Seti Refuge Bar & Bistro Wing of Cafe Einstein

Yup there's ALOT of blame to go around on this one and Sen Ted Cruise getting caught going on and then coming back from his vacation in the middle of it won't help anyone with the rhetoric. One Mayor has already quit and his wife lost her job as well over his comments about it being the citizens fault they don't have power and water and the Governor has now walked back his claim that wind turbines not running are the problem since someone pointed out to him that 90% of the energy production in Texas is done thru gas and oil!!

Personally I think it was a business decision to not prepare for the possibility of freezing temps when they decided to build the infrastructure the way they did, ie nothing in buildings and everything out in the open Sun, and the Government deciding to not participate in a regional power sharing grid so all Texas power is generated within Texas and not bought from other States as needed. Hopefully there will be ALOT of very late night meetings to figure out how to best prevent this from happening again and who's heads are on the chopping block for it this time.

I thought I read someplace that they literally don't have connections to the other grids outside Texas.

Tom M

I'll bet money that if the local temperatures fell as far below the standard range at the locations of the generation facilities feeding Florida as they just did in Texas, you would find a bunch of them would drop off line.

For that matter, if here in New Mexico we somehow got wind as high as you folks in Florida have learned to tolerate, we'd have terrific transmission problems.

Preparing for events well outside of expectation is a tricky business, whether you are a profit-making enterprise, or a creature of the People's Commissariat of Power production.  The first question is "just how far outside the expected range do we want to try to handle?"  The next problem is "so you think you can tolerate XX, and in fact you designed for XX, and the supplier promises it will work at XX.  But if XX has never, ever happened, how likely it is that first try all that stuff actually works at that condition?"

My friend in Houston thinks about 10% of the homes on his expensive street had burst pipes the first night.  Local code, local building practices, as checked up on by local experience, simply had not produced homes which worked right that far outside of expected conditions.

By the way, in his first communication, he was a full subscriber to the "folly of ERCOT" theory of disaster.  He only learned a couple of days later that he does not actually live within ERCOT territory.  There is actually a triangular intrusion into Texas from Louisiana that runs under another entity named MISO.  Guess what.  They lost power also.