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Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

RheingoldRiver
205 replies
1d2h

I was there last weekend & for the day of the hurricane. This was just a cat 1 hurricane at the time it passed through Houston, and there was SO much damage. I can't imagine the city is remotely prepared for (god forbid, and idk how likely it is that far inland anyway) a cat 4 or 5. We were staying in a hotel that had a backup generator, but every single other building that was visible from our hotel had lost power during the storm.

Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.

I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:

* Not enough employees at the electrical companies

* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically

* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically

* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)

* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's

* Other??

blantonl
163 replies
1d2h

This wasn't a "grid issue." It is a last-mile issue.

It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.

The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.

New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.

gmueckl
81 replies
1d2h

What's wrong with below-ground power distribution for metropolitan areas?

bdcravens
23 replies
1d1h

Nothing, but migrating to it is very expensive.

Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/cen...

_wire_
13 replies
1d1h

Funny to think about these costs and the health of the national commons from a point of view of the Federal budget.

For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.

If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".

Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.

But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.

gunapologist99
9 replies
1d1h

Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed

It's amusing and a bit scary that someone thinks the federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed.

galdosdi
5 replies
1d

It's free if you spend it on a durable asset that is as or more valuable than the cash was, which can often be true of infrastructure. Your balance sheet goes up not down after the spend then.

gunapologist99
4 replies
23h47m

There are vanishingly few examples of infrastructure spending that don't turn into massive, wasteful boondoggles; perhaps the Interstate Highway system.

The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.

massysett
1 replies
22h4m

Railroads got massive subsidies in at least two forms: huge land grants, and the power of the U.S. Army to wage war on the native peoples who otherwise would have stood in their way.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
3h4m

I thought by the time the railroad came about the US army already did that for the various ranch lands the railroad went through?

Qwertious
1 replies
22h47m

The interstate highway system is arguably a massively wasteful boondoggle - it subsidises trucks at the cost of the far more efficient and less-polluting rail.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
3h5m

Huge military boon having the interstate as well for our icbm truck platforms.

hedora
2 replies
1d1h

The US dollar literally is constructed as needed. It's pretty darn close to free thanks to electronic banking.

However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.

Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.

Hypothetically, of course.

yownie
0 replies
20h32m

jfc you're like the spiritual avatar of /r/confidentiallyincorrect.

gunapologist99
0 replies
23h50m

Presidents don't print money. Congress approves stimuli in the form of spending. Spending is always inflationary in nature because it injects money into the economy.

The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.

vondur
1 replies
23h35m

Houston is having some budget issues currently: <https://abc13.com/houston-budget-mayor-john-whitmire-city-se...>

How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.

bobthepanda
0 replies
23h25m

The general problem states see is that metropolitan regions are more productive and produce more taxes, so in many cases the state cannot necessarily wash its hands of cities.

The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.

ericmay
0 replies
1d

For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.

The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].

In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].

Maybe they can budget it in?

What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.

[1]. https://everytexan.org/2023/11/03/the-2024-25-texas-budget-t...

[2] https://abc13.com/texas-legislature-2023-state-budget-surplu...

ianburrell
2 replies
18h59m

It is $2.5 million per mile. That is order of magnitude more expensive. Houston has 6200 miles of road compared to 640 square miles.

I think $2.5 million is the high estimate, my city is estimating $1 million per mile.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...

tstrimple
0 replies
17h59m

There is no scenario where every mile of road is outfitted with buried power lines, especially considering not every mile of road has elevated power lines. What a nonsensical comment.

nostrademons
1 replies
1d

There actually are a few problems with underground power lines, notably that maintenance & upgrades are much harder and more expensive, they tend to get severed by construction, they tend to get severed by earthquakes, and bad things result if the waterproof conduit around them is punctured.

On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.

Symbiote
0 replies
22h14m

In European cities where underground power lines are normal these issues aren't a problem.

There might be costs (checking before construction for example) and it being normal it helps.

hedora
1 replies
1d1h

There are about 3844 people per square mile in Houston, so that's $650 per person, amortized over at least 20 years, which would increase the monthly power bill by about $2.70 per person (~ $10 / subscriber?)

I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.

analog31
0 replies
18h56m

Also less expensive than everybody going out and buying a generator, plus putting out fires from improperly stored gasoline.

tigerBL00D
0 replies
1d1h

It seems like a lot, but a few billions of dollars also seems like a good deal to secure against increasing risks for severe weather. What's the total economic impact of future storms? To put it in perspective a single Patriot missile battery costs about a billion dollars and a single missile costs $4M.

bryanlarsen
0 replies
1d1h

Penny-wise, pound foolish. This single 1 week power outage is going to cost Houston a lot more than $1.6B.

KingOfCoders
21 replies
1d1h

Berlin, 3.645M citizen, everything underground. Houston, 2.302M citizen, ... "gigantic"

chasd00
4 replies
23h8m

Berlin also has the advantage, being generous on “advantage”, of being completely rebuilt about 70 years ago.

ggm
3 replies
21h49m

When did the explosion of Houston's size and city take place? pre- or post 1945?

hindsightbias
1 replies
16h37m

A wave in the 60’s for oil & space, then more burbs and exurbs when the bible belters migrated to TX in the 80’s.

gregw2
0 replies
20h43m

Some of both but mostly post-45.

The quip is that two things made Houston possible: oil and air conditioning.

bdcravens
4 replies
1d1h

It's not a matter of population, but land. Berlin is about 345 square miles; Houston is 640.

KingOfCoders
2 replies
1d1h

Berlin including suburbs ("Speckgürtel") is ~1400 square miles.

BenjiWiebe
0 replies
21h22m

So approximately 1/7th the size of the Houston metro area.

tstrimple
0 replies
17h55m

And thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.

Teknomancer
4 replies
1d1h

Berlin, Germany is inland, with an elevation average around 34 meters above sea level. The ground soil composition in Berlin is primarily sandy, draining easily and lending itself exceptionally well to underground infrastructure development.

Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.

ggm
1 replies
21h49m

you haven't seen the soil drainage pipes of Berlin? They're like a screensaver from the 1990s escaped into the real world.

KingOfCoders
0 replies
4h47m

Do you mean heating pipes? Or construction drainage pipes?

Symbiote
1 replies
22h10m

How about Amsterdam, or London (outer London if you want a lower density).

tstrimple
0 replies
17h57m

There always seems to be an excuse as to why America is exceptional and things accomplished routinely in other countries couldn't possibly work here. It's true to a degree. They absolutely cannot work here. But that's more about our political dysfunction than anything meaningful about our geographical situations.

FireBeyond
1 replies
20h34m

This is silly. MSAs have near zero to do with a city.

They are not talking about Greater Houston.

For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area)

It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".

It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.

Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".

Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".

Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.

To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.

It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.

Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.

Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.

In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.

The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.

dwighttk
0 replies
7h49m

Even Wikipedia doesn’t include College Station

KingOfCoders
0 replies
1d1h

Greater Berlin also is much bigger than Berlin.

tohnjitor
1 replies
1d1h

As I understand it, the topsoil in parts of Texas is only a foot deep or less and then it's solid bedrock. This is why most homes do not have basements.

EasyMark
0 replies
1d1h

That’s not true in all of Texas for sure. I can vouch for it in Central Texas “hill country” 6-10”around my home and you will hit solid limestone. Makes a nice home foundation (provided it’s not too porous)but I would not want to pay for a pool or basement here.

bluGill
6 replies
1d1h

Moles, mice, things walking/driving over the top. There is a long list of things that make underground not nearly as reliable as it sounds.

bequanna
2 replies
1d1h

Underground electric distribution is considerably more reliable than overhead lines. Animals digging up the wire is much more rare than an outage created by an animal crawling up a pole and grabbing the line/transformer.

Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.

15155
1 replies
1d1h

Below-ground power distribution is cheaper in sparsely-populated rural areas than overhead lines because utility companies can trench the lines directly through anyone's field or in any random ditch - there's no directional boring required (until customer delivery possibly.)

Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.

alphabettsy
0 replies
1d

Doesn’t seem like it would be cheaper anywhere.

galdosdi
1 replies
1d

Source? The grid was far more reliable where I've lived with underground than overhead lines. Kind of hard to believe. Sounds like that would only happen if your city cheaped out on the conduit material.

bluGill
0 replies
19h49m

Been thirty years since I lived there, but when I lived where there was a coop electric they had data showing underground was overall less reliable. Maybe things are diffarant now.

adolph
0 replies
23h46m

Moles, mice, things walking/driving over the top

I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.

blantonl
6 replies
1d2h

There's nothing wrong with it. But it would take lifetimes of money and time to retrofit a city like Houston to move all power infrastructure underground. And there is no way consumers would ever sign up for the cost to do so. It would be akin to building the Hoover Dam today. It would probably be one of the largest public works projects ever attempted.

mym1990
4 replies
1d1h

Lifetimes of money, really? What is that measurement? Someone above said 2.5 million per square miles. Catastrophic damage from larger storms is often in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, so it feel like it would be in the best interest of most parties to embark on this project, even if it happens slowly.

throwup238
1 replies
1d

Putting power lines underground wouldn't mitigate very much of that damage though, would it? I was under the impression that the vast majority of those multibillion dollar figures is water damage to buildings, cars, and other equipment.

tstrimple
0 replies
17h52m

Just one anecdote. We lived through the deracho in Iowa, one of the places hardest hit. Huge swaths of the city was without power for weeks. In our house, in the middle of the most damage, was without power for under 24 hours. That's a massive difference. I don't know how much the calculations take into account physical damage versus all up damage including lost productivity. But many of the folks working at the local company were back "in the office" working from home because the business was without power far longer than most of the employees. I have no idea how the overall damages are calculated.

Sam713
0 replies
6h53m

The poster above misstated the cost. Its $2.5mil/mile. That number actually comes from PG&E in California, so its possibly not relevant to Houston. I couldn’t find that Centerpoint has actually done an analysis for Houston. Just to get an idea of scale, Centerpoint states on their website that they operate ~33,000 miles of above ground power lines.

Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/ho...

Qwertious
0 replies
22h42m

A lifetime of money is ~$10M or so. That's $100k/year for 100 years.

quickthrowman
0 replies
1d

It’s not lifetimes of money, but there are substantial costs.

All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.

In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.

~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.

seanmcdirmid
5 replies
1d1h

New Orleans and Houston are basically built on swamps. In New Orleans, you can’t even bury people below ground, so I doubt you can do much with power lines underground.

yread
1 replies
23h54m

In Amsterdam the ground water level is also very high but people manage to put lines in the ground

seanmcdirmid
0 replies
23h20m

So this is weird, but I never saw people buried above ground in Amsterdam like in New Orleans. What the diff? Even if cremation is common now, it probably wasn’t a hundred or two years ago?

hedora
1 replies
1d1h

It turns out we don't need to speculate:

https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/64650dded34ec179a83...

Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:

   <attr>
     <attrlabl>DTW23</attrlabl>
     <attrdef>
        December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
        from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
     </attrdef>
     <attrdefs>U.S. Geological Survey</attrdefs>
     <attrdomv>
       <rdom>
         <rdommin>2.83</rdommin>
         <rdommax>453.97</rdommax>
         <attrunit>feet</attrunit>
       </rdom>
     </attrdomv>
   </attr>

MisterBastahrd
0 replies
1d

I used to live in a neighboring parish to the west of New Orleans. If you dug more than 3 feet into the ground, you were hitting water. Driving pilings is a sloppy mess.

robocat
0 replies
21h46m

Swamp is a poor excuse IMHO. Plenty of my city Christchurch is built on swamp. yet it has slowly been replacing HV and LV power poles with underground cabling for about 50 years now, although there is still some remaining. We don't get hurricanes so I'm not sure of reasons for us using underground cabling. NZ is no where near as wealthy as Texas so Houston should be able to afford to do it too.

Christchurch gets earthquakes instead of hurricanes: http://db.nzsee.org.nz/SpecialIssue/44(4)0425.pdf

atmavatar
3 replies
1d1h

I'm getting strong "'No way to prevent this' says only country where this regularly happens" vibes.

gosub100
1 replies
1d

I think "vibes" is a new weasel word that subtly absolves the author from any responsibility to connect cause and effect. There's a whole lot more to writing than announcing what "vibes" you get.

amanaplanacanal
0 replies
4h32m

I understand what they meant.

dpkirchner
0 replies
1d1h

It's funny to me that folks counter criticism of Texas by saying lefty California also has outages. It's like, sure, they do -- so why not show that a right-wing government can do better? What is the actual point of the counterargument?

FredPret
2 replies
1d2h

I’m not an electrical or civil eng, but I imagine it’s very expensive to dig so many tunnels.

Groundwater (especially for coastal cities) and people drilling holes would be very problematic too.

hedora
0 replies
1d1h

Assuming you don't hit rock, it's not bad.

Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.

If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.

If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.

When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)

There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
1d1h

"not an electrical or civil eng. So let me explain how impossible everything is that I don't know about, and snidely say it's just 'physics'".

spyspy
1 replies
1d2h

Much more expensive to install and maintain, and while risk from wind and rain is lessened, you add the risk of any below ground construction accidentally severing cables.

gmueckl
0 replies
13h21m

Above ground you have the risks of e.g. cars crashing into poles and trees falling on the cables.

foota
0 replies
1d2h

"There is no easy fix" underground power lines for an entire city isn't easy.

alephnerd
0 replies
1d2h

It's time consuming and expensive to implement due to a mix of property rights and construction.

adrianmonk
0 replies
22h38m

Isn't there a third option: redundant overhead power lines?

In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.

If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.

I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.

KingOfCoders
0 replies
1d2h

Standard in most of Europe.

AdamH12113
0 replies
1d1h

What I've always heard whenever this subject comes up in Houston is that A) burying lines is expensive (and Houston is very large), and B) Houston floods a lot.

hedora
53 replies
1d1h

I disagree, and I speak from experience.

We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.

Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.

The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).

So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.

We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.

The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.

As to your point about it being an urban area:

The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).

I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.

ethagknight
16 replies
1d1h

You lost me at “climate change induced typhoon”.

Comparing an “Bay Area typhoon” (very hilly) to low and flat Houston with a direct hit is disingenuous at best.

jwkpiano1
12 replies
1d

The elevation of Houston is _higher_ than the elevation of SF. Yes, there are many hills, and the _max_ elevation is obviously higher, but there are also plenty of low lying areas and areas at sea level.

AlbertCory
9 replies
23h39m

Nonetheless, there are no recorded instances of large storm-induced floods in the SFBay area that I'm aware of. Do you know of any?

Fires, earthquakes, heavy rains causing mudslides that have actually killed people: yes. Some very localized flooding around the Russian River happens all the time. The Guadalupe River in San Jose flooded a few years ago. But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.

AlbertCory
5 replies
17h55m

You're calling it a "documentary movie"?

vdqtp3
4 replies
16h23m

Just because he didn't add /s doesn't mean it's not implied

AlbertCory
3 replies
15h47m

you never know what someone thinks /s. There's another guy here claiming there are supernatural phenomena.

mistermann
2 replies
13h25m

And there are also people who are big talkers but can't defend their "non-supernatural" claims when challenged.

AlbertCory
1 replies
3h4m

oh, you're just so busy here, aren't you?

we don't have to prove the negative; you have to prove your claim.

mistermann
0 replies
37m

Impressive, but fairly normative[1] rhetoric[2].

Can you please take that courage over to the thread in question, where the cat seems to have gotten your tongue?

Some alternatives:

1. Engage in even more rhetoric (which is easily identified)

2. Pretend that you have not seen this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954874

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...

Note:

- you and I are both Humans

- this conversation is "a situation"

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

jwkpiano1
0 replies
16h14m

Nah, I was just pushing back on the notion that Houston is that much “lower” than SF, when it is not. Wild to get downvoted for that factual statement.

inferiorhuman
0 replies
9h36m

   But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
In the Bay Area there's not much development on the coast. There are fancy cliff top homes, but not much at sea level. Even in SF things go uphill from the ocean pretty quickly. A good chunk of central and southern Marin is below sea level (and yes it floods during big storms) but that's well inland.

ethagknight
1 replies
1d

Hills make a huge difference impeding winds across the land, storm water drains much faster. Has a hurricane ever hit San Francisco? It’s not a real comparison, typhoons in the area, to a direct hurricane.

It’s also extremely expensive to mitigate, maybe it should be done, but the GP was hand waving it all away. Commenter even “disagreed from experience” and then cited a totally different experience.

jwkpiano1
0 replies
16h14m

True, but none of that contradicts what I said.

wannacboatmovie
1 replies
1d

Don't worry, he saw a clogged storm drain in Pac Heights once, he's got this.

hn_throwaway_99
0 replies
23h54m

He does speak from experience!

DoneWithAllThat
0 replies
23h24m

I was laughing too. Yes the legendary typhoons slamming into SF yearly, how could I forget.

lolinder
11 replies
23h3m

To quantify the winds we're talking about, the record-setting winds in the Bay Area this February peaked at 100mph gusts, with 18 stations recording values between 80mph and 100mph [0] (Pablo Point, out in the middle of the Pacific, recorded gusts of 102mph, but I'd consider that an outlier). Notably, all stations recording values higher than 80mph are on mountain peaks, not anywhere near population centers. In most of the Bay Area the gusts didn't exceed 60mph [1].

During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.

All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/05/map-where-wind-reache...

[1] https://underscoresf.com/the-belated-weekend-catch-up-record...

[2] https://houstonlanding.org/these-houston-areas-received-the-...

sdenton4
10 replies
21h28m

Consider earthquakes. Preparation and infrastructure are what matter. If you don't do the prep, you'll have a hundred thousand dead from a 6.0. But if you do the prep, you'll have relatively trivial damage from a 7.0.

Texas power, thanks to their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude, has shown itself to be woefully underreported repeatedly in the last few years.

roenxi
9 replies
19h9m

I can't walk by this comment without noting that their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude resulted in a large populous state which people want to migrate to. The other large US state, California, has electricity prices that appear to be 2x higher [0]. And their migratory trends are not encouraging.

People underestimate the heavy burden of a strong regulatory state. High standards and high costs. All in it the Texas approach looks to be pretty good even if it means you have to be prepared for an emergency. I actually lost power for 24 hours recently so I can sympathise; a widespread outage would be horrific for an unprepared person. But being prepared for emergencies is a much more resilient approach in the long term and better than the quite substantial risk of overregulating.

They have a very healthy attitude.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

kolinko
5 replies
11h53m

It's not a simple linear scale of regulations and no regulations.

EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.

roenxi
4 replies
11h46m

EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.

The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis triggered by some of the most stunning displays of regulatory incompetence so far this century. So I would accept that the EU is more regulated but I don't think that is the sort of point that plays well right now.

I would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!

snowpid
0 replies
41m

"would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!"

Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.

petre
0 replies
4h10m

The EU had an energy crisis because Germany was high on Russian gas, along with most of Central Europe. Thankfully the US took care of that. Southern Europe also has few fossil fuel options if Libya and Algeria decide to align themselves with Russia.

lazide
0 replies
10h53m

The EU also has very high taxes and very high energy costs.

Jensson
0 replies
5h18m

The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis

No outage though, the crisis was averted, unlike in Texas where the crisis reliably hits every few years.

binkethy
1 replies
10h37m

Bass ackwards defensive hot take.

The above comment should not be grayed out, yours should.

You are placing your political fantasies above reality on the ground.

It is absolutely factually correct to describe Texas political and electrical administration as - anthropogenic climate change denialist

- corruptly in thrall to fossil fuel, including 'natural' gas plant expansion where the actual grid is the issue

- averse to integrating with the electrical grid from nearby states, as others do, and averse to standards and standards compliance.

The number of people moving to Texas and your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic.

lsaferite
0 replies
6h45m

your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic

And

we don't need no regulamazations

Seem at odds with one another.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
3h16m

Power costs are the result of private profit taking not electrical regulation. Look at power costs for municipal providers with the same regulatory burden. LADWP customers are paying maybe 16 cents a kilowatt hour.

gunapologist99
7 replies
1d1h

Houston actually has relatively low population density compared to other metro areas with only 3,842 people per square mile, and across the MSA (Houston is extremely spread out), that number is much lower. (Compare to, for example, Union City, NJ, with 54,138 persons/sq mile.) There are some 7.5 million people spread out across more than 10,000 square miles across the greater Houston area.

Also, the water table is very high, and hurricanes completely flood entire areas, so transformers etc are often completely underwater. It's just not feasible to bury sensitive equipment when the entire area is under six or ten feet of water.

toomuchtodo
5 replies
1d

TLDR Texas is hosed as climate change accelerates and there is no will to pay to build resilient infra. Godspeed y’all.

alexk307
2 replies
23h54m

Did you read OP's post?

toomuchtodo
1 replies
23h52m

Yes. I am also familiar with the technical challenges and cost of improving last mile electrical distribution to withstand hurricane force conditions where burial is not an option (whether because of a high water table or potential surge conditions, where equipment is suspended at a height above ground level on permanent scaffolding or pedestals). It is expensive, not impossible. It is a choice, and there is a cost. It’s cold, hard economics. The politics are whether to spend or not spend, and the outcome of that decision.

silverquiet
1 replies
1d

I don't think it's really possible to predict what will become of Texas. One could imagine such a big, resource-rich state finding ways to work collectively for the better of all, though obviously that's naive to the point of nearly being a joke. Still there is a lot going for it in some sense. Politicians may not care about the people, but their beloved businesses also need infrastructure, so at least there's that.

I've lived in Texas my entire life and there are aspects of it that I love, but I do have vague plans to move north once my remaining ties to the state dissolve.

toomuchtodo
0 replies
1d

Would you bet your financial success or life outcome on Texas making rational policy leading to potentially more favorable outcomes for its citizens (based on all available evidence)?

downrightmike
0 replies
22h25m

And the flood zone maps are out of date and were not really accurate to begin with and they are purposely not updated.

alexk307
5 replies
23h58m

What are climate-change induced typhoons? How are those quantified?

ifyoubuildit
4 replies
21h55m

I also wondered this. How do you tell the difference between a climate change induced typhoon and the alternative? Maybe its obvious to the down voters, but you have at least two people here you could potentially teach something to.

alexk307
3 replies
19h55m

You don't - that's the point.

