I'm afraid everyone - governments, cities, companies, individuals - will have to prepare for "100 years events" more than we've been doing. And we will have to understand what that term actually means.

A "100 year event" doesn't mean it only happens every 100 years - it means that each year, there is a 1% probability of the event. So in a 10 year period, there is a 9.6% probability of the event happening at least once, and in a 20 year period, there is a 18.2% probability.

When designing a power system (or anything else), wouldn't you take precautions against a catastrophic event that has a 10% probability of happening at least once every 10 years? The probability of a commercial building catching fire over 10 years is far lower than 10%, but we still require fire/smoke alarms and sprinkler systems.

Plus, those probabilities are increasingly unreliable, as extreme weather events are becoming more common, as climate patterns change and get destabilized. Houston had three "500 year floods" in three consecutive years. https://www.gfdrr.org/en/100-year-flood

I agree. I'm not concerned about a loss of power or water for a couple days. I can handle that, even without much prep.

What concerns me is the statement in the Dallas Morning News article that, if the grid had totally failed, it could have been down for months. I never thought that was a possibility, short of a war with China or Russia, which I always thought was pretty unlikely.

I had the main water feed into the house freeze even though I had it well wrapped and insulated. Once I got it uncovered and thawed out, I put an old ice chest over it with a hair dryer inside and covered it all with an old sleeping bag. I would plug it in for a few minutes every time I ran my generator. I had a PEX line freeze up going to the toilet in the back corner of the house. It thawed out on its own eventually. Otherwise no real problems. Down to a few pieces of fire wood, pretty punky stuff at the bottom of the pile but it still burns. As I only had five gallons of gas for my generator and no way of predicting how long I would be without power, I only ran it every 6 hours or so to power up the the furnace blower. An hour of run time would heat the house back up to about 60°. After 6 hours the house would drop into the upper 40s. This house was built in 1983 but the insulation is not great. Lots of windows all single pane. It cooled down rather quick. We never lost water but the pressure did drop a bit on Wednesday. Now I need to get up to the country place and survey the damage there. Last I checked the answering machine on the land line was not picking up so the place is still without power.

It's very very unlikely something like that would happen. Even if every plant in Texas went offline it wouldn't take months to get back. More likely most plants, maybe 80%, would trip but the plants with the best responding speed controls would be able to handle the huge frequency change and not trip. Then it would be a matter of restarting each unit. Some would come back in a few hours, some days, while some would likely have failures during the trip that could have them down for weeks or months for repairs.

One of my friends lives in Baton Rouge, LA. His water pipe to the house comes up out of the ground into the air, and then under his stem wall house. If it gets much below 32 his water will freeze if he is not letting it flow at a decent rate. In really cold weather he is screwed. It is a house designed for no really cold weather. Just lazy builders.

The isolated nature of the Texas grid was their strategic downfall in the end.
The arrogance of Texas reared its ugly head and ***** smacked them all.
Oklahoma faced the sane weather BUT they are on an interconnected grid of 24 states, NO PROBLEMS, the power flowed over the grid in an aggregated manner as designed.

With electrical systems it definitely is a socialistic world "IT TAKES A VILLAGE" or you freeze

I think this will get a huge amount of scrutiny in the coming months. I'd expect quite a few new regs to come down the pipe.

I wonder if they'll rethink the decision about having a separate grid.

Socialism is not what built this nation - the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. This "it takes a village" meme is not nearly as successful as "it takes demand in an open market" to get shlt DONE! And that is because the "it takes a village" meme has everyone waiting around for someone else to wait for someone else to do something that the collective agrees on. And then the socialist worker pretends to do something as the socialist borg pretends to make it worth their while. Capitalism gives a nice prize to whomever solves the problem first, and then best. This motivates solutions. Whereas socialism motivates talking about solutions. ... tomorrow.

Seems not all of Texas had the same backwards thinking. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-grid-outage-ercot/

I always viewed the possibility of electrical outages as fairly remote, with them coming from disruptions in the transmission lines... from ice storms, or car wrecks taking out poles, etc. Maybe the occasional blown transformer or failure in the switchgear. Given all the redundancy in the system, I viewed these things as occasional minor annoyances. My last house was in an area with underground lines, so I was almost never without power. In 22 years, I was down a cumulative total of maybe an hour, perhaps two, for that entire time.

I never thought failure of the entire system was even a remote possibility. Gotta rethink that....

Begs the question. Where does poop go?

Wow, what an insightful, brilliant response.

He's right. When was the last time you willingly paid for something that did nothing for you?

rjp

Time to start throwing people under the bus. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/greg-abbott-winter-storm/

Awww. Little Randy's back.
I happily do it all the time. Ever hear of the interstate highway system? How about the military?
National parks ring a bell?
And, do tell how 330 million people are going to individually deal with poop?

Ercot leaders on this subject. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/

Roads and the military you don't want to pay for? Are roads and armed forces unique to Socialist countries? NO, they're not. Stupid analogy.

You're not very bright, sorry.

rjp

I never heard Magness say that. I'd be curious to see a transcript showing that. Even if he did say it, I think he was exaggerating to be dramatic.

Most of the articles I've read in the past week had huge mistakes which were obviously a misunderstanding of what the reporter heard.

My favorite: "geothermal plant failures were the biggest problem, not wind turbines"

I don't know of any geothermal plants in Texas. If there are, they're small.

My thought is that 1/2", 3/4" or even 1" of foam around a pipe may be inadequate for certain situations. Insulation doesn't stop heat transfer, it just slows it down. If the temps are 0º-25º for 24-48 hours, especially if the power is out and the temp inside the house plummets, I'm not sure the pipes won't freeze anyway.

What other than split foam can/would you do for pipes in walls?

What about pipes under a pier and beam house? Split foam (while worth while seems really inadequate for situations like we just had.

I'm on a facebook group for the county next to our property. There's a city about 10-15 miles from our property that uses 7 wells to provide water to the folks that have city water. After the rolling power outages started, 4 of the 7 wells froze (no power).

Our pump is in a small box like a dog house (no insulation). There are gaps under the edges of the walls on most sides. The well head is not under the pump house, but is next to it. I packed the gaps in the walls with hay to keep the wind from sucking the heat out. We had a halogen work light as a heater. I also packed hay around the well head. I'll probably tear that house down and build something a bit bigger that contains the well head and pump stuff and maybe insulate and seal it a bit better. I'll probably stick with the work light or something like it to keep things warm.

I'll be reviewing the plumbing in the crawl space under the house to see what changed can/should be made there.

The bottom of the house has a thin layer of spray foam insulation on much of it (sprayed up from the crawlspace on the bottom of the house. I may be looking into adding more of that (think I need to be careful to not seal in water if there's any sort of spill/leak inside the house too).

working well isn't it?
...... if you are one of the pigs feeding outta the trough.

ROFLMAO, sure, lots of geothermal in TX. That's assuming that you think of Texas as being the far west.