Well, you did ask, now didn’t you?

I just got rid of 10 quilts. Had I known, I could’ve hooked you up.

it was last time, thats why they upped building codes.

is texas gonna do the same?

Anything is possible but you need to consider the incremental costs and the diminishing returns. In the end, it’s up to what the consumer will pay. Texas has a weird arrangement, you don’t have to buy your juice from the guy that generates it, so there’s a lot of competition.

Given how many people shop at Walmart and buy the cheapest crap they can from China, I’m going to bet that paying more for the electrical needs wouldn’t be popular.

defending the incompetence, short sightedness, and dumb system doesn't make it smarter.

this is exactly what ive been addressing this entire thread.

glad we can agree, this was easily preventable.

So should every windmill installed anywhere in the world be outfitted for every weather possible anywhere in the world? Should every car be outfitted with a block heater?

Everything is a compromise. We all plan for the norm and then some of us plan a little outside of the norm. But everyone including companies and the govt has to draw the line and decide how far outside of the norm the need to plan AND SPEND for.

You fail to understand anything I’m telling you.

It has been very warm this winter; there has not been a single month this year that I have not run the central a/c some of the evenings and I have considerably higher electric consumption to show for it. Same for this month as it looks like we'll be in the mid 70s next week and likely high humidity.

and clearly they did not make that decision well.

they should make better decisions in the future, though i doubt they will.

the notion that texas should have been more prepared for this, and would be with better utility models and reward systems, is not argued against by saying that every power source in the world needs to be proofed against every possible condition ever. that would be a logical fallacy.

I was in Houston when an ice storm hit SE Texas in the late 90's. It was not as cold but so so many trees downed.

It would cost an insane amount of tens of billions to upgrade the various infrastructures brought into that mess.

How should they proceed to accomplish this? I mean, should they call St Paul and ask them? Detroit? Spokane?

not abandoning there utilities to the free market and lowest bidder without regulation, building standards or codes.

this is what building codes and public utilities are for. this is why they exist.

this isnt an unsolvable problem, contrary to texans opinion, there are other places in the world, with utilities. its just one texas didnt think they needed to solve, and they'd rather pocket the cash.

Wow! This thread sure turned into a pile of sh.t. Well done!!

Only takes one to do that.

Sorry.... I'll move on.. :( :D

FWIW Bob, I think we should have hurricane codes in Ohio don't you? I'm frighteningly close to Lake St Marys and sh.t could get serious any moment.

Roof straps. Every Ohio structure.

You have PARF’d up this thread with with countless assertions that are patently false. Texas has building codes, regulation, and has public utilities. Duh. But this event was generally not planned for. By anyone. Full stop. And that may have been a reasonable assumption.

You see, and this may be a surprise, but it doesn’t tend to get really cold here very often. If it did, we’d of course have invested in appropriate measures. No one said this was an unsolvable problem. It’s just not a problem that was likely to happen, so the money didn’t get spent.

If you lived here, I’d give you more room to claim that you’d seen this event coming. But as someone that’s been in the energy industry for almost 3 decades on both the power and oil and gas side, I can tell you that this was a very long-tail, unprecedented event. No one was predicting this. No one had thought through the interdependencies of all the systems that failed.

Texas, in addition to be a leading producer of oil and gas, is also the leading producer of renewable energy in the US. We have some of the cheapest power in the nation. It’s one of the reasons that businesses are relocating here. I’ve not paid more than 8c/kWh for electricity for more than a decade (and often much less). Much of that is due to our deregulated (but not regulation-free) power markets. Yep, it’s been money in my pocket, and the pockets of my fellow Texans.

In my opinion, there’s no single group to blame (except maybe Canada), but ironically, the primary issue was that natural gas production was curtailed by wellhead and processing freeze-offs due to the extreme cold. There was reportedly 8Bcf/d of gas shut-in in Texas as a result. That’s a lot of gas — gas that would have been more than adequate to keep the lights on and heat homes. Interestingly, despite such shut in volumes, gas production overall was up. Why? Because of free markets and the fact that those that had working wells let ‘em rip. For producers that weren’t hedged this was a bonanza — Q1 earnings season will be interesting indeed. But gas demand was higher, and gas LDC demand (for heating) effectively takes precedence over electricity usage. While electricity can be switched on and off, turning off the gas is a much bigger/slower deal.

Not that renewables get a pass. They went down too. But if more gas had been available, we’d not had as much of an issue.

This is a very complicated situation, and there are solutions that could have helped. Here’s a few off the cuff:

- Require additional wellhead insulation and heat tracing — that relatively minimal cost gets passed on to all consumers (even outside Texas) — could happen
- Require winterized turbines — might happen
- Build more nukes or coal, and have them as a larger percentage of base load — never gonna happen
- Make more stringent building codes/insulation standards — could happen, but wont change all the existing stock of older, under insulated homes, so limited impact

All of these options would have increased costs and likely gone unused for very long periods of time. Many would argue it would be wasted money.

So yeah, TX could have done more, but it’s hard to blame them for not wanting to spend money such long-tail events. It keeps Texas affordable and less draconian than many other well-intentioned but over-governed places. As dramatic and uncomfortable as this has been, it pales in comparison to the damage wrought by hurricanes and flooding we regularly see.

Thankfully, it’s unlikely we see another freeze like this again soon. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I are already planning our winter emergency kits once the stores are re-stocked: Pipe insulation, duct tape, Sharkbite fittings, and more. Better to be prepared. We’re prepared for hurricanes, and sweating it out while we wait for the power to come back, not freezing in our houses. But unless we see another storm like this again soon, I doubt any real change happens. Until proven otherwise, it was a black swan.


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No green needed. This is being actively pursued by several companies right now.


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4.5 days without power. water is currently a trickle in faucet. House temps in low 40s for most of it. Thankfully prepared. We had warm sleeping bags, gas stove to cook, stored water and dripped pipes. No broken plumbing.

I have been through longer and shorter post-storm (Hurricanes, floods, etc) outages. We faired better than many.

Huge thanks to my neighbors and their large pile of firewood. That seems like a life saver despite having to tend fire every 1.5 hours to keep temps reasonable.

Was there a perfect storm of screw-ups that lead to this? Probably. I am not going to blame anyone at this point. Solutions. we need solutions, not just discussions and complaining about the issues. Of course, that is like most of our lives right now.

Maybe the answer is to require the power provider to insure the loss due to failure to deliver?