Found out the Texas grid was 4 minutes 37 seconds from a multi-week blackout in 2021. Why did nobody tell us this?
Posted by Blue_Mushroom3100@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 22 comments
From a book I just finished. The Machine That Cannot Stop by a retired ERCOT VP who was actually in the control room that night. He says if the load shedding had been five minutes slower, the underfrequency relays would have started cascading and recovery would have been weeks, not days.
He's not a doomer, explicitly anti-doomer, actually -but his read is that the institutional architecture is failing the same way on a recurring cycle and the next evnt is coming. Anyone else read it?
rekabis@reddit
IIRC this was a massive underestimate, with the assumption that the shutdown would be relatively clean.
In reality, had transformers started exploding, it would have been on the order of many months to perhaps as much as a year to get everyone back up and running.
Under worst-case scenarios Texas would have consumed all transformer shipments for America as a whole for the following 14-18 months. And that was assuming perfect, no-delay installations by unlimited numbers of crews.
oxero@reddit
It was the talk of the town here, sadly I'm surprised this is new to people.
Gorgo_xx@reddit
It was widely reported in the international press, also. And, a lot of discussion on reddit.
There’s a difference between “nobody told me” and “I wasn’t paying attention”.
notislant@reddit
Its was on the news frequently as well.
WCGW saying: "nuh-uh" to the national grid.
Fistic_Cybrosis@reddit
What's the book title/author exactly? I can't find it.
Mic98125@reddit
The only book I can find is The Stakeholders' Golden Rule by Raymond Giuliani Jr.
9966seg9966@reddit
People still talk about it here 5 years later. No one cares because "tExAs VoTeD aGaInSt ThEiR oWn InTeReSt" or whatever so apparently we can go fuck ourselves.
brilliantNumberOne@reddit
I’ve seen this reported a few times. The info is out there, you just have to know where to look.
I work as an electrical engineer, and it wasn’t until I started working for a company that did utility-scale stuff that I began to understand how complicated the grid is. Most people will never understand how cascading failures can push a system into a catastrophic breakdown.
The grid is a lot better protected than it was in 2003 when there was a significant grid outage in the northeast, but there’s still a risk.
rematar@reddit
Texas is too smart to a part of the grid you speak of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
Texas, Alberta and Australia have similar collective high opinions of their exploitative mantras. I'm looking forward to the karmic debt fairy making an appearance to any, or all three areas.
AlwaysPissedOff59@reddit
Blistering hot weather from, oh, let's say a monster El Nino might push Texass's grid over the edge.
DelcoPAMan@reddit
Well, at least they're not building data centers there ...
AverageAmerican1311@reddit
https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-worlds-largest-planned-data-center
They're trying.
bedpimp@reddit
They're not data centers, they are bitcoin mines, and they have been building them there for years.
deter@reddit
Yet.
TheLazyNoodle505@reddit
Oh I knew, I'm in the energy industry. I moved from TX shortly after...
Tairc@reddit
Yeah - just in time, bare minimum needed cost shaving design is great… for non critical systems.
But get a major perturbation, and things can go south quickly. So there is benefit to over design, and therefore spending a bit more on infrastructure…. But no private company wants to do that, and generally only does what regulations require.
Which is how we got here, and why it’s getting worse.
LokiSARK9@reddit
Upvoted for correct use of "perturbation."
Perfect_Caregiver_90@reddit
I read the big report that was in Texas Monthly that went into this.
It came out pretty quickly after the event. I worked with electricians and electrical engineers at the time so it was the hot topic in the office for a good month.
I was in an area that would have made it through okay if we had been able to disconnect from ERCOT's control when the "rolling" blackouts started. We couldn't and suffered a ton of infrastructure damage because of it.
Xputurnameherex@reddit
And nothing has really been done about making our winter system better except off putting the costs from the 21 storm by rate hikes
David_Parker@reddit
Texas Monthly, a whole slew of reports covered this. Scary stuff.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"Why did nobody tell us this?" They did. It was all over the news. Sure, they don't talk about it now, but it was 5 years ago.
hammertime84@reddit
It was widely discussed here (Austin). Leading up to it we were watching the ERCOT dashboards, millions in Texas lost power for days in a deep freeze, a bunch of people died, then repeat 2 years later (we had to go stay in a different city for a few days in the 2023 one).
Natural gas infrastructure freezing was the primary cause. The government has mitigated it going forward primarily by releasing enormous amounts of anti wind and solar propaganda.