Dylan16807
2 replies
17h57m

You use statistics.

Demanding the answer for specific storms is like demanding to know whether a smoker's lung cancer was caused by smoking. Maybe?? But we know in aggregate smoking caused an enormous amount of deaths. We can measure the number of smoking-induced deaths, and the number of climate-changed-induced storms.

alexk307
1 replies
3h37m

I understand the concept, but please show me the statistics that show that storms are increasing in quantity or severity on a timescale consistent with anthropogenic warming.

OP said that specific storms are climate induced - there is no way of saying that a storm formed due to climate change when it would not have formed in the absence.

Dylan16807
0 replies
2h1m

They said a multi year batch of storms was climate change induced. That's significantly more valid than saying a specific normal-size storm is. The dice even out as you add more samples.

I don't want to look for papers right now. Ask them about the claim that "This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's", not me.

My point is that you definitely can prove (or disprove) it. Your claim that it's unprovable on purpose or something is not right.

m463
2 replies
20h30m

Can they bury power lines in houston? I thought the water table was pretty close to the surface.

(if you want a swimming pool, dig a hole!)

EDIT: ok I looked

it seems there are two kinds of lines - transmission lines and distribution lines.

Distribution lines can be buried, but it might not be good in hurricane prone areas that are prone to flooding.

transmission lines are hard/expensive to bury, since the insulation requirements are technically challenging.

The hurricane seems to have taken out some large transmission lines in addition to distribution lines.

I wonder if maybe redundant lines might be cheaper than buried lines?

Gibbon1
0 replies
17h18m

A 1998 ministerial inquiry criticized both the Auckland Electric Power Board and its privatized successor, which had halved its staff after taking over in October 1993

The inquiry report also said, "Internal expertise in 110 kV assets was not maintained at a sufficient level"

It's almost as if you put public infrastructure under the control of people who only care about collecting short term rents bad things happen.

Other comment California has underground transmission lines. And yes sometimes they fail. Had a smaller one oops in my old neighborhood in San Francisco a few years ago.

PG&E is spending about $20b to underground 10,000 miles of lines in fire prone areas. Seems like a lot but it's $40/foot. Still that's only 10% of the total.

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...

dehrmann
1 replies
23h20m

climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts

What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.

jjav
0 replies
10h31m

What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.

In terms of wind speed, quite similar. A category 1 hurricane is only 74-95mph winds. This is pretty mild, as far as storms go. I've been through many, many category 1 hurricanes and it's not much of a storm. Things only start getting scary around category 3.

I have several friends who live high in the hills in the Santa Cruz mountains and they regularly see wind speeds in the range of cat 1 hurricanes.

sjs382
0 replies
3h41m

You have experience with something you think is similar but you don't have enough experience to understand the nuances.

It's ok for you to sit this one out.

reaperman
0 replies
21h53m

So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California

The CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E and the CFO of Centerpoint came from PG&E as well. So you're more right than you know!

nostrademons
0 replies
1d

Also live in SF Bay Area, but my sister lived in Houston for ~20 years and I grew up in the Northeast (and got hit by hurricanes Gloria and Bob as a child).

What we saw with the winter storms of 2022 and 2023 was nothing close to what Houston or even the NY area gets with a hurricane. Bay Area topography is hilly; most of the wind is broken by the Santa Cruz mountains. I'm in one of the SF Peninsula canyons that's known for being particularly windy, and we saw maybe 70mph gusts and 30mph sustained. A Cat 1 hurricane (like Beryl, Bob, or Gloria) has 75mph winds sustained with gusts up to 100mph. A Cat 5 (like Katrina at the height of its strength; it made landfall as a cat 3) has 150mph sustained winds and 200+mph gusts.

Hurricane Bob knocked out power to eastern Long Island NY for 2 days in 1991. Hurricane Sandy (also a Cat 1 at landfall, but a direct hit on NYC) knocked out power for 2 weeks. The problem is not unique to Houston or Texas. PG&E has plenty of its own problems, but the reason fewer poles went down our winter storms (and they still did go down; Cupertino was without power for almost 2 days) was simply because the wind was less.

holbrad
0 replies
21h48m

climate-change induced typhoons

Tell me your uninformed, without telling me.

Terr_
0 replies
17h3m

The main challenges are around permitting

In other words, politics scales the other way: The more people you have in the same spot using the same resource, the more different ways they can be unhappy with the management of that resource.

FrustratedMonky
9 replies
1d2h

"no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this"

Regulations on the initial construction? In other words, plan ahead.

But no, I must have my 'Freeeeedooooommmmm'.

You can't force me to prepare.

FredPret
5 replies
1d2h

Why didn’t we think to regulate physics before!?

FrustratedMonky
3 replies
1d1h

Does physics dictate how you build power lines? Where is physics the constraint on more hardened construction? Physics isn't saying, build above ground and 'low cost'.

FredPret
2 replies
1d

Does physics dictate how you build power lines?

Bro.

Come up with a plan and a budget for your buried cables and sell it to the people of Texas who will have to pay for it.

FrustratedMonky
1 replies
22h19m

They are paying for it. It's either on the front end with regulations on more expensive construction, or on the back end with power outages, damage and repairs.

FredPret
0 replies
21h42m

Put that in your presentation to the Texans!

rfrey
0 replies
1d1h

Closer to regulating that providers of essential infrastructure acknowledge that physics exists.

blantonl
2 replies
1d2h

Yeah, well what about existing infrastructure? Most new construction already buries the last mile of power.

But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?

SoftTalker
0 replies
1d1h

I would love it, personally. In addition to being vulnerable to wind and tree damage, above-ground power lines are very unsightly. Just compare any neighborhood with underground power to the ones where you can't look out of any window without seeing ugly poles and wires everywhere.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
1d1h

Sure, just stop complaining about not having power.

Seems like everyone is ready to argue about how impossible everything is. Shrugs "guess it's impossible, we just have to go on like we've always have".

tigerBL00D
7 replies
1d1h

I don't think the difference between the power grid and the power utility is clear to most people. The grid is a statewide wholesale electricity distribution network which consists of generators, substations and high voltage long distance transmission lines. The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses. This hurricane caused a lot of damage to the utility infrastructure. The grid performed fine.

Some people bring up the storm Ian in 2021. Winter storms are fundamentally different disasters. Cold snaps drive up local electricity demand sharply and this is the kind of thing that can stress the grid.

quickthrowman
5 replies
1d1h

The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses.

Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]

Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.

Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-leg_delta

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-wye_transformer

jsjohnst
3 replies
22h58m

Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services.

Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.

brianwawok
1 replies
19h19m

Basically just factories yah? And like large hotels. Your random strip mall business is very happy with a standard 200 amp 240V service.

jsjohnst
0 replies
12h14m

It's more than just factories and large hotels by far, but still not "most" businesses (which implies greater than 50%).

quickthrowman
0 replies
3h54m

I sell and run commercial electrical work and I can think of maybe a handful of places I’ve sent electricians that have a single phase service. I live in a large metro area of 4M people, virtually every commercial building over 4-5k sq ft has a three-phase service where I live. Banks, fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc.

What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.

I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.

I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.

Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.

gunapologist99
0 replies
1d1h

Sorry to be pedantic

Why apologize. You're in the right place for pedantry ;)

fuzzfactor
0 replies
3h52m

In Houston the problems appear to be due to deregulation of the previous HL&P monopoly. If you saw it happen, it was a slow-motion dumpster fire.

I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect.

In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before.

Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg.

That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman.

The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously.

Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg.

Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be.

smelendez
1 replies
1d1h

Ida in New Orleans was a real mess and exposed a lot of issues in the city besides electricity.

Because power was out for so long, everyone threw out a ton of food, but there was no trash pickup in some cases for weeks because of staffing shortages and contract disputes, so there was stinky trash and huge swarms of bright blue flies everywhere. At one point, the mayor suggested people could drive their own trash to the transfer station—after it had been sitting out in 95 degree heat for weeks.

There also was no proper street cleaning, which meant streets and sidewalks were full of storm debris, including things like roofing nails. The lines at tire repair shops were wrapping around the block.

Entergy's meter reading and billing also got completely thrown off. I moved shortly after Ida, and it took months to get any bill at all in the new place, and I only got my final bill for the old place this year, almost three years later, no longer living in Louisiana. (They also never actually sent me the bill or turned on my autopay, so I only knew it was time to pay when the power went out).

ddoolin
0 replies
8h17m

I am from central Louisiana (although I mostly have lived outside the state) and have been considering moving to NOLA and this is the kind of thing that gives me pause. Thanks for sharing.

bastawhiz
1 replies
17h33m

It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this.

Not to be pedantic, but this is easy to fix. Burying power lines, trimming trees, and all of the other labor are solved problems. By and large, it's not even a particularly hard technical problem. It's a bunch of easy solutions that are expensive and tedious and politically unpopular (nobody wants to spend money or tell their constituents that roads will be closed for utility work).

I'd also note that Hurricane Sandy was category 2 when it hit NYC, which is inarguably far denser than Houston. New York had power back for 95% of customers in 11 days. New Jersey did the same in less than two weeks. Texas could be doing better.

randcraw
0 replies
2h44m

The water table in Houston is less than a foot below ground, making line burial impossible, and with almost 7 million residents, economically infeasible. Trees are not the problem since Houston has few trees.

Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.

whoknowsidont
0 replies
3h39m

There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this.

This is quite literally the easiest thing to fix.

presentation
0 replies
14h55m

Why doesn’t Tokyo, which almost entirely relies on above ground power cables and gets hit with strong typhoons every year, not experience these problems? What makes the Houston situation so hopeless?

matt_heimer
0 replies
22h45m

I think there is also a tree maintenance issue, the same problem that lead to fires in California. I'm 2 blocks from where one of the tornados touched down during the derecho and close the transmission lines that were heavily damaged. We were without power for 5 days after the derecho and only 1 day this time. If you look at where power was least impacted and restored the soonest for Beryl it is the same area that was most impacted by the derecho.

I think the derecho took out a lot of the problematic trees and branches.

duped
0 replies
17h32m

Florida took a direct hit from a cat 5 in 2017 and power was back in most places in a couple of days, and iirc they didn't lose a single (new) pole statewide. After Wilma they hardened the infrastructure and this isn't as big a problem there, despite having even worse geographic issues than Texas and New Orleans.

bravetraveler
0 replies
21h59m

This last mile - lines/etc - are also partly what make trivial matters like 'extended cold periods' a problem. I hate it here in TX

tzs
9 replies
1d1h

I can't imagine the city is remotely prepared for (god forbid, and idk how likely it is that far inland anyway) a cat 4 or 5.

In the past they've never had a cat 5. The last cat 5 was Carla in 1961. The last cat 3 was Alicia in 1983. The last cat 2 was Alicia in 2008 (although that was actually east of Houston and just hit Houston with its weaker winds).

Climate change should make such storms more likely to form, but it should also change ocean and air current patterns which could affect the chances they make it to Houston.

