Texans must understand blackout before overhauling electric grid

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by Chris Tomlinson 2/24/2021

Tomlinson: Texans must understand blackout before overhauling electric grid

COVID-19 killed half a million Americans in less than a year. Blackouts left four million Texas homes without electricity on the coldest four nights in decades. Thirteen million Texans were left without running, potable water.

Poet William Butler Yeats had seen something similar in 1919 following World War I and the Spanish flu and wrote “The Second Coming.”

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Today, provocateurs are stoking division and hatred with disinformation. Most of us are scrambling to explain what went wrong. Yet others see nothing more than an inconvenient anomaly. Then, there are those who want to burn it all down.

To recover, restore and improve our lives, businesses and economies, we must move with deliberation and humility, two things our culture does not seem to value at the moment.

Our society is built on energy, and millions of Texans, who had never heard of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or the people on the Public Utility Commission, have learned what happens when “things fall apart.”

We need to learn why 185 powerplants tripped offline in a matter of hours. The breadth of the failure suggests a catastrophic fault in our system. We presume our generators were not prepared for such a winter storm, but we don’t know all the facts.

Texas regulators’ light touch and the state’s independence from national interconnections were supposed to be features of our system, not bugs. Would weatherization and expanding our capacity to import and export energy solve our problems? Maybe.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Texans-must-understand-blackout-before-15975044.php

[thackney]

This point from the author really hits home.

...I find my personal experience analogous to this larger debate. The pipes under my home froze in 2011 but did not burst. When I looked underneath my recently-purchased house back then, I recognized that I needed to weatherize. Of course, I didn’t, figuring I would just trickle water if it ever got that cold again.

The latest freeze burst pipes in nine places and cracked the valve on my water heater. Now half the pipes are uninsulated, and I have a mix of copper and plastic pex pipes and numerous patches. Do I upgrade all my pipes to freeze-resistant pex or go back to traditional copper? How much insulation do I add?

More succinctly, do I make a significant investment that will last 50 years or hope the duck tape holds? The larger societal debate is not just about electricity, water or public health....

And how much is enough?  How cold will it get next time.  Really sucks to spend the money to insulate to 20°F protection and get three days of 15°F.

My crystal ball has proven to be rather clouding in determining how bad things can get.

[HoustonSam]

This point from the author really hits home.

And how much is enough?  How cold will it get next time.  Really sucks to spend the money to insulate to 20°F protection and get three days of 15°F.

My crystal ball has proven to be rather clouding in determining how bad things can get.

Managing risk, i.e. the product of likelihood and consequence, is always a gamble.  Right now people would be willing to pay more in monthly electricity bills to prevent a repeat of last week.  Five winters from now, when the Gulf Coast weather has barely flirted with freezing, people won't be as willing.

My sense is we need to distinguish between the variable cost of electricity and the cost of insurance on that electricity.  It seems we've emphasized the former and neglected the latter.

I admire greatly the author's use of Yeats.  It's a welcome departure from "blame storming."

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Managing risk, i.e. the product of likelihood and consequence, is always a gamble. Right now people would be willing to pay more in monthly electricity bills to prevent a repeat of last week.  Five winters from now, when the Gulf Coast weather has barely flirted with freezing, people won't be as willing.

My sense is we need to distinguish between the variable cost of electricity and the cost of insurance on that electricity.  It seems we've emphasized the former and neglected the latter.

I admire greatly the author's use of Yeats.  It's a welcome departure from "blame storming."

That is a misstatement.  Managing risk properly is not a gamble.  It is calculated risk taking using solid risk assessment parameters.  Ask any insurance actuary.

I spent a career in risk management and economics within the energy industry.

[HoustonSam]

That is a misstatement.  Managing risk properly is not a gamble.  It is calculated risk taking using solid risk assessment parameters.  Ask any insurance actuary.

I spent a career in risk management and economics within the energy industry.

Whether we call it a "gamble" or a "calculated risk", we have to assess the likelihood of an event occurring, and the consequences of the event if it does occur.  Winterizing grid assets has not been required by law in TX because the likelihood of needing that protection is low in any given year while the costs of providing the protection would be paid in every year.  So the law makers have seen fit to forego making such a law and have left it to the owners of the assets to decide for themselves what degree of protection they can afford consistent with minimizing the direct variable cost of power to the consumer.

Well this year we happened to roll snake eyes and the consequences were devastating.  While the grid's economic and technical design minimizes the summertime direct variable cost of power to the consumer, it has maximized the cost of wintertime power failure to the consumer.

So the risk calculation needs to be re-assessed - the consequences are too great to ignore - and perhaps so does the entire energy-only, minimize-consumer-cost-through-deregulated-competition model.  Personally I believe winterization requirements should be enacted in law, but *how much* winterization should be required, and *how* will conformance be documented?  @thackney, whose competence is self-evident, has argued that selecting and certifying a particular degree of winterization is highly problematic.  Still, I think it has to be attempted and that attempt has to originate in the legislature, and fortunately for us all they happen to be in session.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Whether we call it a "gamble" or a "calculated risk", we have to assess the likelihood of an event occurring, and the consequences of the event if it does occur.  Winterizing grid assets has not been required by law in TX because the likelihood of needing that protection is low in any given year while the costs of providing the protection would be paid in every year.  So the law makers have seen fit to forego making such a law and have left it to the owners of the assets to decide for themselves what degree of protection they can afford consistent with minimizing the direct variable cost of power to the consumer.

Well this year we happened to roll snake eyes and the consequences were devastating.  While the grid's economic and technical design minimizes the summertime direct variable cost of power to the consumer, it has maximized the cost of wintertime power failure to the consumer.

So the risk calculation needs to be re-assessed - the consequences are too great to ignore - and perhaps so does the entire energy-only, minimize-consumer-cost-through-deregulated-competition model.  Personally I believe winterization requirements should be enacted in law, but *how much* winterization should be required, and *how* will conformance be documented?  @thackney, whose competence is self-evident, has argued that selecting and certifying a particular degree of winterization is highly problematic.  Still, I think it has to be attempted and that attempt has to originate in the legislature, and fortunately for us all they happen to be in session.

Got it.  Gambling is throwing dice hoping for the right amount to show up.

Calculated risk taking is the usage of statistics to predict the likelihood of the right amount to show up, and acting accordingly to that uncertainty.