the illegals in TX aren’t consuming enough power in their homes to be more than a blip in the total capacity. They aren’t trying to heat McMansions with a family of 3.Report
All the foreigners for the last 40 years who traveled here because of a higher min. wage plus basket of social liberalism goods. Plus the headcount of offspring of those folks.Report
Texas has a population of 29M, of which there is an estimated 1.6M illegal immigrants. That’s just population. That says nothing of how much energy that illegal population uses, but given that illegals will be living in low-rent, low-square footage, high density housing, their per capita energy usage is going to be insignificant compared to the needs of large, single family homes or apartments.
Ergo, you are making a claim that does not hold to logic. Back it up with evidence, if you will.Report
Address the last 40 years and you might actually be responding to my comment. Yall really can’t just admit the underlying issues.l, just attempt to skirt them.Report
The last 40 years of what? Human migration patterns? Still irrelevant. Utilities don’t plan for capacity based upon census numbers alone.
The only way your comment holds water is if you had a substantial population that was not using power at all, ever, for the past decade, who suddenly decided to tap the grid last week when the temps plunged.
Otherwise, TX had plenty of capacity. What they didn’t have, because the incentives aren’t there, was surplus capacity. And even that probably wouldn’t have saved them unless that surplus capacity was somehow weather resistant.
I mean, your comment is on par with saying that the airplane crashed because it had too many people and cargo, when the reality is the damn wings tore off due to poor maintenance and inspections.Report
Again skirting. Without the influx, Texas population goes down, not up and even the single family homes on the liberal agenda dart board would be fewer.
Yall just can’t admit that resorces might just be partially limited and act like demand can just keep going up without bad things happening like decreases in reserve capacity.
There is a reason socialism ends with rationing and long lines for important resources.
It’s like experiments of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century are a complete mystery.Report
Not skirting, I’m flat out telling you this pseudo-Malthusian take is wrong. This isn’t a case like, say, southern CA and fresh water, where people keep moving there, and the fresh water supply continues to decline.
The problem Texas has, as the OP, and a number of commenters have explained, was not a crisis of capacity, but the fact that effectively none of the ERCOT grid was winterized. This event would have happened if Texas only had 10M people, rather than 30M, because the equipment and supply lines straight up FROZE.
In addition, if Texas was only at 10M people, there is no reason to think that the state would be pumping out sufficient natural gas that it would be able to supply itself AND the rest of the country that was experiencing normal winter temperatures. It would make zero economic sense for them to be pumping out that kind of surplus.
And where in the hell does socialism even enter into any of this?Report
“We don’t have the supply of gas that we normally do, and we’re consuming gas in record numbers, which is also depressurizing the gas lines,” Rhodes explained. “Natural gas power plants also require a certain pressure to operate, so if they can’t get that pressure, they also have to shut down. Everything that could go wrong is going wrong with the system.”
Is there at least one liberal here that doesn’t live a Star Trek fantasy bubble and will admit that there aren’t infinite amounts of resources available at any given time.Report
Now, why doesn’t TX have the supply of gas that they normally do?
1) Pipelines froze, dropping supply.
2) A large amount of the supply is busy getting piped to the North.
NONE of this has anything to do with immigrant populations driving up demand.
Also, the energy markets don’t pretend there are infinite supplies, that’s why gas has a price tag, and Texans are about to feel the pinch of that price tag, one way or another.
I’m not sure where you get this idea that folks think the energy is free? Nor what any of this has to do with immigration or population. You’re not only ignoring Occam, you’ve tossed the damn razor out the window.
Taking a black swan event as some kind of indicator of something other than poor black swan planning is nuts. Right now, manufacturing lines across the globe are struggling to meet demand because Covid has supply lines all messed up. Is that due to over-population? No, it’s due to Just-In-Time manufacturing, where no one maintains a surplus of inputs, but instead relies upon a relatively constant flow of inputs. If the inputs get disrupted, ideally the plant just shifts to alternative suppliers. Unless ALL the suppliers are interrupted. Then JIT staggers.
Same thing in TX.Report
Your comment is self contradicting. Gas is a limited resource. More gas used per unit time leads to less gas available per unit of time which leads to rationing/higher prices. Unless you are making the point immigrant populations (in Texas and elsewhere) don’t use gas, you have made my point for me.
The one thing you are still skirting is the millions more using a limited resource versus millions less.
Also being willfully unaccountable for the impact on rationing and price.Report
Oscar:
He didn’t skirt it. He simply pointed out – correctly – that the use of gas at the moment isn’t largely concentrated in Texas, and that were Texas the only state experiencing higher then normal usage it would probably be fine.Report
You are ignoring what I and others have said regarding gas supplies in furtherance of your point.
But to reiterate, the limited nature of the gas supply in that crisis was partly a disruption (freezing equipment), and partly the result of markets and the associated logistics not being able to shift quickly enough in response to the crisis.
Had every illegal immigrant suddenly vanished the day before and their homes gone cold, Texas would still experience the crisis to the same degree. The reduction in supply due to the freezing was such that the population of Texas would have to be far, far below the 29M it is in order to weather the crisis.
When a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast of Texas and destroys thousands of homes, do you blame the sudden housing crisis on illegal immigrants in the area?Report
Again the point is that the population would be much less, not the 1.6 million you keep refering to but the subtraction of all immigrants and offspring created by the liberal social goods for the last 40 years. Your arguments here become even harder to make if you subtract the numbers in population centers of the north that require even more infrastructure/supply.
I kinda miss Pillsy because he would at least admit the bases being stolen in the premise and not skirt around them.Report
What liberal social goods are you imagining exist in Texas? If we were talking about CA, or MA, maybe you’d have more of a point, but TX is not known for being a generous welfare state.
You need to offer up evidence of migration patterns to support your claim. Otherwise your whole point is being magically pulled forth from your nethers.
So you are making the claim you present evidence of such a migration into TX that you have some basis to your claim. Likewise, you also need to show that ERCOT was so negligent in their planning that they failed to build in reasonable growth to the grid and generating capacity.
As a final point, I suspect what you will find is that TX actively encourages people to migrate to TX from all across the globe. If the migration patterns show that the bulk of the migration and population growth is from legal migration, what of your point then? All those legal migrants are bad because…?Report
Speaking as a Houstonian, which had a very outsized number of the “without electricity” (around 1.3 million), what screwed us in particular was a nuclear reactor shutting down.
2000MW’s of what is supposed to be ultra-reliable baseload power down.
Why did it shut down? Turbine instrumentation froze.
Why did it freeze? Because, for some unfathomable , they decided those turbines would just…sit out in the open air. Just hanging out in the breeze.
Not in a roofed turbine hall like pretty much every other reactor, but just — slap those bad boys on the roof and call it a day. Instrumentation froze, so they had to shut it down.