The list I got those from noted that in 1961 air conditioning was still novel, which makes me curious. How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning?

The average July temperature in Houston nowadays is 4.2℉ (2.3℃) higher than it was in 1970, and climate change tends to cause more extremes, so I'd guess that the highs are also higher and extreme days more common, so maybe AC has become more of a necessity nowadays?

genocidicbunny
4 replies
1d1h

I'd expect the population of Houston in those days was also a little more self selective, in that of you couldn't deal with that heat, you probably didn't want to live there anyways.

There's a reason a lot of southwestern cities like Phoenix started booming in population when AC became more readily available.

SoftTalker
3 replies
1d1h

Probably right, but also you don't miss what you've never had. Not having air conditioning was just normal.

genocidicbunny
2 replies
1d1h

It might have been normal but people are people and would still seek out more comfortable climates. And if you stretch the definition of air conditioning a bit, we've had that for about as long as we've been living in semi enclosed spaces. Running a fire at night to keep the cave warm is air conditioning. Building your home to have water flowing under the floors so that you can cool or heat the floors passively (I believe the Romans were doing this) is air conditioning. Hanging a wet towel to allow the water to evaporate and cool the room a little is air conditioning.

throwup238
1 replies
1d1h

Before the 20th century people seeked out arable land that could feed them reliably, any comfort the climate provided was a very distant concern.

genocidicbunny
0 replies
1d

Arable land and climates comfortable for people tended to have a very large overlap until the the invention of modern irrigation techniques like center-pivot irrigation. Before that, you need pretty special conditions to be able to successfully farm in many of the places in discussion.

Arable land that isn't habitable for weeks or months out of the year wasn't terribly valuable or sought out.

wongarsu
0 replies
1d1h

How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning

I imagine at first it was really drafty homes, and later on big ceiling fans everywhere

vondur
0 replies
23h29m

If I remember correctly, Houston is one of the most Air Conditioned cites on earth. In the older days, Houston was much smaller with less concrete and paving that holds the heat in, making the entire area warmer. Plus, older houses were designed for the climate that they were in. Now, every place in the US basically gets the same house design regardless of the climate.

throwup238
0 replies
1d1h

There were a lot of behavioral adaptations that don't seem as practical now because the extremes are so much hotter and more frequent. Porch sitting, the siesta, outdoor sleeping on porches and roofs, etc. were all ways to mitigate the heat.

Wealthier people built big houses with lots of thermal mass and tall ceilings while poorer people lived in shotgun houses with aligned doors and porches that created constant airflow.

alexk307
0 replies
23h26m

Why start at 1970 when Houston has a temperature record back to 1889? Start in the 60s and the jump is far lower. Or any other year and the difference changes.

AlbertCory
6 replies
1d2h

It's obvious that everyone wants to blame it on their favorite villain, whatever that is.

A more rational approach would be to look at comparable cities and see how they cope with big storms, whatever the storms' cat numbers. My guess is, no matter what comparables you pick, Houston comes out on the bottom.

Maybe it IS deregulation! You can be in favor of it in general, and still admit, "OK, maybe in this instance it didn't work." That doesn't mean you're giving free rein to the people in favor of the government regulating everything.

blantonl
4 replies
1d1h

The issue was exactly the same with Ida and New Orleans in 2021. Areas of the New Orleans metro area were without power for 3 weeks or more

AlbertCory
3 replies
1d1h

so that's one comparable. Surely there are other First World cities that have storms?

presentation
1 replies
14h49m

Look to Asia, all the major coastal and island cities have far bigger storms than whatever Houston experiences, many times a year, and they pretty much all fare better than this.

AlbertCory
0 replies
2h59m

Someone (maybe in Houston!) should compile a list of all those cities, the storms they've had, and the number of power outage days they suffered. Not a cherry-picked list of "good" cities; ALL of them.

That would be a lot of research, for sure.

vel0city
0 replies
22h59m

Sprawling cities with millions of people that experience Gulf hurricanes?

Miami, which also experiences massive power outages when they're hit with even category 1 hurricanes.

The rains caused flooding, and the combination of rains and winds downed trees and power lines, leaving 1.45 million people without power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina

alexk307
0 replies
23h44m

Houston is a low-lying coastal city surrounded by rivers and bayous whose population has increased 10x since 1950. Not really an ideal situation to build out that kind of housing for millions of people in floodplains.

bdcravens
5 replies
1d2h

I live in an area northwest of Houston.

We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)

In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.

seanmcdirmid
3 replies
1d1h

I live in Seattle’s Ballard area, but work with people on the east side. Big storms blow down branches all the time on the other side of the lake, causing power outages. We have less trees here in Seattle, comparatively, or maybe Seattle power and light is better at tree maintenance, but ya lots of trees = lots of power outages from what I can infer.

Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.

jtolmar
2 replies
1d

Downtown Ballard had a lot of power outages over the last two years. Apparently they were using a different transformer than everywhere else, all of which are getting old, and some procurement mistake lead to the spare parts being back-ordered by a year.

(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)

zacharycohn
0 replies
21h45m

Using different equipment from the rest of Seattle is very Ballard.

seanmcdirmid
0 replies
21h13m

Ya, I live on 60th, so 4 blocks north of market, and it’s weird that they get power outages to about 56th or 57th while we never do.

vel0city
0 replies
22h57m

The delivery price is regulated like it was pre-deregulatuon and is a separate line item in pretty much everyone's bill.

silverquiet
4 replies
1d2h

I see people talking about deficiencies in the Texas grid, and that may be true but hardly seems relevant to Houston; it's the Houston grid that seems to be acutely problematic. In fact, it occurred to me that with much of Houston still offline, the TX grid is probably less stressed than usual and a look at the dashboards on ercot.com would seem to confirm this - capacity is well over demand.

dingnuts
1 replies
1d1h

it's totally irrelevant. there was a wind storm in a region where burying power lines is impractical

without wireless power transmission I'm not sure what people want.

Where do you put lines that can't be buried or blown over?

fragmede
0 replies
23h6m

SimCity and Elon Musk to the rescue! See, we put satellites in space with giant solar panels on then and then just beam the energy down from space, directly to a receiver dish mounted on your rooftop, next to the starlink dish.

bdcravens
1 replies
1d2h

The state grid is problematic at other times, but in the case of storms, it's irrelevant when a fallen tree takes out a physical power line. It's more of a "last mile" issue.

jeffbee
0 replies
22h49m

The solution to last-mile problems is fewer miles. Fact is metro Houston takes up 15x more land than is really called for. A factor of 15 makes a significant difference in the cost of wires, pipes, and roads.

poikroequ
4 replies
1d1h

It's likely a combination of multiple factors. Texas, being a red state, most certainly has a stronger climate denial sentiment, which is going to affect policies and regulations. Texas may be unprepared because major hurricanes were uncommon in the past. Global warming means hotter temperatures which makes long power outages more unbearable. And probably other reasons I can't think of.

I expect things will improve, but it may take some years. As these events become more common and people have to suffer every year, voters are going to get fed up, and Republicans would be foolish to keep up their climate denial stance.

dylan604
2 replies
1d1h

Texas may be unprepared because major hurricanes were uncommon in the past.

Maybe, but no. Texas has its history of major hurricanes. While maybe not as popular of a target as Florida and New Orleans, but Houston definitely has as much of a bullseye on it as a trailer park in a tornado.

Harvey was predicted well in advance that it was going to be a devastating storm. For days ahead I saw the up to 40" of rain and thought that couldn't possibly be correct. Then it happened. Houston took little action and then acted shocked. Of course, Houston has it's own unique set of problems with their lack of zoning rules plus so many other things without having to make some climate denier argument that's not necessarily wrong but just horribly out of place

poikroequ
1 replies
22h43m

I just know what I hear. Power outage during freezing temperatures in winter time, and their response? No handouts, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. As if people in a major metropolitan city can just go into the nearby woods and gather firewood.

Politics is definitely a factor.

sangnoir
0 replies
20h46m

Politics is definitely a factor.

It's also election year. The state agencies didn't submit the emergency declaration work before the storm hit like they usually did in years past - this is not their first rodeo, so it can't be explained by ignorance.

Also, Houston is Harris county, so not exactly the governor's or legislature's favorite voting county.

zdragnar
0 replies
21h39m

Centerpoint applied for $100 mil in funding from the department of energy in 2023 to make their lines more resilient to wind and storms and were turned down.

It's not nearly as clear cut as "red = head in sand"

gunapologist99
4 replies
1d1h

Hurricane Ike was a category 4 that traveled nearly directly over Houston in 2008. (It wasn't a category four when it passed over, since, like all major storms, they weaken as they move inland.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike

Burying lines, especially in historic areas, is incredibly expensive and not necessarily a panacea either, although it helps. Is it worth it?

Realistically, for the millions upon millions of people that live in the greater Houston MSA (and of course except for those who rely on power for healthcare equipment, who really need to invest in a small generator or get to a shelter), it's far more cost effective to simply deal with power outages every decade or two.

During Ike, large parts of Houston, especially to the northeast, were literally underwater, so power wouldn't have helped anyway. The number of utility crews lined up along highways from other states, even from thousands of miles away, in the immediate aftermath of Ike is both inspiring and enlightening, especially when you recognize that they were going into a disaster zone, likely without a nice hotel to go back to or even running water after working a 12 hour shift.

So, no, it's just part of living near the coast in a hurricane-prone area. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.

EasyMark
3 replies
1d1h

I think part of the argument is that it’s like that the number of these events will double or trouble, or even become yearly with climate change.

gunapologist99
1 replies
1d1h

Yes, that's the argument. Of course, some of it remains to be seen, because as of now we're not actually seeing more or more intense storms compared to historical averages (at least that we know about).

Houston has, on average, one large storm event every decade or so, and that hasn't really changed much over the last 100 years. https://www.weather.gov/hgx/major_events

two_handfuls
0 replies
22h54m

We’re probably about to see more and more intense storms over the Atlantic. Hurricane Beryl is the earliest category five Atlantic hurricane in records going back around 100 years ([source](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9r3g572lrno)).

So it’s just a matter of time.

Also, looking at your source, I see 2 tropical cyclones between 1900-1950, 3 between 1950-2000, and then 8 in the 24 years since. To me that looks like an increase in tropical cyclones over time.

mturmon
0 replies
20h58m

(Not an expert, but try to follow climate science as part of $Dayjob. It’s always hard to write quick summaries in Earth Science, because the system is very complex.)

We have to be careful about what is meant by “these events”.

According to the sources I was able to find [1,2], sea level rise (SLR) is perhaps the dominant driver for the increasing damages from tropical cyclones (TCs). Models show some increase (I’m not finding any support for 2x or 3x though!) in the number of high-intensity TCs, and TC intensification is expected to be more rapid.

But the underlying SLR will make even smaller TCs more consequential - even if the number of storms of a given intensity does not change.

[1] specifically says this. And if you look at the consensus report [2], they spend most of their time discussing SLR, in effect as an amplifier for all the trouble a TC can cause. Only in one sentence in a very long discussion do they claim that TCs are themselves worsening, and the statement is quite nuanced:

“For example, hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly and decaying more slowly, leading to stronger storms extending farther inland with heavier rainfall and higher storm surges…”

So if you interpret “these events” as “high dollar damage TCs”, you are correct. But not in the raw number of TCs of a given intensity.

