Power grids

 It's pretty much spring in Texas now, but last week was a doozy.  It spurred my favorite kind of local debate, over how a community should react to an emergency.  Whine that government didn't take care of everything as unobtrusively as a well-tipped concierge?  Or roll up your sleeves and deal with some adversity with good grace?

Here on the coast I don't think we got below 17 or so at the worst.  That's pretty bad for us, and killed an awful lot of landscaping.  It also created icy road conditions of the sort that we never handle well.  Still, there's no reason to die in 17-degree temperatures if you're indoors and protected from rain and wind.  We had about 10 days notice that this thing would hit, so also little excuse not to have some basic food and water in the house.

Some of my neighbors are strongly invested in creating a narrative of Armageddon.  One claims to have witnessed an elderly lady die when her oxygen machine froze up.  The problem is that such a thing could barely happen here without making waves, if not in the local newspaper then at least in the EMT gossip mill.   There are only about 25,000 people in the county, for Pete's sake.  It seems a shame to have to say so, but I'm convinced he's a lying drama queen who enjoys having people commiserate with him for having had to witness such a shocking example of malfeasance by rich fat cats and/or nanny state representatives.

In my unincorporated area of the county, the volunteer fire department was available as a shelter, but only one or two people took advantage of the opportunity.  The local water company and sewage treatment plant muddled their way through without denying service to anyone, which is more than I can say for any other water company in the entire county.  A number of people in town found that their backup generators failed because the natural gas utility couldn't keep pressure up.  People in town keep suggesting darkly that we did well because we're fat cats.  They can't have driven through this area if they think so.  The people who kept things running aren't rich, they're just sensible and provident.

We're seeing spirited discussion over why the electrical grid couldn't maintain service for nursing homes and grocery stores.  The nursing homes are required by law to have backup generators.  The grocery stores aren't, but that's on them.  They got restocked within a few days.

Many people seem to assume that the electrical grid operators should be strung up for their failure to predict how many plants would shut down in the unusual cold.  I'm less convinced.  It seems to me that they planned for reasonably likely conditions.  This cold front was colder, longer-lasting, and of greater geographical extent than we've seen before.  There is an argument that Texas's independent grid is vulnerable because it insists on remaining independent of FERC regulation, but that exemption is limited almost entirely to ratemaking authority.  The Texas grid remains subject to North American grid regulatory authority, which gave us a clean bill of health after the 2011, 2014, and 2015 cold snaps in terms of our energy reserves and our winterization efforts.  The 2021 cold snap was greater than anyone planned for, but I can't reasonably blame either ERCOT or the plant operators, least of all for their "greed."  There are people still gathering information on why plants failed and what might have prevented the cascading failures.  Clearly we should be looking at linked risks like gas failures that cause electrical failures and vice versa.  Nevertheless, I'm unconvinced that this is an example of failure to plan for reasonable foreseeable events.  Sometimes things just get extreme, and you have to learn from developments that weren't predictable enough to invest a lot of resources in preventing.  I do think that an important lesson is that backup generators should be much more widespread than they are, and should be fueled by supplies you can genuinely count on, which is to say gas or diesel tanks rather than gas utility lines.