So Houston lost 2000MW of power for four days because someone saved perhaps 500,000 dollars by not sticking a roof and walls around their turbines, like everyone else does.
Now I don’t know if “Slap an effing roof over that” was part of the post-2011 freeze “How to avoid this in the future” post-mortem, but it’s certainly indicative of the sort of absolute basic corner-cutting that led to this problem.
To save a bit of money, they forwent a turbine hall in favor of open-air turbines. (And speaking again as someone who lives here, putting those things indoors where technicians could examine them in climate controlled conditions would have been worth it alone. 100 degree, 80% humidity days aren’t exactly rare in Texas.Report
And obviously, if there were no illegal immigrants in TX, losing 2GW of base load wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to the available supply.Report
“In liberalism the cascade failures create themselves”Report
In the noted liberal stronghold of Texas.Report
What goes on in Austin should stay in Austin.Report
“Only liberal policies fail. Conservative policies can’t fail. They can only be failed.”Report
“Expecting the right type of person to do the right thing in your social construct is equal to the expectation your head is up your posterior”
-BSDIReport
Funny thing, though, is that ERCOT acted according to expectation by ignoring suggestions – not regulations – that they winterize their power supply equipment. They didn’t want to spend the money.Report
ERCOT operates the market and the transmission system. They lack any authority to actually regulate the generators, and especially not the gas producers.Report
Yes.Report
Since the goal post has wheels with yall, does ‘the right thing’ cover winterizing? That most brutal teacher shows that if the choice is either build efficiency or robustness to meet a ever INCREASING population, what was chosen was efficiency. Raw inputs to outputs.Report
Increasing population is not met with efficiency or robustness, but by building out capacity. Being best able to afford building out capacity is to do so efficiently. If all the capacity was built to maximize robustness, you’d be complaining about how wasteful it is to spend money against low probability events.
Also, back to your original point, you’ve yet to provide evidence that illegal immigrants have so driven the TX population increases, rather than legal migration due to the fact that TX is very business friendly.Report
They could have hired immigrant labor to build the enclosures. It would be a win for everyone.Report
My take: what people focus on reveals their values. Beyond facts, we learn much from preoccupations.
I suppose it might be true that without any undocumented immigrants, that TX might have handled this situation better. It’s an empirical argument. I don’t know the fact of the matter. I doubt anyone here does.
Although an immediate and obvious counter argument is that, without those immigrants, many of whom have been here for decades, the power companies would simply have constructed even less capacity, and we’d be right where we are.
(Note, the following paragraph is meant to be read ironically.)
That said, I can make an argument: without rich jerks with overly huge homes that exist to stoke their narcissistic egos, TX would have handled this fine.
Again, an empirical question, one that also is vulnerable to the criticism I made above: if those homes didn’t exist, then the power companies would have allocated resources differently.
If there were no QAnon folks in TX, would the grid have held up?
The big question: from a system design standpoint, each immigrant (regardless of status) will use a certain amount of power, just as each wealthy homeowner uses a certain amount. It is the job of the power companies to estimate demand and then build resiliency into the system to handle the unforeseen. In turn, those customers pay for power.
To try to pin blame for the failure on one particular kind of customer is really ugly.Report
YesReport
Creating a influx of customers by offering a basket of social goodies and a artificial wage rate at the expense of the local population is the (really ugly) unmentioned here.Report
you keep insisting that those undocumented migrants are suing resources at the expense of the local population. Its an interesting and totally false assertion in as much as those migrants are occupying an economic niche (primarily in construction and agriculture) ath the native born “locals” refuse to occupy , even at wages well above what you claim are artificially high. Take away those 1.6 million undocumented migrants, and Texas economy falls flat on its face.Report
‘refuse to occupy’
u-huh, it truly is weird that when you get out of the liberal minimum wage bubbles……people fill all niches just fine
Plenty of economies do just fine without liberal basket of goodies creating population growths in population centers. In fact it’s the method to not end up with a leftist liberal shethole.Report
[I do have to give some credit, i wasn’t called a racist xenophobe this time. Either yall are slipping or things are changing.]Report
Again – agri business in Texas (and elsewhere) would not function absent the undocumented migrants you want to literally toss out in the cold because native born Americans will not go to the fields and pick food at any combination of wages and incentives offered by farmers. Construction companies can not build houses in Texas or anywhere else at prices people will pay using native born American labor because that labor demands a premium in wage compensation that undocumented migrants don’t. Undocumented migrants are legally BARRED from accessing your “basket of goodies” and yet the pay sales taxes, use fees and all sorts of other money into government coffers.
Take them out of the equation – sure you lower some resource consumption in some places. You also destroy several major economic sectors. That’s not the fault of minimum wages, or Social Security, or food stamps. You have to lay the blame where it belongs dude.Report
Not quite. The labor rate for those farm workers would increase, drawing non immigrants to consider that work. It would also drive up food costs for consumers, among other things, ceteris paribus. The question then is, is that a policy decision the society is willing to engage in.
I’d argue that it’s not a good idea to rely on temporary migrant workers for your food. We’re starting to see impacts in other places by relying on importing material from China:
https://www.ft.com/content/d3ed83f4-19bc-4d16-b510-415749c032c1. Starting to see similar issues in my industry. In case you don’t want to pay:
“China is exploring limiting the export of rare earth minerals that are crucial for the manufacture of American F-35 fighter jets and other sophisticated weaponry, according to people involved in a government consultation.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last month proposed draft controls on the production and export of 17 rare earth minerals in China, which controls about 80 per cent of global supply.
Industry executives said government officials had asked them how badly companies in the US and Europe, including defence contractors, would be affected if China restricted rare earth exports during a bilateral dispute.
“The government wants to know if the US may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban,” said a Chinese government adviser who asked not to be identified. Industry executives added that Beijing wanted to better understand how quickly the US could secure alternative sources of rare earths and increase its own production capacity.”Report
I don’t see any economic way to increase farm worker pay to get away from undocumented migrants. Before it gets to a point where native born americans would do the work, it becomes cost effective to start or expand mechanization – which still denies economic opportunity to the humans regardless of where they come from.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/Report
Sometimes you’ve just got to break the law.
I wish it weren’t so.Report
Err.. Philip, arguing that restricting illegal labor in agriculture and letting food prices increase would result in mechanized agriculture rather than well paying agriculture jobs is an argument -for- restricting illegal labor in agriculture, not against it.
Personally I think you’re mistaken, though. If we clamped down hard on illegal immigrant agriculture labor then I think what would end up happening is that the agriculture production would move to low cost labor countries. Instead of paying illegal immigrants to pick strawberries in the CA deserts we’d just end up importing the strawberries from farms in Latin America.Report
We already pay to import strawberrys from Latin America . . . . and my read of the advance of mechanization is from the article I linked – wherein farmers said they would pay up to a certain wage level to have farm hande BEFORE moving to mechanization. Their words. And I assume they are truthful.