And you are right that the situation is quite dire already:

“Annual frequencies of both minor and moderate coastal flooding increased by a factor of 2–3 along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines between 1990 and 2020” [2]

The same source says models predict a 5-10x increase in flood events by 2100, which is truly staggering. The recommendation of the GP commenter (“If you don't like it, move somewhere else”) seems to be poorly informed about how important adaptation will be.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/a-force-of-nat...

[2] https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/, and expand out “key message 1”.

pennybanks
0 replies
9h18m

its funny people comment and act like they know how strong a hurricane and how much damage it should do like theyre all the same. or that they know how much infrastructure is supposed to break or not break.

if you were there during beryl you know the winds were strong enough to take trees out yes? trust me houston is not a stranger to hurricanes we all went through a cat 4 harvey years back. which well funnily enough didnt have any huge power problems. more so a house and car totally flooded problem. or 10in of water in the house for weeks problem. mold problem.

tropical storm ike before that took out power for weeks causing $30b in damages in the states

wish people would put their energy into helping or something instead of just thinking about their own agenda. or talking crap i dont know i wouldnt wish this on anyone its hell

christophilus
0 replies
1d1h

I’ve lived through a lot of big hurricanes. Cat 1 storms can be worse than more intense storms, as they are often slower-moving, so they can dump a LOT more water per square inch. Not sure if that was the case here, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’d fare significantly worse under higher category storms.

akira2501
0 replies
1d

This was just a cat 1 hurricane

_just_. The definition of "just a cat 1" is winds from 75 to 95 miles per hour. There is some debate over whether it picked up to cat 2 levels just before it made landfall and reweakened to cat 1.

Other??

Political corruption preventing elected officials from actually enforcing any laws or authority over Centerpoint.

epolanski
31 replies
1d2h

To me it's crazy people run so much AC at home.

It's like making global warming a worse problem with AC, so it gets hotter and we use more AC.

I live in Rome, Italy, we had 40C (104F) degree max temperatures during day, and even at night it doesn't fall below 29C (84) and we survive without AC just fine, not just me but the rest of my family in their houses too, of course it is sometimes uncomfortable, but that's summer.

The worst offenders though are the many shops that blast AC 24/7 and have their doors open! Put some goddamn sensors and sliding doors!?

I just can't look at it. Even worse, electricity comes and goes all time during summer and it's hard to work at times (I'm full remote).

I'm fully convinced nobody gives two damns about global warming and our own impact. It's better to just ignore our actions and focus on evil corporations so we keep avoiding doing anything, maybe buy and change our EVs every 3/4 years as it didn't make it worse.

sojournerc
6 replies
1d2h

AC isn't a problem if the energy feeding it is carbon neutral. With a strong mix of renewables and nuclear this is achievable, but instead we continue to burn coal and natural gas to provide base load.

KingOfCoders
5 replies
1d2h

Visited NYC several times. Metro was unbearable in summer because trains heated up outside and blasted the warm air into tunnels and stations through AC.

sojournerc
4 replies
1d1h

AC doesn't really create heat though, aside from minor amounts from the compressor/fan motors, it merely moves it from inside to outside, or into the metro stations as you mention.

KingOfCoders
2 replies
1d1h

Yes, AC moves heat from inside homes outside into the city.

sojournerc
1 replies
1d

My point is that it doesn't create heat, thus does not contribute to climate change on its own. Only the energy source that powers it potentially does.

BenjiWiebe
0 replies
21h3m

Since ACs are pretty far from 100% efficient, they turn electricity into heat. There's also heat generated along with the electricity because generation isn't perfect either.

BobbyTables2
0 replies
14h52m

The HVAC fan alone in a surban house can draw 1KW. That’s pretty much all heat.

The AC cools the house at the cost of many more KW.

The house gets cooler but this is all heat from the electrical usage.

KingOfCoders
5 replies
1d2h

Many homes in the US are not build with stone but thin wood. Houses in Europe with stone take some time to heat up. We lived in a 100 year old house in Berlin and it took 2 months until the walls were warm. Also took some months in winter until walls are cold again.

[Edit] This is not about insulation but heat capacity.

bequanna
3 replies
1d1h

Modern "stick built" homes in the US are well insulated and actually quite efficient. Stone walls would be a poor choice in most areas in the US due to extreme conditions.

As you mention, once a stone house heats up in the summer, that is an incredible amount of thermal mass to cool. Your AC would run non-stop. Similar issue in the winter, super high heating costs in cold regions.

KingOfCoders
2 replies
1d1h

This is not about insulation but heat capacity.

zdragnar
1 replies
21h26m

Heat capacity doesn't mean much unless the walls are several feet thick.

The frost line where I live is around 5 feet deep into the ground- meaning that footings for any building have to be that deep to avoid shifting as the ground freezes and thaws.

Summer months thick stone walls can be nice if you are able to keep humidity out, but if you don't and your walls actually stay cool you're dealing with a lot of mold and mildew since water will be condensating 24/7.

KingOfCoders
0 replies
4h43m

"several feet thick."

I don't know how thick a feet is, where we live we don't measure distances by the length of the feet of the king.

But I have lived for 10 years in a house with 30 cm thick walls and it has a tremendously positive effect, when outsite it is 30C and inside the walls are still 20C into July.

"mold and mildew"

Didn't have that problem in 10 years. This more happens with modern insulation than thick stone walls from my experience YMMV.

bluGill
0 replies
1d1h

such houses are great in mild climates, but the us is generally not mild.

thin wood as an engineer has many advantages over stone. Stone seens stronger but often it isn't where strength matters while being stronger where it doesn't-

epolanski
3 replies
1d

I'm commenting on Rome though, my city. Not Houston.

snailmailman
2 replies
1d

The point is that Houston is both hotter and more humid. People have already died due to heat because of this loss of power. The AC is not a luxury but a necessity.

epolanski
1 replies
19h44m

I'm not commenting on the usage of ac in Houston (albeit it's nonsense to raise a city in such a place) but in Rome.

zamadatix
0 replies
4h52m

Perhaps your original comment made it to the wrong post? This article was about the problems Houston is having from power and AC being out for days so people are naturally expecting comments and their ensuing discussion to also relate to this.

soared
2 replies
1d2h

Homes/buildings in your area are built with not having AC in mind - window locations, shade, insulation, etc is all purpose driven. Homes in Texas and generally the US are built with AC in mind, so we can’t not use it - it would get 104 inside.

genocidicbunny
1 replies
1d1h

I've also noticed that newer homes tend to have this problem more than older ones. They're better sealed thermally, so while they're more efficient to keep cool, when they get hot they stay hot for a lot longer. Great for winter, not so much for summer heatwaves.

I used to live in an apartment built in the 70s which was a pain to cool or heat because it was so badly sealed. But the one benefit it did have is that on hot days with cool nights it'd very quickly cool off, without needing AC. My current place requires AC unless I mind waiting until 4am for it to cool off.

BenjiWiebe
0 replies
21h4m

It's pretty easy to temporarily "unseal" a house though - open doors/windows.

A well sealed and insulated house takes less to cool too, though. It doesn't just help in winter.

Sadly, in central Kansas where I live, it regularly forgets to get cool at night. Last summer we did our corn silage chopping at night and slept in the day, as we were getting burned trying to operate equipment. At night it was still very hot and muggy. IIRC the dewpoint was in the mid-to-upper 80s F.

baggy_trough
2 replies
1d2h

How humid is it in Rome during the summer compared to Houston?

blantonl
0 replies
1d2h

No even in the same ballpark. Houston is literally built on top of a swamp. The humidity is oppressive.

seanmcdirmid
1 replies
1d1h

Whenever I visit Italy in the summer I check to make sure the hotel I’ve booked has AC. I got burned by that one hot summer in Milan.

Klonoar
0 replies
23h6m

Heh, just got burned by this in the Czech Republic. Far on the east side, hotel advertising A/C but it’s only in a common area - not in the room itself.

Just about drove me insane.

zamadatix
0 replies
1d2h

Lowering energy usage doesn't solve the climate problem it just slows the devastation. We need to use clean energy regardless if it's for AC or for work to have a worthwhile impact on that half of things. From another view: it's better to live well sustainably than be proud of unsustainably living miserably. To do that we need to convince people to pay more for electricity generation instead of pointing out they likely wouldn't die if they used less dirty energy.

ramesh31
0 replies
1d2h

To me it's crazy people run so much AC at home.

Tell me you've never been to Texas in July without telling me.

megaman821
0 replies
19h3m

The world uses vastly more energy for heating homes than cooling them. It would be more energy efficient to live in the desert using AC than burning natural gas for heat in northern countries.

genocidicbunny
0 replies
1d2h

In places like Houston, which is effectively built on reclaimed swamplands, it's not the just the temperature, the humidity plays a huge part too. When it's 40C and humidity is at 100% and wet bulb temperatures are approaching 30+C, lack of AC becomes a life threatening problem. It becomes practically impossible to cool off and maintain a safe body temperature, especially for the very young, chronically ill, or elderly people.

spamizbad
20 replies
1d1h

Why is Texas infrastructure so brittle? It’s a wealthy, prosperous state unencumbered by regulation or legacy stuff that tends to cause issues in other states.

namesbc
3 replies
1d

It is the lack of regulation that is the problem here. The power company is incentized to make higher profits year around by not preparing for a disaster.

nxm
2 replies
21h21m

PG & E is "heavily regulated" and yet Newsome allowed them to not upgrade power lines which eventually caused massive wild fires

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h54m

Part of the issue is that its listed on the stock market

dehrmann
0 replies
20h19m

The fact that PG&E, in a much more regulated and liberal California, also has power problems is interesting and valid, but Newsom's only been governor since 2019 (the Camp Fire was 2018), so you can't put that much blame on him, and there are decades of blame to go around.

krapp
3 replies
1d1h

You've answered your own question. The incentives of capitalism "unencumbered by regulation" and the necessities of investing in and maintaining infrastructure are often at odds.

bluerooibos
2 replies
1d1h

See the crumbling privatised water infrastructure in London/England as another example of this. The companies in charge allowed the infrastructure to crumble all whilst paying out massive shareholder dividends and holding huge amounts of debt. Then they dare to ask for government bailouts and increased utility bill prices. Someone explain how that's even allowed.

As usual, socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits.

olddustytrail
1 replies
23h45m

It's worse than that. Those massive debts are from loans from a loan company. The parent company of the loan company is also the parent company of Thames water.

It's all a massive scam. It would be better if companies were not able to own other companies.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h52m

In the US companies are sometimes considered people, which really perverts what they can do.

genocidicbunny
2 replies
1d1h

Seems like this was a problem with last mile delivery, which isn't a uniquely Texas problem. Oregon and California have had plenty of major outages due to wind and cold snaps in the last few years as well.

while_true_
1 replies
1d

Not true about California. Outages in storms are highly localized. Some rural areas get power turned off but only when fire risk is extreme. There have been no large cities without power for a week like Houston.

genocidicbunny
0 replies
1d

Not a week, but just earlier this year there was a storm in the SF Bay Area where there were many people without power for 3-5 days. Most of the damage was due to last mile transmission failures from debris. And I'm sure that had the storm been in the hurricane strengths, the damage would have been even worse.

