# Why Would the Power Problems in Texas Lead to a Months-long Collapse? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 25, 2021, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719 "2021-02-25T12:33:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/41 "2021-02-28T02:44:20Z")
The analogy I’m seeing is like a mule train dragging a large heavy wagon up a steep mountain incline. Everything’s fine so long as the total weight isn’t too heavy and the load is perfectly evenly distributed by the harnesses to each mule. If those conditions aren’t met the failure can quickly cascade. ---
**Author:** ![jjakucyk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3d9bf3/32.png) [@jjakucyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjakucyk)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/42 "2021-02-28T03:38:33Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > What was going on in 1890 Japan that they developed two separate systems though? Nothing. At that time electric grids with any sort of scale were only just starting to be developed. Prior to that point you may only have a small local plant with a mile or two of service area. Downtown buildings and factories had their own generators, street railways had their own plants, and if you were lucky enough to have service from a fledgling electric utility, it may only be available from sundown until midnight. The idea of regional, let alone national, grids was virtually unheard of until decades later. So it’s no surprise that standardization and interconnects came after too much infrastructure was deployed to realistically integrate it. This is similar to having different railroad gauges or the direction of traffic (many countries that switched to right-hand traffic still have left-hand railroads). Sometimes they just got too far along with deployment to reconcile incompatibilities. This seems to be especially true in Japan where they have highly fragmented private and public utility and transportation companies. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/43 "2021-02-28T03:40:18Z")
Makes sense. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/44 "2021-02-28T07:17:16Z")
Apologies, I read the bit about Japan and traffic many decades ago, and assumed they were talking about the mainland islands. Recall that the American occupying forces in Iraq might have tried to impose CDMA cellular service (thanks to a congresscritter who fronted for Telecom lobbyists) it would not surprise me if the Army had imported replacement electrical generating equipment during the WWII rebuild. I was wrong. but yes, I’ve seen that in industrial environments, very large high-powered transformers can take weeks and months to be replaced. I recall an incident where a local company essentially scoured North America to find and purchase (and deliver) a very large transformer on short notice. I suppose if anything burned out during the grid shutdown, it could take a while to replace. Another bit of trivia I heard, from teachers at school in the 60’s, was that “once upon a time” Ontario had been 25Hz power and before they matched to the rest of North America; fluorescent lights were unusable because at 25Hz the lights flashed noticeably. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/45 "2021-02-28T17:44:13Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Makes sense. Thanks. Worth remembering: in the 1890s the US didn’t just have competing AC frequencies, they had a war between DC and AC development! ---
**Author:** ![Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/marvin_the_martian/32/2898_2.png) [@Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marvin_the_Martian)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2021, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/46 "2021-02-28T18:26:02Z")
Hell, even today New Orleans maintains 70 MW of 25Hz power generation capacity to power their ancient (flood control) pumping systems. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/47 "2021-03-02T14:55:15Z")
> [@k9bfriender](#): > > Not very healthy for the poor thing. Oh know, you let the gray smoke out! And then the black smoke! FOOL! > [@k9bfriender](#): > > The automatic bits are good for some things, but sometimes, they are set up for conditions that are not the conditions they are experiencing, and can do exactly the wrong thing. That kind of design takes deep failure mode study to lay out a robust, 2-fault tolerant kind of system. What that means in layspeak is that the system can sustain any two independent failures and still keep working. So station X goes offline and transformer Y pops and you still have a system that works, albeit with a couple holes in it. But it is incredibly challenging to foresee all possible failures and then design systems that protect against them or work around them. That gets EXPENSIVE. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/48 "2021-03-03T13:57:23Z")
Perhaps a stupid question, but if you moved from 60 Hz Japan to 50 Hz (or vice versa) would you have to get all new appliances? Or are there some like maybe a toaster that wouldn’t make much difference but something like a clock where it would? ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/49 "2021-03-03T14:04:56Z")
Pretty much everything portable nowadays is OK with either frequency. Even non-mechanical clocks. Some mechanical clocks are also frequency agnostic; after all battery operated mechanical clocks exist and they have no frequency at all. You can thank globalized production for that. With half the Earth on 50Hz and half on 60, that Chinese factory will save money making a device that runs equally on both. The other driver is the prevalence of microelectronics. That’s going to need a power supply to drive it with low voltage DC. At which point the frequency of the AC coming in becomes moot; it’s filtered out one way or the other just inside the case. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/50 "2021-03-03T17:38:59Z")
There are frequency converters you can buy to convert between the two: [http://www.gohz.com/how-to-convert-60hz-to-50hz](http://www.gohz.com/how-to-convert-60hz-to-50hz) ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/51 "2021-03-05T05:18:02Z")
Almost all electronics use chips that run on DC; so most power bricks and internal power supplies convert AC to DC (5V, or 9V, or 18V, etc.) . Since people travel a lot (until the last year) it’s no more difficult to handle both 120V and 240V, and a good design can convert both at 50Hz or 60Hz (just have bigger capacitors) almost all electronics don’t care. (I had the misfortune to find my battery charger was 120V-only when I was in Australia). I also found that while heat elements don’t care about 120V60Hz vs. 240V50Hz., they are fussy about the voltage switch for that being flipped firmly all the way - another expensive lesson in Paris. One of our souvenirs or Europe is a hair dryer with an Italian power plug. The one I can’t answer is motors - like a refrigerator compressor. I would assume for a place like Japan, they make them so they work on either frequency, since from what I do know it should not be terribly relevant issue. The only proviso is that items like clock radios or those ancient record players cannot get their timing off the power cycles in that situation, but I imagine most are timed with crystals like watches, radios, and computers were/are. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/52 "2021-03-05T08:55:34Z")