Here’s the thing – at the current wage structure, agribusiness in Texas creates a market of undocumented migrant labor. JoSal’s contention is if we got rid of that labor not only would we see less resource use (meaning people won’t literally be freezing to death) but we’d see wages adjust so local native born folks would move into that labor market thus keeping both resource consumption down and ending the economic draw for said undocumented migrants.
And I’m saying that the actual on the ground empirically testable data shows he’s wrong, in no small part because the employing farmers would increase mechanization BEFORE arriving at the point where they could draw local native born americans into the fields .Report
Oh yes, I’m certainly not defending Joe’s assertion that minimum wage is somehow responsible for Texas’ power fiasco. Just was noting that a highly mechanized agriculture sector would be a pretty good thing to have, though I suspect we’d suffer some painfully higher food costs for some time until such mechanization came about- or more likely a lot of our agriculture would shift to imports, which I don’t necessarily consider a bad thing.Report
The machines exist, it’s merely a question of the cost of the machines.Report
Do picking machines exist yet? For the vast variety and variations of agricultural products we’re talking about here? I honestly don’t know.Report
Depends on the produce. There are a small handful of things that have to be handpicked, but the bulk has machinery to do it, it’s just expensive stuff because it’s often custom designed for the produce.
Grain harvesting is economical because the same machine that can harvest wheat can harvest barley can harvest oats, etc. Same machine that can harvest corn can (with simple modifications) harvest peas and beans.
Stuff like that.
Picking berries and tomatoes is a bit trickier because of how easy it is to damage them, and they don’t all ripen at the same time, so the machines had to be a lot smarter and more gentle.
With modern robotic vision, the ripeness question is solved. And engineers have been perfecting robotic “hands”* that can very gently pick delicate fruits and berries.
*”Hand” is a bad term for the manipulator, since it looks and functions nothing like a hand.Report
Fascinating. So if I was, say, Jeff Bezos and I said “By gum I feel like building fully automated spinach, tomato, blueberry and cherry farms and I don’t care what it’ll cost.” My well paid minions could have blueprints and timelines available for me by next quarter?Report
Well, if Steve Jobs said that now, it would probably raise a number of important questions far beyond the scope of agribusiness.Report
Yeah I caught that too late.Report
Maybe next year, but yeah. All the problems are, essentially, solved; it’s just a question of bringing the relevant technologies together to tackle this problem.
As long as human labor is cheap enough, there is no economic reason to pull it all together except as an academic exercise (I believe academics have created such prototypes, just no one cares to fund the next step).Report
If you are bored and curious as to what kinds of soft manipulators are out there, this is a good starting point.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2016.00069/fullReport
Thanks, I appreciate it.Report
And much to my and veronica d’s disappointment, all deep-learning neural nets, so no one can point at one of the half million coefficients and explain what its value of 6.1 is an estimate of.Report
I realize you have probably lived in the American Liberal Wage Exceptionalism Bubble your entire life, but alternate hypothesis actually exist were there is no bubble and the entire wage spectrum gets filled without foreign influxs.Report
“Alternate hypothesis” – ah yes the refuge of those trying to appear intellectual while denigrating whole economic classes of people.
Like I said – data, evidence, call it what you will – is that we have cheap food in the US because we rely on vast numbers of undocumented migrants at the critical first step in that food supply. They come here at great personal risk to themselves because that depressed wage is still many times better then what they could earn without migrating. And the economic segments they e=inhabit keep employing them precisely because native born labor demands a wage premium that makes those products unappealing.
Sure, thos emigrants use resources. Sure, 1.6 million fewer people in Texas might have freed up generating capacity – but given the unwillingness of Texas to impose regulatory efficiencies on the utility generators I doubt we’d see a different outcome.
We would see agricultural products either completely coming from other countries (which in no way increases our national security), or we’d see prices so high that the wages paid to native orns to pick the produce wouldn’t actually allow them to gain anything economically.
Oh, and i grew up in Louisiana and live in Mississippi. Last I checked those are anything BUT liberal bubbles.Report
Any state that has minimum wage is a liberal bubble.
Finally:
“Sure, 1.6 million fewer people in Texas might have freed up generating capacity”
At least you admit a little there which OT appears to maintain a perpetual blind spot on.
Other nations that don’t have minimum wage still produce cheap food and a vast array of other goods without the liberal skies falling.
All in all ya been fairly cordial in my hell raising this time, appreciate ya.Report
Undocumented migrants in the US – all 11 million of them – fled those countries. Why do you think that is?
Go tell a Montanan or someone from Wyoming they live in a liberal bubble. I double dog dare you.Report
Social basket of goodies including minimum wage.
I will be in Montana this summer doing that.Report
We have a system that is designed to work exceptionally efficiently when everything is going smoothly.
It’s probably better to have a system that is designed to plod along even when absolutely nothing is going smoothly. The problem with a system designed to plod along even when absolutely nothing is going smoothly is that, in times of everything going smoothly, it looks inefficient as heck and has lots of redundant parts and has a lot of people who have been hired to not do much when everything is going smoothly.
Think of the money we could save!Report
Efficiency is a rich man’s god.Report
In fact, there is a whole branch of Operations Research that studies how to efficiently design systems that “plod along.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_optimizationReport
Yeah, I guess that that would be a good thing to do too.
If we could do it cheap, of course. And quickly!Report
I suppose you could include cost and manufacture time into your model, and then use stochastic techniques to simulate cost overruns and delays — which is just more robust optimization. Plausibly you could make it work, although I suppose you’d get bitten by Hofstadter’s law and nothing you could do would save you.
Note, if I were ever to go for an advanced degree in Operations Research, I would love to focus my research on the use of fat tailed distributions with stochastic simulations. I think it would be interesting. Note, “fat tailed” is the mathy name for probability distributions that include “black swan” events. This is the stuff that Taleb talks about, in his in reference to finance. Back when I worked at {big content delivery company}, I wanted to use techniques like this for network router optimization. I never really had the time, nor support, to pursue the ideas. The idea was basically this: network packet delay is best modeled by a Pareto distribution, which is fat tailed. “Queue theory,” by contrast, which is the math normally used to allocation network resources, assumes at its root better behaved probability distributions, such as Poisson. Those are not fat tailed, although they are way easier to handle mathematically, which is why they get used. I like to think something cool could be done with more robust probabilistic methods.
(I expect someone else has done this by now, at least worked it out in simulation. I had this idea years ago. I doubt I’m the only one.)Report
I love this concept even if it seems totally alien to our current set of economic incentives.Report
Given climate change, I think a lot of the world is going to have to seriously start addressing the fact that the probability curves are shifting, and money and political capital is going to have to be spent to address that.