Portland too had that major cold snap where power was out due to last mile transmission problems. I know at least one city in the metro area that sped up their plans to bury their power transmission because during that storm large parts of that city were without power for days.

akira2501
1 replies
1d

Are you judging it to be "brittle" based upon popular headlines or some insider information?

cocacola1
0 replies
23h56m

They're likely basing it off the fact that so many people have been without power for so many days.

sparker72678
0 replies
1d

Profit does not rise proportionally with costs as reliability increases (i.e. it costs a lot of money to make it more reliable, but you don't get to charge substantially more). The electric company monopoly does not have incentives to spend money to be more reliable. All the downsides of widespread power outage are externalized onto the customers.

msie
0 replies
1d1h

We all know...

mardifoufs
0 replies
21h55m

We had a power outage in March for like 4 days, that spanned the entire city of Montreal last year. We were lucky the weather was pretty warm. This type of stuff just happens sometimes.

We also had a 2 weeks long power outage 20 years ago. Again, in Quebec

jjav
0 replies
10h20m

unencumbered by regulation

There's the answer.

A public utility is a natural monopoly. If given lack of regulation (or, wrong/weak regulation) it will of course seek to maximize profit at all cost, which means very little is spent on grid quality and maintenance (these things eat into profits, thus bad).

grecy
0 replies
1d

Same reason healthcare, higher education and many other necessities of life are horrifically expensive.

Ever increasing profit.

freen
0 replies
1d

Huh, odd that profit seeking behavior doesn’t maximize the public well being in the case of natural monopolies.

chasd00
0 replies
22h59m

Houston has always been a wreck. This is just another example.

(I live in Dallas)

KingOfCoders
18 replies
1d2h

Germany has overengineered and expensive utilities, but I'm happy sometimes that all power and telephone lines are underground.

galdosdi
9 replies
1d

Another poster pointed out that the cost of moving lines underground is really only a one time fee of about $5 per person per month for about 10 years. This does not seem too expensive for a permanent increase in reliability. One thing I will miss about living in Manhattan is the power never ever went out, at least not due to the distribution grid.

And, it's a minor, minor thing, but as a bonus, having lines out of sight is very nice.

jncfhnb
6 replies
1d

Per person per month for 10 years is a ridiculous unit to choose. Europe benefits from being very dense. The US grid is way more spread out.

Undergrounding costs are around $1M per mile. The US has millions of miles of lines.

xboxnolifes
3 replies
23h36m

Look at the numbers and it's not so crazy. This is a last mile issue, not a full grid issue.

chgs
1 replies
22h1m

Americans like to think they’re a special case.

Houston has a higher density than say Magdeburg

jncfhnb
0 replies
14h40m

The climate and suitability for under grounding in Magdeburg is vastly different.

jncfhnb
0 replies
19h53m

I’m only including distribution numbers in my figures here. Transmission does not make sense to underground.

fragmede
1 replies
22h58m

I get that America is big, but the amortized per-person cost is what's relevant. If something costs $10 M per mile, but there are a million people per mile, suddenly that's not all that expensive. I'd pay more than $10 to not have my power go out for a week after a big storm that's likely to happen again in a few weeks and next year and the year after. A backup generator costs way more than $10.

jncfhnb
0 replies
19h54m

The amortized per person cost is obviously not going to be constant when the demographic density and line mileage changes. That’s why it’s a foolish standard

There’s NEVER 1M customers per mile in a distribution system. There’s only going to be a few thousand per substation. Half of the line miles will have customer counts in the tens or ones.

chgs
0 replies
22h5m

I was in New York during hurricane sandy, staying in a hotel on I think 28th street.

Really weird seeing complete darknesss to the south with just a march of flashlights coming uptown to charge their phones in Duane Reade.

akira2501
2 replies
1d

The water table in Germany and the water table in Texas are two different things. Notably, the city is right next to a giant body of salty ocean water, which is why they get hurricanes in the first place, but it also severely complicates the process of creating underground utilities.

stevenwoo
0 replies
17h53m

Downtown Houston has a big underground tunnel system connecting building so people don’t have to walk outside. The first big plan to reduce flooding in Houston was to create tunnels similar in size to the ones under Tokyo to funnel water from Houston area to gulf. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environm...

sangnoir
0 replies
20h5m

This argument would be more convincing if Houston didn't have any underground infrastructure.

Thorrez
1 replies
11h17m

Does Germany get as bad of storms as the US? This article seems to say the US has worse weather than Europe:

the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish.

https://www.neh.gov/article/storm-patrol

binkethy
0 replies
10h14m

What a weird take. Europe has extreme weather to match North America.

Any Texans wanting to talk about their special case can have a look at Iberia and its meteorology, for example.

The notion that North American weather is anomalistic is false.

k8sToGo
0 replies
1d1h

Utilities are much cheaper in Germany than for example California. At least it was when I lived there.

issa
0 replies
21h50m

My wife is from Germany and one of the weirdest things for her in moving to the US is that the power goes out.

hooloovoo_zoo
0 replies
19h11m

Much more complicated in Houston than Germany. Aside from the density which has been mentioned, Houston regularly floods so the lines would frequently be underwater. Plus, the rise and fall of the water table causes the ground to expand and contract. That’s why the sidewalks are constantly buckling.

Molitor5901
17 replies
22h43m

Deregulation is a terrible idea for life supporting and necessary utilities, power specifically. By deregulating the market, everyone is forced to compete for a finite amount of transmission ability for low profits, each one trying to undercut the other IMO. It completely destabilized the Texas power market. At this point, it may be worth considering putting the Texas power grid into some type of federal receivership.

AtlasBarfed
11 replies
22h39m

Texans basically should view grid independent home solar as a minimum requirement.

Between this and the ice storm s couple years ago Texas has shown itself incapable of utility grade service.

In general I think the disaster resilience afforded by home solar is simply not valued enough by subsidies and incentives policies.

standardUser
6 replies
22h30m

Texas is a highly urbanized state and a significant number of families don't have the ability to install home solar, so it cannot be viewed as 'minimum requirement' and some other solution is neccesary.

chgs
2 replies
22h7m

Maybe people could club together and form some form of group which provides that minimum requirement for the whole area. You could perhaps have an equal say in the group, and have a meeting every few years where you elect some people to run the thing on your behalf.

standardUser
0 replies
21h2m

Or the state government could implement a regulatory regime that ensures its citizens have reliable electricity. A feat the other 49 states seem to have mostly accomplished.

fy20
1 replies
15h55m

In my country the price of roof mount solar is now under €2000 for 10kWp. That includes government subsidies, however they are not that high (€350 per kWp).

Texas is a much richer economy than where I live, so I see no reason why it couldn't be a requirement, at least for single family homes.

_heimdall
0 replies
6h46m

With a subsidu of €350 per kWp, does that mean the government subsidizes €3500 for the roof mounted solar that you quoted at €2000 for 10kWp?

If so that seems like a pretty substantial subsidy to me, the government is covering around 63% of the total cost.

tstrimple
0 replies
17h49m

We must have very different definitions of urbanized. Hundreds of square miles of suburbs doesn't quite count as "urbanized".

bsder
3 replies
20h41m

Texans basically should view grid independent home solar as a minimum requirement.

And then hail punches through your solar panels and you have to pay for that.

If there were a cheap, easy solution, people would have done it already.

throwaway4220
2 replies
18h59m

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/2013/HAIL.png

Here is a hail map.

https://solarpower.guide/solar-energy-insights/infographics/...

Here is a rough solar install map

I think it’s not necesarily true that people avoid Solar because of hail, although anecdotally I know a friend who is reluctant for this very reason

That being said, flooding happens very often and yet homes in Houston are not flood proof.

And let’s not get into the whole cheap energy from carbon sources being subsidized

vel0city
1 replies
17h47m

I have multiple friends who have had significant damage to their home solar setups this year alone due to hail and high winds in North Texas.

Some who didn't have hail damage are now having difficulty getting other roof damage repaired because in order for their warranty to be valid they need certain people to remove the panels before other roof work can be done. But those people are massively backed up by all the other people needing panels removed/reinstalled/replaced.

AtlasBarfed
0 replies
14m

Truly an insurmountable problem for our civilization.

Well, better keep driving 5mpg trucks and dying when the power company fails then.

mardifoufs
1 replies
21h51m

I think this is just confirmation bias. We have plenty of power outages, some that last longer than this (the 1998 ice storm in Quebec took down the power for weeks). Last year we were out of power for 4 days, again right in the middle of Montreal. It just seems like HN likes to see stories about the Texas power grid, since I don't even remember a story about Montreal's outage last year hitting the front page for long.

I don't think anyone could argue that Quebec has a deregulated power grid, it's the complete opposite in fact. Power generation, distribution, and last mile connections are all nationalized.

Jensson
0 replies
5h23m

You want a mix, you don't full government control but you don't want full free market either.

zdragnar
0 replies
21h37m

Centerpoint applied for $100 mil in funding from the department of energy in 2023 to make their infrastructure more resilient and were denied.

If you want to blame politics, this is a case of national bureaucracy getting it wrong than deregulation.

sjs382
0 replies
3h39m

This has nothing to do with the grid, nor deregulation.

The supply market is deregulated. The last mile transmission is not.

bob1029
0 replies
20h41m

I don't know that this event is a great example for your argument.

An entirely different energy market model (MISO/Entergy) was also heavily impacted. The Woodlands, Conroe, et. al. are on a completely different grid. I don't get to pick a "retail electricity provider" and I live 20 minutes from people who can. Doesn't seem to matter.

All markets hit by Beryl are approximately the same degree of screwed, regardless of any specific underlying ideologies.

gigatexal
15 replies
1d2h

Not angry enough to get their elected officials to make the power grid changes needed to make it more robust to such things.

I mean how can they when reps like Ted Cruz fly off to Cancun when the weather gets really bad.

wannacboatmovie
9 replies
1d2h

Not angry enough to get their elected officials to make the power grid changes needed

Do you have the magic solution that makes them resilient to natural disasters short of burying every single power line underground? Which is not only impractical but insanely expensive. The infrastructure has been physically damaged or destroyed. You fired off a politically charged comment and offered no specifics.

harimau777
5 replies
1d2h

Increased trimming of trees near power lines. Apparently CenterPoint spent significantly less than some of the other power suppliers on maintenance.

I don't know that it would help in this specific instance, but connecting Texas to the rest of the power grid would likely make the system overall more resilient.

wannacboatmovie
2 replies
1d2h

I don't know that it would help in this specific instance, but connecting Texas to the rest of the power grid would likely make the system overall more resilient.

