Texas electric providers always getting every rate hike they ask for but clearly not investing it in infrastructure.
As a former North Dakotan for 30 years, I was extremely surprised by news accounts showing how fragile Texas' electric grid and production infrastructure has proven to be. This storm simply hasn't produced enough snow, ice, wind or cold temps for this mess to be justified. How could NG electric plants fail just from slightly chilly temps? Unbelievable. And the additional claim that wind & solar failed is really bizarre since they both work well in ND winters.
So don't believe anyone who says it can't be built for these conditions. They likely have an agenda that doesn't involve the truth.
If you've been involved in budget planning, you know you plan for the 80% or 90%. That extra 10-20% will cost you 80-90% of your total. We are geared for the routine 2 months above 100º since it's every year. What happened after the 2011 Superbowl blackouts was that the legislators added a guideline for winterizing but failed to make it mandatory. Bean counters over ruled suggestions and recommendations by engineers and support crews (remember the Challenger?).
Would ND build to handle 2 months of 100+º temps when they don't see that very often? Do people in ND even own AC?
That guideline will probably change to a mandate this next congressional session. When I first moved to the area, TXU Electric had the monopoly and the Energy "commission" would rubber stamp any rate hike requested. The first 3 or 4 years saw 25% rate hikes every year getting approved. Clearly they didn't put that back into infrastructure.
I've been involved with critical infrastructure budget planning indirectly as an agency lawyer. And how it's budgeted depends on the consequences of failure. If the consequences are minimal, then it's ok to build fragile. But where the system is critical to life, then build robustly. The key is to think like a living system.
Some people I worked with were influenced by "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I only recently read this book, and should have much earlier. One of his discussions involved infrastructure and natural disaster. We always build to the most recent greatest disaster. But what we built previously was also designed to meet the last prior greatest disaster, and that didn't work. We are always behind. His solution was to copy nature and build about ten percent stronger than the last disaster (he used examples such as muscle and bone strength, or immune response, which respond to stress by overbuilding by about that amount). If we followed this example, the next record disaster might not overwhelm the 10% stronger infrastructure, which would give us time to build yet bigger without suffering a disaster if the prior record is broken again. This is actually less expensive in the long run. But, as you say, bean counters.
Usually the improved infrastructure's cost isn't that much if it's designed that way from the beginning. The additions to make a wind turbine good to -30 include an anti-ice coating on the blades, and little heaters on the pitch motors and the turbine itself. It's really not much more added to the appx. $3-4 million wind tower cost at the time of construction.
Part of our problem is that the people who directly pay for infrastructure don't typically bear the risk of loss. They can thus gamble with a "just enough" response. My guess is that the financial damages to homeowners and businesses, not including the loss of life, is going to be greater than the cost of having built a more robust infrastructure as things were constructed or rebuilt over the years. Now, bringing it all up to speed at once, well that's gonna be expensive.
And ND weather seems to have the worst of both worlds. Our winters are "Legendary" (ND Tourism's slogan
). We plan on that. But our summers have grown worse over the past 30 years. We typically see July and August in the upper 90s with over 20 mph winds, while we used to see only a handful of days break 80f. Several days a year are above 100, the worst I experienced was 114F and 60 mph wind. No brownouts. I'll concede that I don't know whether 2 months of 110f would be sustainable. But to your point, almost every inhabited building has AC. We took advantage of the energy rebates from about 10 or 12 years ago to also increase our AC capacity as well at the old ND homestead. Summers had changed that much from when we initially built the house.