Maybe that means utilities harden their facilities and develop base load storage*. Maybe it means government expands incentives or lowers barriers for household solar/wind/power storage. Maybe it means something else. But we can’t keep pretending that this is all just a statistical blip.Report
How many hundred-year-events have we seen in the last 10 years?
I’d be 100% down with coming up with a plan to address Global Climate Change and whatnot but I’d like the people proposing the plans to talk about engineering solutions more than they talk about moral solutions.
I appreciate that engineering solutions are weighted toward giving clout to engineers (who won’t know what to do with it!) instead of people advocating for marijuana legalization and veganism. (“Are you going to stop flying to Europe?” “Why are you stalking my instagram? I don’t see why what I do on my vacations is any your business.”)
But if we’re going to have a fix for this, it’ll involve fixing it rather than mastering the narrative around it.Report
Dig into the national labs’ work on the subject. Over the years they have done increasingly detailed engineering studies of what’s necessary to build-out a low-carbon or no-carbon version of the three US grids.Report
Maybe we just need a handful of influencers to run interference. “We need to stop eating beef! Bugs provide protein that is just as high quality! Don’t use the bigoted term ‘maggot’, see it as ‘insect veal’!”
And just start fixing the grid.Report
Here’s an engineering solution:
Florida May Spend $74 Billion on Seawalls to Prepare for Sea Level Rise
https://miamibeachtimes.com/business/florida-may-spend-74-billion-on-seawalls-to-prepare-for-sea-level-rise/
But remember kids, its environmental controls that destroy the economy.Report
We can build the sea wall with the plastic we saved from the plastic straw ban.Report
Biodegradable seawalls FTW!Report
I think we have those. They’re called mangroves.Report
Space awesome!Report
Back when I lived at the tip of America’s dong, I had a roommate who was a geotechnical engineer (go Cal Poly!). Anyway, he did a lot of erosion control in FL. I even rode with him on a few jobs, mostly filling erosion barriers with concrete.
Anyway, the whole topic of Florida and erosion control brings back memories.
He had a great anecdote. One time he was trying to sell {a local city} some reinforcement fabric to place beneath roadbeds. It’s a “non-woven” fabric, which has uniform tensile strength along every axis. Cool stuff. Anyway, the fabric is ultimately a plastic, so one of the city “polical types” heard the term plastic and quipped, “Plastic? Is it biodegradable?”
He responded, “I certainly hope not. You do want this road to last, right?”
Florida. Funny stuff.Report
My marine geology professor in undergrad kept reminding us ( and I went to a small 4 year liberal arts school in Florida) that sand has one job – to dissipate wave energy by moving. He used to then follow that quote up with “and civil engineers have one job – to keep that sand from moving. Guess who usually wins?”Report
Yep. Coastal erosion is one of those things that brute force engineering can’t really solve.Report
Well, it can, actually, but it’s not a finish it and forget it kind of thing. You can go a long time before you have to address it again, but you will have to address it again at some point.
See also, Tetrapods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod_(structure))Report
Given the “moral solutions” to the spread of the pandemic (mask up and avoid going to bars/restaurants) and how well THAT worked given human psychology, I would like the engineering solutions, thank you.
I don’t want to be sweating to death in an 85 degree house some summer night so some a-hole somewhere can use that electricity to mine bitcoin.Report
I’m all for redundant systems and renewable resources… ironically one of the reasons I’ve never pulled the trigger on Solar for our property is because in Virginia once the grid goes down, your solar shuts off.
Now, I get the reason… since we’re back-feeding in ordinary circumstances, it has to for safety reasons. My engineering question was why couldn’t we fail-over – even manually – to a separate panel a’la a generator (or batteries)… to which the installers replied: laws.
Batteries destroy the cost curve, and don’t really provide a reserve more than a day… a lot less than a propane generator – esp. with an existing 1000 gal tank.
So in concurrence… it’s more than just subsidies, it’s engineering specs and dealing with the political fall-out of Electric companies and their interests (and frankly the franchise Solar companies who don’t want to engineer solutions… just install panels).Report
As I said:
Right now, the system is setup to cater to the needs/wants of utilities/contractors/unions/etc. And hey, that’s fine, but then you need to demand such systems are 5 nines reliable (or something, 5 nines might be asking too much). If no one wants to do what it takes to get to that kind of reliability, then they need to not insist on so much.
I mean, I get that utilities have capital outlays they need ratepayers to help them cover, but we can’t have centralized systems failing and leaving folks to die.
Re: solar panels, you can install a cut out that isolates the solar from the grid should the grid lose power. I’m not sure why local laws would prevent you from installing one.
Re: household battery – as Michael Cain and I have been going round about on my hydrogen post, there may come a day, very soon, where a household battery can store more than enough for a few days operation off grid. Or maybe every house has a backup fuel cell and a supply of hydrogen storage slurry.
It’s a solved technical problem. It is not a solved political/economic problem, but not because we can’t solve, but because no one really wants to.Report
Yeah, On-Grid = OK, off-Grid = OK, Hybrid = Well, you have to understand.
I’m monitoring the Battery tech… but my design spec isn’t for a temporary outage but for one-week+ outage after a hurricane… we’ve had friends with longer outages – it’s all a matter of where the tree falls on which segment of which line that determines the length. All I really need is water… then the animals won’t die.
Mostly I was just hoping you’d say, “Don’t worry March, I’ve got some time off and I’ll build you that 30kwh hybrid system and damn the regulations…”
Or this… come on out and engineer this for us. 🙂Report
Linky no worky
I’d be fine if the utility companies all said, “You can have home solar/etc., but we aren’t going to buy the power and you have to install a switch to prevent your power from feeding the grid, like, ever.”
Totally get that. I’m just confused why they’d object to a hybrid system otherwise.Report
I think it has to do with the fact that no-one would *ever* buy solar if it was 100% back-up power… and if it doesn’t tie into the grid to at least offset the usage without having to pick one or the other at any given moment… then no-one would buy it. So the Electric companies say, fine… but no way we’re cohabitating without getting married. Or something like that.
So yer sayin’ there’s a chance?
https://www.rpssolarpumps.com/backup-water-systems/#1584320099948-90461073-7ddcReport
You have a smart enough switch that the breaker panel is powered by the solar, and augments with grid, so your electric meter only pulls power at night (unless you have a big enough system that you can actually store power during the day, in which case the grid is only there for the middle of winter or long cloudy periods).
A solar powered well pump? Seems easy enough to do, what’s the difficulty?Report
“A solar powered well pump? Seems easy enough to do, what’s the difficulty?”