Irrelevant wishful thinking. The outages are caused by localized physical damage. There is no shortage of grid power. Inter-ties to every grid in the world wouldn't help when the wires on the last mile have been physically destroyed.

harimau777
1 replies
1d1h

Note that I said "I don't know that it would help in this specific instance"

Previous outages have been caused by issues with the grid rather than lines. Apparently CenterPoint is predicting that this summer power usage will near the grid's capacity and supposedly CenterPoint is known for underestimating.

wannacboatmovie
0 replies
1d1h

Okay, but none of that has anything to do with the power lines being physically mangled or toppled by wind.

blantonl
1 replies
1d2h

It wouldn't have helped. Trimming trees is preventative maintenance so that simple wind gusts don't trip lines when branches encroach on power lines.

The only way you can prevent damage from falling trees is to completely remove them.

harimau777
0 replies
1d1h

Then it might be necessary to remove or relocate the trees since Houston is so vulnerable to hurricanes.

tardy_one
0 replies
1d1h

Improving a percentage of a net has reduced down percentage for a reduced timeframe, so it seems like there are obviously better alternatives to the hand wringing approach if the goal isn't actually to justify doing nothing.

TulliusCicero
0 replies
1d

Do you have the magic solution that makes them resilient to natural disasters short of burying every single power line underground? Which is not only impractical but insanely expensive.

"Do you have any suggestions other than what would actually work??"

547555
0 replies
1d2h

It targets the right. His comment won't get [flagged] even if it's a mind fart.

39896880
4 replies
1d2h

Notice the deflection by the Lt Governor:

“People have a right to be extremely frustrated with CenterPoint. People are suffering through terribly oppressive heat, a lack of food and gasoline availability, debris everywhere, and much more,” Patrick said. “The poor and most vulnerable are suffering the most.”

Not, “People have a right to be frustrated with the government,”

ta125865421
3 replies
1d2h

What is going on over there? Seems like crazy town. With the geriatrics and corruption, good god it looks dystopian from a rando aussie pov.

FredPret
2 replies
1d1h

Any country looks dystopian from the news.

From the outside, your own country seems to have a dystopian liking for government control of speech and the internet.

If your daily experience does not align with this perception, consider that Texans might be in exactly the same boat as you, perception-vs-reality-wise.

sonotathrowaway
1 replies
1d1h

The attorney general of Texas is openly corrupt and is in the middle of a criminal trial.

Acting like Texas isn’t uniquely shitty requires intentionally forgetting reality.

FredPret
0 replies
1d

The government of many places, like the EU and Australia, openly and regularly make moves to crack down on individual freedoms in favour of state power - and they aren’t even in criminal trials.

Mindless2112
13 replies
1d2h

TL;DR:

“The grid is a whole different issue which we’re addressing, have been addressing, and will continue to address,” Patrick said. “The power is down because the lines are down, and the transmission lines are down primarily because trees fell on them.”
SoftTalker
9 replies
1d2h

Yes, building the infrastructure in the cheapest way possible has consequences.

Underground lines would not be vulnerable to falling trees. But they are a lot more expensive to install, and when they require maintenence for any other reasons.

wongarsu
7 replies
1d2h

As European I find it strange how few power and telecom wires seem to be buried in the US. What's up with that? I get that in rural regions digging a ditch isn't worth it, but the Houston area has pretty high population density and still has wires on poles.

genocidicbunny
1 replies
1d2h

A lot of the infrastructure was established when density was much lower, so it was built out in the cheaper way, and now changing it is more expensive than just keeping on keeping on.

That and a lot of Europe got to do some involuntary infrastructure rebuilding in the 1940s that the US didn't.

vel0city
0 replies
22h49m

To be fair to the comparison and Houston, the vast majority of Houston didn't exist in the 1940s either.

structural
0 replies
1d1h

For comparison, the Houston metro area (which is basically just the original city limits + what used to be its suburbs but have really just all grown together) is the size of the entire country of Belgium.

llamaimperative
0 replies
1d2h

Houston doesn’t have high population density. It has a gigantic population over an utterly enormous land area. And that’s why they “can’t” build infrastructure correctly and cost effectively.

chasd00
0 replies
22h45m

If this happened every year they’d be underground. Situations like this aren’t common enough to create the need for a real fix. They’ll just patch it up and move on.

ars
0 replies
13h48m

Huston is a swamp, it's not easy to bury power lines and keep the water out of them.

_heimdall
0 replies
1d2h

My understanding is that its largely a byproduct of how many of our major cities developed. When power infrastructure was originally being run, our cities were much less dense than what was already in Europe. They installed power above ground because there wasn't the density to really support funding underground lines, and because above ground lines are easier to add to as the city does become more dense.

I lived on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple years. The island gets hit with storms pretty regularly, two or three major storms in my lifetime if I'm not mistaken. All of the power lines were above ground until maybe 5 years ago for two reasons - the island had a pretty low density for full time residency and buried lines are expensive, and they were worried about issues with burying lines in a sand island that can quite literally move and shift after a major storm. It seems like the latter either isn't a concern today, and its a good thing because those power poles were always causing problems on the island.

wolfendin
0 replies
1d2h

They are also a lot more vulnerable to flooding which is also a major issue in a hurricane

39896880
2 replies
1d2h

Is the grid not composed of power lines?

wongarsu
0 replies
1d2h

What he means (but can't say directly) is that this isn't like the last couple highly public Texas blackouts. This time the power is available, there is enough generating capacity online and connected, they just can't get it delivered.

FireBeyond
0 replies
1d2h

Texas famously wanted to be "independent" from the energy market and has steadfastly refused attempts from the federal government to have it join regional grids for the purposes of redundancy and resiliency, saying it can handle its own needs just fine.

Until every power grid failure, when they ask the Feds for relief money (this is notwithstanding that in cases like this, they are not just asking for money for the grid failures but the general aftermath of Beryl, but it is a component).

ndr42
11 replies
1d2h

I‘m curious, Texas seems to get a lot of sun - how common are private solar installations on the roofs? Combined with a battery you could lower your electricity bill and would be safe from this kind of problem.

In my neighbourhood in northern germany about 5% of the houses have them. They pay for themself in about 5-10 years.

edit: spelling

wannacboatmovie
8 replies
1d1h

Are you suggesting that the vast ghettoes and low-income areas in Houston all install solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls? Many people in hardest-hit areas struggle paycheck to paycheck- if they're working at all.

ndr42
5 replies
1d

No I do not. I was not aware of the vast ghettoes. But some kind of middle class has to exist as the article headline talks about air conditioning - in Germany air conditioning is not common even in the upper middle class - this may be different in the US - idk.

vel0city
0 replies
22h52m

It turns out the climate of Houston and Germany are pretty different. Who knew.

nemomarx
0 replies
1d

Air conditioning is very common and very cheap here - you get little window units for a few hundred and such.

laweijfmvo
0 replies
1d

in the US many people expect their houses to always be between 68 and 72 degrees fahrenheit (or some other ridiculous numbers), year round.

chasd00
0 replies
22h53m

“Vast ghetto” is a bit extreme but a lot of the gulf coast is very poor indeed. Texas has plenty of very poor neighborhoods as does Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida right in prime hurricane paths.

Falkon1313
0 replies
20h26m

Germany is way farther north though. Houston is further south than Israel, about the same latitude as Kuwait City and the Sahara Desert. The temperature averages 20-30°F warmer than Berlin (33-40°C), or put another way, Berlin's record high temperatures are a typical day in Houston. Also very humid since it's right near the ocean. Comparison charts:https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~75981/Comparison-of-...

So yes, air conditioning is very common there, even if you're poor that's one thing you will try to find a way to get.

In the ghettos it's normally an old window unit, not central AC. Also shotgun shacks, which are houses setup with a straight-through floorplan so that if you open the front and back doors the whole thing becomes kind of a wind tunnel. Not as good as AC, but better than nothing.

In those neighborhoods, you'll also often see people (especially elderly and children) hanging out at the neighborhood church or mom and pop store, where there is air conditioning, if they don't have AC or it isn't working.

galdosdi
1 replies
1d

This is what financialization is for -- allowing homeowners to get "free" panels in exchange for paying back out of the savings over the years. Leasing panels is not uncommon.

If these kinds of services don't exist in enough quantity, government subsidy could help.

akira2501
0 replies
1d

allowing homeowners

They don't own the homes. They likely rent them.

government subsidy could help.

More government money going directly over the people who most need it into the hands of the people who least need it. The property owner class redirects another crisis to their benefit.

collinmcnulty
0 replies
1d1h

Solar installations are common and growing. I put one on my Houston roof this year. However, battery backups to allow you to keep the lights on with your solar when the grid is down are much more expensive. Many people have gotten gas backup generators in the past few years instead.

blantonl
0 replies
1d1h

Solar installations in suburb cities in Texas are extremely common.

Scoutmaster
8 replies
23h49m

Yesterday I spoke with a Generac (home standby generator) dealership owner in the Houston area, and they are getting swamped with calls (80 a minute at times) and they have 20 people manning the phones.

One of the problems I see is that people aren't prepared. I live my life by the motto "Be Prepared" (see username). One of the Merit Badges I teach is Emergency Preparedness, and with camping, my Scouts are okay going without electricity and electronics. Even if you're not interested or able to participate in Scouting, swing by your local Scout Shop and pick up an Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge booklet and learn what you can do to Be Prepared. It doesn't extend to just hurricanes.

jmward01
5 replies
21h38m

We live in a society and preparing as a group means that we can efficiently use resources and focus our energy on things that are interesting instead of everyone being overly prepared. Everyone going out and buying a generator is expensive, wasteful and incredibly inefficient. Why isn't it reasonable to just expect reliable infrastructure and quick responses to issues?

BenjiWiebe
2 replies
21h15m

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect reliable infrastructure after getting many examples of how the infrastructure is not reliable.

You and I are highly unlikely to be able to fix the infrastructure; we can, however, be prepared for doing without it.

jmward01
0 replies
19h59m

I think it is better to put that energy into improving things and building a better future for everyone. As a country it feels like we have forgotten that we can work together to do big things. I still think we can.

fellowniusmonk
0 replies
20h2m

Due to occasional failures we should now throw our hands up and label systemic undercutting, and poor governance as unfixable.

Because things are bad sometimes let's excuse unlimited incompetence when expected situations are ignored and cause inevitable catastrophic failure.

Sometimes plans fail so let's excuse failure to plan.

When a huge storm blows through with minimal fuss because preparation and regulation was taken seriously let's downplay the risk and deregulate and dismantle safety apperatus as they are clearly unneeded....

It goes on and on... why did we hire these security guys we never have breaches, why did we hire these sys and network admins everything always works, why do we have all these pesky earthquake codes no buildings have fallen recently...

After nearly 40 years I still can't understand the mental gymnastics required to be so obdurate. It's just nihilistic slash and burn thinking isn't it.

throwaway4220
0 replies
18h58m

Sadly we do not live in such a society in most of the country. It’s every man/woman and family for themselves. Covid laid that bare where I live.

