Yes, but it didn’t have to be. Proper winterization could have prevented many of the outages, but the system was designed to save money for operators and provide the cheapest possible power, especially for commercial customers.
From this article, we have this gem, which I’m really thinking of sending to the Pit:
A defense of a system that sees millions of people out of power for days during freezing weather should not be that the system is working as designed.
Article on the Texas power grid:
One issue is there is competition for natural gas – house heating and for power plants. The fact that cold caused some gas lines to freeze doesn’t help.
Brian
Up around Chicago, they talk of such things as 100-year weather events (tho they seem to be occurring w/ increasing frequency lately!) I’d assume there is a similar concept for cold in TX.
What was the impression after that hurricane? Was there anything that could’ve been done to reduce the damage following such a storm? From the outside, I’ve long considered the lack of rigid zoning around Houston to be curious. And I’ve lived places where they had crappy/nonexistent building codes. Sure, the houses are cheap, but you hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard…
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that extreme weather has been becoming more frequent just about everywhere. So if a government or industry chooses not to invest in prevention, or an individual chooses not to buy a heavy coat, well, that’s your choice.
Then, it is simply a question of cost vs benefit, and WHO should pay. Is it worth paying the extra to insulate against a remote possibility, or do you just save the $, figuring you’ll either accept the hit (or try to shift costs on someone else) when the remote event occurs? As a general matter, I’m not a big fan of individuals/entities cheaping out on precautions, and then looking to be bailed out later.
Can someone explain to me how natural gas lines can freeze? Methane’s freezing point is -182C.
I think the system is dramatically multifactorial, and the system has suffered from the extreme cold:
I flipped to Fox’s The View briefly, only to hear them blaming Biden, saying that his desire to get us off of fossil fuels in a decade or three is to blame here, since TX is currently relying on NG and fossil fuels to make up for the crashing failures of wind and solar.
Which is, of course, amazingly ignorant and craven, but …
Not really. We have the concept of 100 year flooding events and such but less so for cold.
The houses, for the most part, held up. The power grid did not, which is not so much on the homeowners.
A lot of homeowner failures we’re seeing are of the “we made fires inside our homes to stay warm and they got out of control” type. And many of the burst pipes would also either not been an issue or much less of an issue had power/heating been available.
What hurricane? As a Dallasite and at over 400 feet above sea level, bump would not experience any effects from a hurricane except perhaps a bit of rain. Some day, it may become an issue because the seas have risen so much, but that day is nowhere in the foreseeable future.
It comes down to the worth of human lives and disruption of business. The recommendations have always been to winterize equipment but the State of Texas has left it at recommendations to be handled voluntarily by the companies running the power plants and natural gas pipelines rather than legal requirements, i.e. they don’t because it’s cheaper not to.
There’s always a bit of water in there as well.
Ayup.
More on that:
My bad - I was thinking about Houston.
Does not compute. I have exposed, above-ground natural gas lines outside my house, as does every house in this city. The average overnight low here over the past two weeks has been below -30C, and daytime highs haven’t gone above -20C. This is not atypical winter weather for my location. I’ve never heard of a frozen natural gas line.
The natural gas coming into your home has been through a treatment plant that removes the water vapor. The gas coming out of the wellhead has not, and freeze-offs in the gathering and transmission pipes are the main source of problems. If the gas can’t get TO the treatment plant, it can’t get through to the generating station or your home.
Ah okay that makes sense. I was reading about frozen lines thinking they were talking about the distribution system and was just baffled. Naturally the wellhead and transmission lines can be protected from freezing too if one cares about that sort of thing, as we manage to have reliable natural gas production through the winter on the Canadian prairies. But, I expect that adds slightly to production costs.
There is also the issue that any significant piping system will have electrically powered sensors and valves here and there. If installed above ground those valves or the motors that move them can be iced up during an ice storm. Or the power to the motors can be cut.
The end result is a section of piping that’s out of control. For safety you may need to cut the flow off upstream of the out-of-control area. Which can have far-reaching downstream consequences.
One of the problems we get here during power restoration post-hurricane is that something is damaged in every single block of the great suburban metroblob. Within any local area it’s very hard to turn any part on until every part has been repaired. And often the first few times it is turned on all that does is reveal show-stopping damage nearby that you hadn’t discovered yet.
Lather rinse repeat until finally that particular 6-block area is healthy enough to stay online. Then you move on to the next 6-block area and start over.
That is interesting, but somehow, even if you don’t see the cost immediately, I would not be surprised if your rates jump at some point. I can’t see the free market worshipers who privatize profit and dump risk on the rest of society not trying to make someone else pay for this fiasco.
Without power, without heat, and increasingly without water.
Look, we have wind turbines up here. They keep turning in the cold. I’ve heard on multiple news outlets now that back about a decade ago during anther cold snap with power issues the utilities in Texas were told it would be a really good idea to winterize their equipment. They didn’t. Probably because it would cost money. Now look at the mess.
From what I understand, 0F is cold enough to actually condense butane as well.
I don’t doubt that it is working as designed… the question is designed for whose benefit? Probably not the average working stiff in Texas…
We have gas lines up here. Oddly enough, they don’t freeze in the cold…
There is a serious problem in the Texas power grid that really should not crumple because of cold. The technology exists to prevent that, the utilities were just too damned cheap to use it.
Nope, can’t spend money - it’s better to have people burning their furniture and kid’s toys to try to stay warm, the entire city of Houston on a boil water order when no one has power for their kitchens, 300+ reports of carbon monoxide poisoning (though not all fatal) from people desperate to keep warm, and at least one city asking for a refrigerated trailer because they’re anticipating an uptick in deaths from all this.
I don’t live in Texas and I’m furious about it. Can’t imagine how the Texans feel now - except for those wealthy enough to jet off to Cancun until the lights come back on.
But - can’t have oversight! Can’t have government regulations interfering with holy profits!
The problem is that the people making the cost-saving decisions are NOT the same people who are, at present, in the cold, the dark, and without water.
Yes. Particularly since up here in Indiana we’ve had even lower temperatures this week but OUR solar and wind turbines have kept producing power. The problem isn’t wind and solar, it’s people too cheap to winterize their equipment.
I wonder if some of those burst pipes might have been mitigated if people were more familiar with where the master shut off valve is for their home, or if a lot of those valves froze up?
Of course, with apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings those shut-offs might not be accessible to the tenants.
From the pictures I’ve seen it looks like the problem might be frozen controls and valves and such, not so much the natural gas itself.
[GOP]Can’t they just leave the bodies outside where it’s below freezing? Typical liberals, always spending money on luxuries.[/GOP]
A bit of both. A lot of people generally do shut them off when they figure out they have a busted pipe.
But some don’t know where it is, some know where it is but not how to shut them off, and some were frozen in water and not easily accessible. We helped our neighbor shut theirs off pre-emptively (probably not necessary) because they couldn’t do it themselves. Standing water in there so that was unpleasant.
The pipes froze up too. It’s not an insurmountable problem but requires spending, which, ya know, Texas and all…
Plus executives who deny that climate change is happening, and so deny that there will be a problem. Especially those in energy companies.
I feel for Texans, except for Republican climate change deniers. They can freeze in the dark.
They might not have any heat or clean water, but by Gawd, they got their bibles and their assault weapons cache, and that’s what matters.
Here’s a question for those well-armed Texans.
Do ravening zombie hordes coming out of the cities shamble more slowly in sub-30F temperatures? Does your weapons’ terminal ballistics get better or worse as their dead flesh stiffens in the increasing cold?