I know, right? Haven’t been able to find someone with the skills/equipment willing to do the work… plumbers won’t do it, electricians won’t do it, and solar guys won’t do it. Solar guys don’t like the plumbing, plumbers don’t like the electric/solar and Electric don’t like the plumbing/solar. Like the Bermuda triangle of trades.
I kinda gave up after a bunch of calls… there’s probably someone somewhere, but sometimes you can only build what people in your area know how to build.Report
Sounds like you need a contractor to coordinate the guys.Report
Re: solar panels, you can install a cut out that isolates the solar from the grid should the grid lose power. I’m not sure why local laws would prevent you from installing one.
My limited understanding of the situation is that these are a consequence of the type of meter the utility is using and particular failure modes if an entire neighborhood or group of houses is producing surplus power.Report
OK, that makes sense. I know all our meters got upgraded last year to more intelligent ones, so perhaps it’s not an issue here (the HOA encourages solar installs, so…).Report
Oh, and the Ted Cruz in Cancun thing… oh, my gosh. It’s like he doesn’t have any theory of mind whatsoever.
Send the wife and kids to Cancun, sure. Tell them that you’ll miss them and to stay safe. Hell, tell them to have fun! But stay in Texas, wear a mask, stand in the doorway to a church and hand out blankets. Make vague promises about fixing everything even though you’re in the Senate and not, you know, a state official somewhere adjacent to state energy policy. Say something like “We’re all in this together!” 9 times out of 10 and “register to vote!” on the tenth time.Report
The indifference is deafening.Report
Cruz called everyone he knew to ask how he could help. Most of them saw “Ted Cruz” on the caller ID assumed it was a spam call, and blocked him. The rest thought it really was Cruz and blocked him.Report
LOL they thought he was gonna ask them for a campaign donation. That’s how i’d react if I saw ANY politician’s name in my caller IDReport
“Cruz called everyone he knew to ask how he could help.”
The overwhelming response was “Leave the country!”Report
I laughed, -hard-.Report
It might not be accurate but it owns the libs and keeps the corporate paymasters happy and the corporate paymasters fill the trough.Report
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/resources/interactive-virtual-landing-packet/?fbclid=IwAR0keVgNc8uY8SpPyoqqiMDA3ZVGF4ZAED94KMCs_Aq0doKOv0nmB-pplWM
We’re landing something on Mars and kids (and adults) can watch it live(ish). Here is a cool resource to prep.Report
“There is a lot to say about the question of re-opening school which our own Will Truman has gotten into. But I’m forced to tentatively agree that the Biden Administration is ignoring the science that indicates both that schools can be re-opened relatively safely and that remote learning is not working well. I say “tentatively” because we have yet to see how the math might be changed by the new strains.”
I don’t think you need the tentatively there. The new strains aren’t informing the decision making. If we are going to add an asterisk to school reopening because of new strains, than we have to add an asterisk to everything else. We aren’t doing that.
As for Cuomo, he deserves every bit of criticism he is receiving and probably more.Report
The reopening guidelines still stress community transmission rate decreases, vaccination rate increases, mask wearing and social distancing. Seems to me the science is being followed . . . .Report
“Stress”… maybe. But are contingent upon? Hardly.
NJ just allowed parents to attend indoor interscholastic sports. Many for schools are remain closed. Explain how that works? Things are continuing to remain open if not have restrictions loosened DESPITE the variants.
The variants as a reason to keep schools closed or resist further opening them is inconsistent with how every other sector has had to respond to the variants.Report
And most of that is driven locally – Biden can’t control it no matter what the GOP says about the Department of Education.Report
All these decisions are local. Why can my kid go to Chuck E Cheese but not school? Don’t tell me “because variants.”Report
Of course, schools and districts are local and have different challenges/approaches successes and failures, but I’m watching Fairfax County, VA… as I mentioned my daughter is working for a family there; a family that would be representative of the sort of folks who know people who know how things are done and shaped.
Solidarity with Teachers and Public Schools right now is teetering. Not so much in the ‘end-all-public-schools’ sort of way, but in the ‘do these people know what their jobs are and who calls the shots’ kinda way. Bumped to the front of the line for Vaccinations… special treatment and thumbs on scales for them specifically (vs. Rando teachers)… hiring ‘docents’ to sit in the ‘hot zones’ while they are remote?
Clearly we’re seeing this playing out real-time in Psaki feeds… but as Fairfax goes, so goes policy.Report
My opinion of the local systems on this side of the river has plummeted. After all of this is over major reform should be on the table. I hate playing the ‘we pay your salaries’ card but it seems like public school teachers and their unions have forgotten who answers to whom.Report
For my policy preferences I’d like to see that… but my current guess is that while the brink is near, it will all be patched up by August.
I can all but guaranty there will be in-person schooling in August… the idea that there won’t be (or that it will require the levels of vaccinations of children being bandied about?) is the sort of nonsense up with which these people will not put.Report
If there is change I think it will be due to increased long term defection by those who can afford it which will lead to public schools going further down the path of being considered welfare. ‘Why am I paying for something that can’t be relied on when I need it most?’ is a much more compelling question than the usual meta stuff about quality and choice pushed by the reform movement.
I don’t see the people whose buy-in the system relies on forgetting this episode quickly. It gets even more dire for the system if white collar work goes permanently remote and/or flexReport
Locally to me, all the private and charter schools are at capacity.Report
My son’s daycare has been running since June (knock on wood) without an outbreak. Private and parochial schools are also operating.Report
Certainly it could… for example the family wanted one of the kids to ‘opt-out’ of an online *zoom study period* since it was, well, kids on zoom reading or doing their own homework.
They were, of course, told, No you can’t ‘opt out’ but not only that, the *way* they were told really irked them.
They are opting-out of whatever they can… but, and this is the big question, will they defect? Maybe, they certainly could… but then the Fairfax schools – when they are functioning – are quite good (from their worldview), convenient, and bought/paid-for by Fairfax county taxes.
And, when the time comes for schools to start up… the foretaste of attempting to opt-out of study-hall will be nothing like the backlash against those who try alternatives. Sure, you can always send you kid to Exeter, but even Exeter has a limit.Report
The best placed systems I think will be ones like Fairfax where there seems to be consistency across the county. The well-regarded districts in Maryland (primarily Montgomery and Howard counties) are a bit more complicated. Neither of them have schools that could ever be considered ‘bad’ if we’re measuring based on national or even local standards (see Baltimore City). But there are definitely relative haves and have-nots within the jurisdictions. There is already tension between those groups and I wonder if this won’t be a ‘last straw’ for the relative have nots with resources.Report
I take your point… partly I’m just pointing out how close Fairfax County seems to be to defecting… on the stipulation that if you lose Fairfax, the game is officially changed.
Regionally and locally? I hope it plays out a thousand ways with a thousand new alternatives.