_heimdall
0 replies
6h43m

What you're describing here makes our society sound particularly weak. You're basically describing a society that can't be bother with the basics of survival, we're only capable of having those taken care of for us so we can focus on whatever we think is interesting and actually worth our time.

thehappypm
0 replies
18h12m

I can’t imagine having no plan for backup power in a hurricane corridor

gunapologist99
6 replies
1d

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the constant repairs after a major storm every 10 to 15 years, Houston actually has one of the lowest energy costs in the United States: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

For some real numbers for Houston specifically in the middle of the hot summer months, input 77002 (a Houston metro zip code) into Texas govt's electricity provider search engine https://powertochoose.org/ ; it will show most plans are around 12-14 cents per kwh, down to 10.9 c/kwh on a variable 12 month 500kWh plan.

laweijfmvo
2 replies
1d

does it matter how cheap it is if it’s not available?

gunapologist99
1 replies
23h57m

That's something you could decide for yourself and vote by moving there or away. Many residents of Houston would gladly tolerate an occasional outage to not see prices go up, and critical services like emergency services, hospitals, and datacenters all have generators, so it seems to be something that can be worked around with a bit of effort and expense.

arp242
0 replies
18h49m

Many residents of Houston would gladly tolerate an occasional outage to not see prices go up

Source on that?

Also, when did people vote for this issue specifically? Was there a referendum about this?

protastus
1 replies
21h47m

It seems that it's cheap because they're cutting corners on infrastructure.

kibwen
0 replies
21h2m

And then go begging for disaster relief and emergency funds from the federal government, so the rest of the country gets to cover the costs. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.

Sam713
0 replies
5h54m

Part of the reason Houston electricity is cheap is because a lot of power generation is from natural gas https://www.gridinfo.com/texas/houston, and Houston area is also a trading hub and hosts some of the largest nat gas refineries in the US. TDU charges are relatively fixed for utility providers in Texas, so transmission infrastructure tends to have less impact on rates than supply and trading.

S_A_P
3 replies
21h39m

I was directly hit by Beryl, and just got power back today. For us, the issue was trees taking out the power lines. We live on acreage with a lot of pecan trees, and lost 4 of them in the storm. 2 of them toppled over on the power line. I personally don't think that Centerpoint has done a bad job here, Houston is a large land mass and there is no way that you can get everyone back online with as much wind damage as we sustained much quicker than what happened. This storm was so much different than Harvey, which was a flood event. We did have some flooding but nowhere near that level with Beryl. Really, its just one of those situations that just sucks, and there isnt a whole lot you can really do about it.

londons_explore
1 replies
21h32m

One option is multiple feeds to most streets.

Ie. If power lines at one end of the street get felled by a tree, power just comes from the other end of the street instead.

High voltage distribution lines can be done the same - every transformer getting fed from at least 2 places.

Obviously with many lines down, such a system might leave everyone with power, but total power deliverable is still lower. For that, you need smart metering that integrates with consumers distribution boards such that at times of stress on the power network, less important loads are turned off by default (ie. Pool heaters), whilst lighting and fridges stay on.

Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.

ars
0 replies
13h51m

Ie. If power lines at one end of the street get felled by a tree, power just comes from the other end of the street instead.

That would imply a live wire under a tree. Not a good idea.

Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.

Tons of places do that, in exchange for a lower rate you install a box that lets the utility shut off your AC when demand is very high. It's available in almost all states last time I checked.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h55m

Why don’t they keep up with the trees? Other places with trees they will use chainsaws from helicopters and regular mowing to maintain the transmission lines. In neighborhoods they cut very generous Vs in trees that are close to wires.

xyst
2 replies
20h41m

I’m surprised people still live in that area. The aftermath of Harvey in 2017 would have been the eye opener. Yet the area sees a massive influx of residents every year [1]

Any area near coast line is going to disappear over the next couple of decades due to climate change.

[1] https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2024/03/19/texas-populat...

nocoiner
1 replies
19h9m

Houston isn’t particularly near the coast, believe it or not. And the flood control infrastructure has been dramatically improved since Harvey. This occurrence seems to be a failure of the local transmission and distribution monopoly.

vel0city
0 replies
16h40m

I grew up with a Houston mailing address and was less than 5mi from the water.

wnevets
2 replies
22h55m

texas and not having power go together like a horse and carriage

nxm
1 replies
21h21m

Meanwhile in California...

wnevets
0 replies
21h18m

How many people don't have power in California?

jmyeet
2 replies
23h52m

Note: this isn't a power grid issue. Texas is famously not connected to the national grid [1]. This is an issue of downed power lines.

An obvious question is: why doesn't Houston have underground power? It turns out that Houston really shouldn't exist. It's built on a swamp. It's also hot so heat dissipation is an issue. So it's expensive [2]. Houston is also famous for its lack of zoning [3]. Combine this with a lot of really old neighbourhoods that don't, for example, have sufficient setbacks to bury cabling and you have a hot mess.

It's also worth pointing out that Houston is one of the worst urban sprawls on the planet. It's almost as large as LA with slightly more than half the population.

It's accurate to describe Houston as a low-lying car-dependent hellscape built on a swarmp with no urban planning in a hurricane zone.

[1]: https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-07-22/texas-elec...

[2]: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/05/24/burying-...

[3]: https://therealdeal.com/texas/2023/03/16/dont-say-the-z-word...

AlexandrB
1 replies
22h35m

It's almost as large as LA with slightly more than half the population.

Geez. I thought LA was quite bad already.

jmyeet
0 replies
22h20m

Here are some comparisons I like to use that really put things in perspective, particlarly for Europeans:

1. The Greater Houston Metro Area is larger than Wales;

2. Greater Houston has fewer people than London but is almost twenty times the area;

3. IIRC if liad out the Greater Houston area over England it would stretch from London to Birmingham;

4. Greater Houston is, in fact, larger than several states including New Jersey;

5. Greater Houston is more than half the size of Switzerland.

ryzvonusef
1 replies
10h28m

Are roof top solar panels able to survive hurricanes?

I think for a rich sunny region like texas, best answer is resiliant microgrids with rooftop solar and powerwalls.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
2h50m

Considering the entire roof might come off, I doubt it.

kazinator
1 replies
5h20m

“Seniors in assisted living and nursing homes should have been more of a priority for power restoration.”

That shows a gaping misunderstanding of electricity.

For that to be possible in this situation, the assisted living and nursing homes would have to have their own, dedicated power plant that is knocked out by a hurricane, separate from the knocked-out power plants for anything else. Then you prioritize fixing that power plant first.

That would require them to be on their own dedicated circuits, separate from everything else in the same city block. And for the problem to be local to them, and not the outage of a big power station far away.

Idea: maybe these homes should have their own wind, solar and generators, not to be 100% reliant on the grid.

deepsun
0 replies
5h3m

In Europe (at least some countries), all electricity consumers belong to one of 3 categories. E.g. medical facilities are 1 category higher than regular homes.

Each category has their own reliability targets, although I don't think policy specifies how that target is met: separate circuits or a backup generator.

My point -- it's all already known for 50+ years. And I believe it's all must be already done in Texas as well.

bob1029
1 replies
1d2h

My power was out until ~4am today.

Incredibly, my fiber internet never went down the entire time. That part of my infrastructure is buried and they back it all up with proper generators.

matt_heimer
0 replies
22h55m

I'm in the affected area. The contractors that they used to install the last mile fiber didn't do a great job. They not only damaged other cables like the coax but "buried" isn't how I'd describe the fiber. In the easements the fiber is only a couple inches below ground at most, in some places it was above ground and I had to bury it myself.

I do wish Comcast (and Tmobile) would use generators instead of battery backups. We get about 4 hours of internet when the power is out and I run the home router off of a generator.

mouse_
0 replies
1d2h

frustrated seems like an understatement

more_corn
0 replies
23h52m

Get rooftop solar and a battery.

kkfx
0 replies
1d

My two takes:

- due to climate change alone AND business predatory practice alone infrastructure are very vulnerable and there is no easy fix at infra level;

- p.v. and batteries for large slices of the inhabited planet where they are meaningful AT CHINESE PRICES are an expensive backup that can pay back itself even without emergencies.

Corollary: doing our best to annihilate companies who makes absurdly high margins on p.v. and batteries and do individually our best to be covered. Personally I eat my fingers a bit when 4 years ago I decide for a small (8kWh LFP) backup with only 5kWp p.v. instead of 10kWp/30kWh witch would give me enough also in winter in case of a blackouts. In summer I can be autonomous since local climate is hot only during the day, no need of A/C from early evening to mid-morning.

Corollary of the corollary: built modern well insulated homes is needed, not only to consume less as a whole society but also to live well individually.

iftheshoefitss
0 replies
22h50m

haarp 20.0 goes dummy on bro

dingosity
0 replies
18h50m

Just imagine how horrible this would be if climate change were real.

adolph
0 replies
23h57m

Something that did go well is water movement. It was neat to see the bayous rise to just below the flood point then stay right there as the weirs of flood mitigation ponds take off the excess. I’m looking forward to checking out the data to compare the rain/flood gauges compared to past events. [0] Thank you federal tax payers for contributing to this effort!

WRT the local utility, I can appreciate that they have some hard choices ahead. There are two branches of possible futures: one where many more people are charging cars etc and require more power to domiciles; two where battery deployment at the edge bears the brunt of peak loads and requires a lower constant trickle or even nearly nothing as PV is more broadly deployed.

0. https://www.harriscountyfws.org/

Sam713
0 replies
7h21m

I just got power back late last night (6th day of outage). This comes directly on the heels of a prior power outage that also lasted nearly a week from a severe storm back in May. CNP seems to have majorly dropped the ball on this one from a logistics and disaster preparedness standpoint (especially considering they had a trial run only 2 months ago). Unlike the storm in May, a) Beryl was forecasted to impact Houston at least 24 hrs beforehand, b) its hurricane season so CNP should be ready to go. They routinely seem to lag behind on electrical grid improvements and maintenance. From my personal observations, a lot of outages could have been prevented by better tree management. (Anecdotally, I had a tree catch fire behind my house last year due to limbs contacting lines; I called CNP to report and they did nothing; said to watch it and let it burn out. They haven’t trimmed trees on the line behind my house in the 4 years i’ve lived here). With Beryl, it has become painfully apparent that CNP was simply not logistically prepared to handle the impact of hurricanes, and did not prepare in advance, a major failure for a utility provider operating on the gulf coast. These are not black swan events.

Root cause seems to point towards prioritizing shareholder value over providing services, and lack of regulation enabled by Texas laissez-faire handling of utility providers.

A short timeline: In 2014 CNP reported ‘excess revenue’ but were allowed to keep it https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/10/20/texas-puc-leave....

In 2020 a major activist investor put a large stake in CNP https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/12/14/billiona.... The owner of that private equity group also happens to be a major donor to the political party of the current Texas governor, who appoints the commissioners who regulate public utilities (https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/paul-singer-hedge-fund-r...).

Texas electric utilities are regulated in theory, but in practice this regulation seems lax or at least not proactive. This was readily apparent in the 2021 freeze (Uri): https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/10/21/texas-re...

And later in 2021 CNP also made direct political donations to Texas politicians: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/04/texas-energy-industr....

It doesn’t seem like Texas has done much to improve regulation since the 2021 failure. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2022-11-17/texas-lawmakers-a...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/why...

It’s hard to see how these apparent conflicts of interest (and lack of regulation or consequences) don’t create an environment where a state supported monopoly can abuse their position by putting short term profits first.