> [@naita](#): > > Worth remembering: in the 1890s the US didn’t just have competing AC frequencies, they had a war between DC and AC development! And most of the remaining DC stuff was turned off ~ 100 years later. In Melbourne, somebody put a back-hoe through the remaining DC distribution network, and the company decided it would be cheaper to just give each of their remaining DC customers an onsite rectifier to convert AC to DC, rather than continuing to maintain DC distribution. NYC and Chicago shut down their DC distribution systems at around the same decade. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/53 "2021-03-05T09:28:07Z")
> [@Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](#): > > [News stories](https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/ercot-texas-was-4-minutes-and-37-seconds-away-from-a-blackout-that-could-have-lasted-months/2562592/) are saying that had the utilities not cut off demand during the emergency, long-lasting damage to the infrastructure would have been much worse. > > Why is that? If users demand more power than is in the system, what physical part of the network is damaged? The actual article linked to doesn’t mention damage, only long-lasting outages. Long-lasting outages are caused by the difficulty in starting and re-connecting the systems. To prevent long-lasting outages, customers are disconnnected: “forcing ERCOT to order outages to prevent a far worse collapse of the entire power system.”, so that the generators are only supplying power to fewer people. This allows the generators to continue running at the correct speed with the correct load. If ERCOT had not ordered outages, then there would have been automatic outages, as suppliers disconnected in an ad-hoc unauthorized manner. The same as all those other generators which had disconnected in an ad-hoc unauthorized manner, because it got too cold. If there were no shutdowns and shutoffs, _then_ there would have been additional damage from running transformers at the wrong frequency, and from generator turbines running at resonance, and the same problems happening to customers with refrigerators or escalators, but that’s almost purely theoretical and there is no real suggestion that would have happened. If the shutdowns aren’t ordered, they happen anyway, just in an unplanned manner. When the power is turned off, apart from the difficulty of balancing load and synchronizing generators, there are always some switches that don’t switch, some lines that short circuit (and the short circuit didn’t burn out, because the power was off), and generators where you just can’t get the thing started again… The more power is turned off, the worse it is. If it’s all turned off, it’s worse than if only half of it is turned off. In the typical case, there is no power to start the electric pumps that pump the water through the boilers that make the steam that run the steam generators. So if you are a nominated/contracted start-up generator, you need a very big diesel generator onsite to make it go. (If you aren’t nominated/contracted, you don’t have that capacity at all.) But you haven’t started that in the last 6 months, and there aren’t any spare, because every other company in Texas is using them, because the power is out… It’s better to turn off half of Texas than to let all of Texas shut down. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 10:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/54 "2021-03-05T10:07:44Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > Perhaps a stupid question, but if you moved from 60 Hz Japan to 50 Hz (or vice versa) would you have to get all new appliances? Or are there some like maybe a toaster that wouldn’t make much difference but something like a clock where it would? I had a perfectly good clock-radio rendered useless for this very reason. For a couple of days I reset the alarm time each night to compensate for the frequency drift, but it was ridiculous. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/55 "2021-03-05T11:01:07Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > I also found that while heat elements don’t care about 120V60Hz vs. 240V50Hz., they are fussy about the voltage switch for that being flipped firmly all the way - another expensive lesson in Paris. Heating elements do care about mains voltage, which is why that switch exists. If you have a 110V appliance that features a heating element (toaster, curling iron) and does not include a voltage switch, using it on 220V will kill it. **[Universal motors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor)** have the same issue: if they’re designed for 110 and you run them on 220, they’ll overspeed and/or cook themselves. You find these in everything from hair dryers to power tools to handheld mixers. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/56 "2021-03-05T14:08:30Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > I would assume for a place like Japan, they make them so they work on either frequency, since from what I do know it should not be terribly relevant issue. Not a safe assumption. Many things, maybe most things, won’t care. Some will merely run less efficiently - like refrigerators. Note they aren’t explicitly designed to be used efficiently across regions but will still operate. Some things - microwave ovens, washing machines - shouldn’t be used across regions. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/57 "2021-03-05T21:01:09Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > Some will merely run less efficiently - like refrigerators Motors that run at the wrong supply frequency sometimes overheat. This was perhaps more of a problem with old refrigerators than it is today: I have no idea what kind of motors they use now. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2021, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/58 "2021-03-25T14:08:06Z")
The Practical Engineering YouTube channel has a lot of great educational videos on YouTube topics. A couple of days ago Grady (the guy in the videos) posted one that does a great job of explaining what happened to the Texas power grid in February. 17 minutes long but very informative: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/08mwXICY4JM/maxresdefault.jpg "What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM) ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b77776/32.png) [@Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_was_in_Saudi)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2021, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/59 "2021-03-25T14:50:58Z")
Thank you very much. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2021, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719/60 "2021-03-25T15:03:16Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > The Practical Engineering YouTube channel has a lot of great educational videos on YouTube topics. Sorry, this sentence should read as follows: The Practical Engineering YouTube channel has a lot of great educational videos on **civil engineering** topics. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-the-power-problems-in-texas-lead-to-a-months-long-collapse/933719.md?page=4)