But, conversely, once Fairfax (and the other ‘key’ districts) fall back in line, the full weight of the Dept. of Ed will come down like a freight train on how bad alternative education is for children… after all, look at the terrible job *we* did, and *we’re* the experts.Report
Got it I see what you mean now. My wife’s best friend lives in Loudon county and I know she isn’t happy with how it’s been handled but don’t have a strong sense of the particulars or the local politics.
As best as I can tell it’s all horse farmers and hipsters with vinyards where she lives. Are there even public schools? I have no idea.Report
Eastern Loudon? Plenty of Schools. Western Loudon? I think you need a special use permit to have a child.Report
I think most if not all schools will be open full-ish time by the next school year. If not, I think there will be a big reckoning. And I fear the long-term results of it.Report
I think you’re right… barring some a radical change in Covid rates/vaccinations/strains… they will be open or, as you say, a big reckoning. Which is to say, the current trends are seen as perfectly adequate levels of risk to proceed at that point.Report
School is a seasonal business. If the reckoning could reasonably come now, it may be close to starting in some places. Schools/unions may not realize they’ve passed a point of no/difficult return until it’s too late.
Like, in my area, next year’s private admissions season is done. Publics won’t know how many kids they’ve lost likely until summer.Report
I guess the school I’m watching is our own, and what are they going to do with 25 to 50 percent failure rates in core courses (middle and high schools). Presumably many seniors won’t have the hours to graduate, and some will simply drop-out when the option is available. Will students get held back and how many? Or will there be a special dispensation for failed students to be given a pass? Will class sizes balloon as students repeat classes/grades? Or will parents/schools migrate to alternatives? Probably not, with the later, the students failing are disproportionately low SES and their parents disproportionately favored remote learning.Report
All good points… I don’t know… one thing we’ve learned though, is that school districts are good at planning for and executing on unexpected contingencies.Report
Yeah, I think they’ll work it out. Mainly I don’t think its been reported in the news how many students are failing. I only know because I watched all of the school board meetings. I see a moment coming when the school district announces a number of changes and the explanation is revealed.Report
For a while I banged the drum that drops in reading or math scores aren’t going to make headlines. We aren’t going to see daily figures on how kids are doing in school. The social and emotional toll probably won’t be understood for years and will probably just be a quiet study most folks don’t notice.
That doesn’t definitively mean that schools should have been open this whole time. But it sure as hell means that there are very real costs to their closures. And, yes, everyone said, “Well, of course there will be costs but…” and never really filled in the blank, offering little more than a handwave.Report
For me, the resistance of the Teacher’s and the Unions seems like a whole lot of FYIGM. Grocery store employees and medical workers can’t demand to stay home just because there is grocery delivery and telehealth. Why are teachers so special?Report
Hell, private schools and daycares have been open.Report
People pay lots of money to send their children to private school and that might explain that part of the equation.Report
Well sure there’s an obvious incentive too in that if they close for too long they go out of business. My point is that many have managed to open in at least some capacity without having major spreader events. There are a lot of places where that seems to have never been on the table for public schools for reasons totally unrelated to risk of spreading coronavirus.
I have thanked God every day since this started that I have relatives nearby who were able to provide childcare in the spring and that I’m able to afford private daycare at a nice center that was able to quickly reopen. This has been hell on a lot of people and what the public school teachers are doing in some places is a giant middle finger.Report
Here’s my situation. The kid is in 3rd grade. We tried the online from home and he was hating it. Local school has before & after care (BAC) that they opened up to run all day. Kid goes to the school building in the morning, sits in the lunch room, jumps on the school wifi and goes to class. During recess, he puts on a mask and plays with the other kids currently doing the same damn thing.
The BAC staff is masked, and we’ve had zero spreader events (one staff member caught COVID, but not from the school). The staff interacts with the kids and help them with homework and tech issues as best they can. I pay about $900/month for the privilege of sending my kid to his public school so he can attend online classes and still interact with other kids. The teacher’s union seems largely unconcerned that the BAC staff are interacting with kids.
It’s all a big FYIGM. People are massively pissed at the Union.Report
That sounds insane and I can only imagine the frustration. But that’s the kind of thing that’s illustrating the bad faith involved. It’s not even like the buildings aren’t full of kids.Report
Actually, it’s worse.
Our district did a 25% return… alternating mornings in half groups. Small pods! Limited exposure!
Some kids, including my own, attending multiple alternate care settings. BAC with kids outside their pod and then remote days at the Y with kids from all over.
So if my kids got sick, rather than just expose the 15ish kids in their full-time class, they’d expose the 8 kids in their pod, everyone at BAC, and everyone in their Y group. Lovely. And since their teacher would have been exposed, the opposite cohort quarantines anyway. Brilliant.
Why? My hunch is liability. The district seemed to err towards letting kids get sick elsewhere so it wasn’t their fault. Maybe that’s cynical. But regardless, the plan increased risk for many many folks. And I got to pay $1500ish/month for this. (I ultimately took leave to support them from home.)
Though, we’ve also seen the risk in schools is pretty minimal. And yet… the schools haven’t budged on opening more. There is a meeting next week to discuss the spring. Fingers crossed.Report
This.
Teachers pushed for a long time to be considered professionals. We pushed to have our work considered valuable and essential.
And then… the unions spent the past year insisting that, no, we aren’t essential. We aren’t professionals. We should get vaccinated but we should absorb zero risk and not return until it is absolutely 1000% safe.
As a teacher, this is infuriating me to no end.Report
It’s funny because there is a parallel universe where I am probably arguing to cut them some slack. Nothing like this has happened in several generations and I don’t think expecting perfection is reasonable. A little creativity would have gone a long way.Report
To be clear, I am separating the unions from the teachers. The former treated this as a negotiating tactic while most everyone else was thinking, “How the F can we make this kinda sorta work?” There was a great moment for collaboration among various groups that unions turned adversarial. Our local union had 90%+ of teachers wanting to return and the union reps were still sabre rattling about not returning up until Labor Day. The district called their bluff and schools have been mostly open (hybrid) all year.
Most teachers are killing themselves this year while feeling like everyone above them doesn’t give a damn.Report
Re Schools:
In what has to be the most SF story ever, The City and County of San Francisco has sued its own School Board over a lack of reopening plan:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/03/963832632/san-francisco-vs-san-francisco-school-board-a-push-to-get-students-back-in-schoo
Instead the school board was engaged in the eyeroll activity of renaming dozens of schools for not being woke enough and using shoddy history to do it. Among the names stricken are Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lowell, Paul Revere, etc.
I can assure you that most San Franciscans find the renaming thing eyerolley. Our mayor does. The problem is that a lot of San Franciscans do not have children and we have some of the highest private school attendance in the nation. I think a lot of people just skip over the School Board slots during election time. This silly action might lead to a recall though.Report
Progressives in disarray!Report
A big disadvantage of having so many off-year elections and so many offices that would be civil service positions in every other country is that it allows radicals of all stripes to get elected to positions of power. New York City municipal elections also have extremely low turn out.Report
ThTh1
As many of you know, I both live in Houston and have worked, and still do work, for the power and distribution utilities business, with experience in more than 20 countries, so let me pitch in my two cents:
As already pointed above, wind generation normally works in cold weather: Scandinavia, the North Sea, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas and Antarctica are places where wind turbines operate normally without any problem. They have to be winterized, though, which turbine manufacturers sell as an option -like leather seats, but for wind turbines. Though the Cold weather package is not terribly expensive compared to the cost of a turbine, it is not nothing, so a significant portion of Texas wind turbines, particularly those close to the Gulf, are not winterized. Our company has not winterized our turbines in California, based on my recommendation.
The main problem with respect to generation this week has been the failure of natural gas no ramp up. This has had two causes: technical issues (frozen fuel systems in the plants), and commercial issues (lack of gas to purchase).
The former problem, frozen fuel supply systems is the same winterization problem discussed above. fuel valves freeze and cannot be open, gearboxes freeze, liquid fuel generators cannot reach ignition temperatures. Same issue, no winterization package because it is not expected to be used.
To understand second issue, the gas commercial availability you have to understand that Texas electricity load profile is very different in the summer than in the winter. Texas electricity is used mainly to cool the state in August, where we reach the peak demand and frequently experience blackouts. Our very mild winters (Houston rarely gets below 32, and almost never below 25) do not generate an equivalent demand. So commercially, thermal generators make (or should make) arrangements to secure duel supply in the summer, when all hands on deck are called to generate, but let those firm commitments lapse in the winter, when, most gas fired plants do not run at all. Conversely, states up north have relatively milder summers but very cold winters, and all the available gas is shipped to the North: the Lake states, Mid Atlantic, PJN and New England.
However, electricity demand on Monday in Texas was similar to that registered in August. In itself that’s an enormous increase in demand. Whether this had been forecasted or not by ERCOT (the Texas System Operator) I don’t know, but I doubt they did.
When ERCOT started calling thermal generation on line on Monday it was faced with both technical failures to start and lack of gas. The supposed rolling blackouts that ERCOT had coordinated with counties, cities, and Emergency Managements Systems all across the state suddenly turned into permeant outages. ERCOT and the utilities did not have enough operational generation flexibility to start turning the power on and off as required. Those that had been shut off stayed off (I was lucky, I lost power only on Wednesday, when the situation was slightly better controlled). By the time the system was “balanced”, only 35-40% of the load could be served. There was no generation available to cover anything more . We stayed like that for more than 48 hours.
On Wednesday we had a weather respite, temperatures rose and some more thermal generation could be bought on line. Stronger than expected wind also increased wind output above what winterized generators had forecasted, easing the pain marginally. The gas supply problems continued until Wednesday afternoon when governor Abbot forbade with immediate effect any gas exports from the state (there goes the sanctity of private contracts out the window). By 6 pm I, and 60% of the state, had power. By midnight Thursday, 90% of the state had power. Suddenly, with the stroke of a pen, the power issue was solved in less than 12 hours just by making enough gas available to generators . Mind you, Houston is still below freezing as I write this.
Lots of ink (of pixels??) has been used to explain that a once in a lifetime (at least for those born after 2011, the last time this was an issue) winter weeklong blackout is a reasonable price to pay for cheap energy, because generators (are supposed to) pass to customers the savings associated with not winterizing equipment that will not operate in winter, or not signing up for gas contracts that will not be used.
When pundits say that a blackout is a reasonable price to pay for savings in capital or operating costs, they are looking this from the point of view of the generator. These savings are balanced with loss of energy sales revenue. That’s how I saw it when ruling out cold weather packages in California.
But blackouts are not cost free events to customers. Commercial customers lose revenue but not being able to operate. Large industrial batch industrial operations might lose millions of dollars with just a short interruption. A smelter that loses power for hours will see their furnaces filled in with solid metal that will be almost impossible to remove. Water and sewage service was interrupted in all major cities. Cellphone data coverage was lost, even if you could charge your phone in your car.
So pundits are ignoring this massive externality that well designed regulatory systems, like Guatemala’s or Colombia’s (two countries with excellent, very complete, regulatory frameworks) called the cost of undelivered energy, or rationing costs. A properly designed regulation compensates the customers for the energy not delivered, not at the “price” they would have paid for that energy, but at a value high enough to mitigate their real damages. Twenty to fifty times the tariff price would be
And individual customers are not only cold and without internet. People that require critical medical equipment (respirators, dialysis) can die, no, have died. Scores have also died in the state of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to heat up their houses (Galveston county required a mobile morgue to store the dead bodies collected). Who pays for the lives lost in a blackout whose effects were foreseeable, and foreseen in countless reports after the 2011 freeze/blackouts?
Lastly, the areas of Texas outside of ERCOT, El Paso (electrically part of the NM grid), and Beaumont (tied to LA’s) had barely any power interruptions. I’m fairly sure that customers there are perfectly nappy of paying a couple cents a month to cover the risk of dying in the next decennial once in a lifetime power outageReport
Thanks, J_A. I was hoping you’d be around to say something.Report
1) Glad you are doing OK
2) Thanks for writing this. I didn’t want to hope too much that you would, given that I figured you might be out of power.Report
Allow me to add my thanks.
May I ask — perhaps you have commented on this before — I see a lot of people suggesting that, on the whole, the United States’ general infrastructure, which includes power generation, is quite fragile compared to other developed nations. Do you concur with this? I suspect, from an engineering perspective, the problem is “solvable” (within sensible constraints). Do you have any suggestions on how to build the political will to address this?Report
Thanks to all!!! You are very kind
I cannot comment much on the actual state of the electrical infrastructure in the USA since I am mostly involved in international markets – I can speak with more accuracy about power into Beijing (sucks big time – massive issues) than power into Denver. having said that, I suspect it is at least as bad as our road infrastructure, and probably worse. Our friend Michael Cain knows a helluva lot more than me about the physical infrastructure itself.
Having said that, I have been given a soap box by you, and I’m not stepping off it, yet.
We have a political problem in USA, or at least in parts of it, that blows my mind compared to places not like Germany, but like El Salvador, and it is the regulatory capture by utilities.
For most utilities worldwide, the regulator responds to customers (or at least to politicians that respond to customers). The utility is a villain, kept in check by the regulator.
For instance:
Tariffs are built based on an ideally economically adapted grid, that is the right size, and not bigger, calculated by the regulator based on a statistical sampling of hundreds of utilities internationally, that will provide the required level of quality service. Should the utility fail their quality targets, it is heavily penalized, with the penalties applied as tariff rebates (a couple of dollars for each customer, but adding to millions to the utility. Should they over invest to make sure they meet their goals, the excess capital costs are not allowed to be part of the tariff base and generate no return. Same principle for ongoing O&M expenditures.
Likewise, utilities have to contract just the right amount of energy, not less -brown outs are penalized at punitive levels-, and not more, extra energy purchased above a thin security margin of 5% or so cannot b e transferred to the customer, the utility buying or selling any difference at their risk in the spot market.
In the USA, utilities present their investment and operations plan to technically weak regulators, and, if approved, they get a guaranteed return on it. Utilities have an incentive to over invest because the regulator will not penalize unnecessary investments. Likewise, regulators, having approved the investment/operations plan, somehow “own it”. If investments prove insufficient (hurricanes, ice storms, fires) well, the utility built the approved plan, so it is not the utilities’ fault it was not a good plan. Why didn’t the regulator say something?
Recent (decades old 🙂 ) deregulation has at least decoupled the energy and the wires businesses, but most energy plans still pass on too much risk to customers that are not savvy enough to chose. Hey, I am savvy enough, I review our own tariffs, and I can’t find enough publicly available information to be sure what and how I am being charged for here in Texas. But utilities and the Public Utilities Commission have already warned Texans to expect to be hit by massive electricity bills for February given wholesale energy prices in the 1,000s US$/MWh.
Separately, but not less important, the multiple government layers add enormous complexity and veto points to building anything, be it new generation or more wires.
In my ideal world, just as there is no Kansas accounting that is different from Oregon accounting, or there’s no Tennessee medicine different from Connecticut medicine, and therefore there shouldn’t be Kansas Accounting boards or Connecticut Medical Boards, there shouldn’t be a myriad different utility regulations. A federal transparent regulation, implemented by state regulatory agencies that refer only to the same Federal guidelines, and relay on the same environmental and approval criteria would make it a more transparent system.
The argument for the states seems to be that they are closer to the local citizen, but that’s not really true, not today. We live in a centralized information market, where we all receive the same information, centered around DC/NYC/CA and little more. The general public -you and me- does not have the bandwidth to individually follow what is happening in the Helena, Tallahassee, Boston or Santa Fe utilities commission offices, health offices, transportation offices, environmental offices, etc. The public has to -even if they don’t want to- ‘have to, again, rely in just a handful of specialists in the different areas, the Faucis of their different specialties. And these specialists themselves do not have the capability to follow the 50 states different regulations. They can only follow Federal regulations, and a couple more.
The result is that those regulators hiding in plain sight in their offices Des Moines, Pierre, Sacramento, or Seattle, and their work, are known only by those who they are supposed to be regulated by them. Regulatory capture in those circumstances, helped by an appropriate contribution to unknown state legislators (show of hands if you know who is your state senator and representative, what they have proposed/voted for in the state assembly, and who are their donors) with oversight power over thse regulators.
I’ll step off the soap box now, because mu next Zoon conference is about to start 🙂Report
‘the regulator responds to customers’
A social construct that depends on the ‘right type of person(s) making the good decisions’.
Excellent comment though, even if i don’t agree with your philosophy.Report
Thanks for responding. That was very thoughtful and informative.Report
The local and regional variances are enormous.
A few months ago my wife and I moved from one city to another along the Colorado Front Range urban corridor. I have to say kind words about the local non-profit power authority which provides the electricity for four municipal utilities, including ours. Call it 400,000 people plus a surprising amount of high-electricity industry (no steel furnaces, but multiple IC fab lines). Staggering growth rate. In four months, there hasn’t been a blink big enough to reset the appliance clocks. To the best of my recollection, the lights haven’t even flickered. That’s saying a lot along the Front Range, where 60 mph straight line winds are if not routine, also not uncommon. (“The jet stream will be mixing down” is something we hear regularly.) We’ll have to see how things go during the first thunderstorm season in three months or so. Current delivered power is about 50% renewables. Published goal is 100% non-carbon by 2030, which will be impressive as hell if they can do it.Report
This is an incredibly informative post. Thank you.
And wow, everything is bigger in Texas including the fiascos.Report
As usual, this site’s demographics (older, middle/upper middle class, white, and suburban) puts it out of step when it actually comes to how people are feeling about school reopening. It’s the same bubble that comes to the conclusion the only people supporting the lockdowns are WFH techies when actual polling shows current restrictions (closed businesses, masks, etc.) are all widely popular.
So, some highlights –
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teachers-unions-schools-reopen-covid_n_60218ee6c5b6173dd2f89ceb
Most Americans continue to support the idea of teachers striking in response to school conditions they feel are unsafe, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they would strongly or somewhat support the idea, compared with 30% who said they would oppose it.
….
The HuffPost/YouGov poll suggests that the public remains largely supportive of these union actions. A November survey from EdNext found that parents’ views of unions have actually improved slightly since May 2020, with the percentage of those saying that unions have a positive impact on schools growing from 40 to 46 percent.
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3692
47% say schools reopening at right pace, 27% too quick, 17% not quick enough
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/18/22289735/parents-polls-schools-opening-remote
One poll, the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study, asked parents starting in late January how their child was learning — in person, remotely, or a hybrid. Then parents were asked what they would want for their child if they could choose any option.
Three-quarters said their child was receiving the type of instruction they wanted, according to an analysis of the data done at Chalkbeat’s request.
Fifteen percent of parents wanted more in-person instruction. Another 10% actually wanted less in-person learning, perhaps because some schools are not offering a remote option or are pressuring reluctant families to send their kids into buildings
In mid-January, roughly two-thirds of public school parents were getting the kind of schooling that they preferred for their kids, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of the data. About one in five parents wanted more in-person instruction, while about one in 10 wanted less.
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/1362013924963532801/photo/1
“New Politico poll – majorities trust teachers unions (along with school administrators and Biden) on school reopening. By 55-34, Americans think reopening should wait till teachers are vaccinated.”
https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1354489129023795204/photo/1
Data showing highest income families most likely to support full-time in person learning right now; poorest families least
In short, the people who are most feverently for reopening schools – 20-30% – are the same people who have always disliked teacher unions, and are using this as a cudgel to attack them for, but the actual reality, if schools are largely back to normal by next fall, the idea the GOP will be able to attack Democrat’s for it the year after is silly, given the populace’s short term memory.
Also, I’ll make a Trading Places bet w/ anybody on this board that by the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, people going to private school is about the same as it is now – 10% – and there will be no mass movement away from public school that certain center-right people on Twitter online blather about all the time.Report
Hey folks, I’ve got post w/ links stuck in moderation.Report
I don’t see you in Pending, on the first 3 pages of Spam, or on the first page of Trash.
Can you try again?Report
Wait, I found it.Report