Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
It would have been great if there was some sort of warning from climate scientists that extreme weather events like this could happen, so people and governments could prepare.

I get this is sarcasm pointing at climate change being a thing, but there's a rather wonderful report in the aftermath of the 2011 storm that recommended winterization of power plants and related infrastructure (like natural gas pipelines) that failed during that storm. Texas decided that requiring that their utilities to follow the recommendations would be an undue burden on their businesses.

Which is why I reserve my sympathy for elsewhere.

I mean, The poeple affected by this are not the poeple who made that decision.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I mean, The poeple affected by this are not the poeple who made that decision.

They consistently elect the people who did, though.

It's a representative republic though and not a democracy. The people don't have their hands in every decision that's made about infrastructure and such. We leave it in the hands of our representatives to make the right decisions about those things for our well-being.

I can't deny that the whole thing seems very on-brand for Texas...but they're fellow Americans that are suffering and I hope the federal government can help somehow.

I'm in San Antonio. Power was out for the better part of 48 hours. Got into the 40s inside.
Does it suck? Yes. Is it an annoyance? Yes. Is it definitely worse for a lot of other people? Yes.

However, I think as a 'crisis' it's a bit exaggerated. I've seen people claiming that their food has gone bad and that their house/apartment is literally freezing. That's a contradictory statement. I've gone out a few times because aside from overpasses the roads have been reasonably clear most of the time. People are slamming grocery stores, fast food places, and restaurants like you wouldn't believe. It's stupid.

Obviously reform needs to happen, but this isn't even comparable to major hurricanes that routinely tear up the coast.

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

Edit: Bursting pipes is going to be a HUGE problem down there. Wet goes really, really bad with cold.

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

Edit: Bursting pipes is going to be a HUGE problem down there. Wet goes really, really bad with cold.

Not really, the people in the colder states take the necessary steps to prevent it being a problem. The people running texas decided it was more important to let big energy biz hold onto that money.

That was my point.

 Easy E wrote:
That was my point.

And even such colder places the possibility of a blackout can still happen. Case in point with California this Summer with the heat, there wasn't a thread mocking Californians for not preparing for hot days taking a toll on their infrastructure, something to be expected from a state that usually pretty warm in a majority.

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

And it wasn't a problem in Texas. Green energy performed better in the cold there than the fossil fuel energy. Certain people chose to spread lies about it for...reasons...

 BlackoCatto wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
That was my point.

And even such colder places the possibility of a blackout can still happen. Case in point with California this Summer with the heat, there wasn't a thread mocking Californians for not preparing for hot days taking a toll on their infrastructure, something to be expected from a state that usually pretty warm in a majority.

Because we WERE prepared. People are instructed to have emergency supplies for exactly that sort of thing, and situations like utilities going down due to an earthquake. Even given people's preference towards short term thinking a lot of us do have extra supplies. The outages weren't foreseen, but they were rotated around to a reasonable degree and the people managed just fine. It was irksome, sure, but nothing like what Texas is facing.

My sympathies to the people affected by this in Texas, if any Dakka members are stuck in it, I hope you're doing well.

I'm in the PNW and a trio of ice storms over the weekend has left me without power since Sunday as well, just about every power line in town came down due to ice accumulation or falling branches, I left all my groceries out on the counter because it was colder in my apt than it would have been in the fridge normally ive had 3 hot meals in 4 days and 1 shower.

As my internet time is limited, I'm not going to prune this thread, however I will ask that posters please knock the politics off. There are other, better places to hash that out than here, and there are a lot of people suffering and dying for no fault of their own.

Stay warm peeps!

There IS fault of their own. If someone is living in lowland and is told 'hey, flooding is going to get worse in coming years and decades, you should prepare for that' then they proceed to do nothing then yeah, they do bear some blame for the consequences. If they did something and it turned out not to be enough that would be one thing, instead they denied that there was going to be a problem at all. Was politics involved in that decision? Absolutely. But the decision was still bad, and the lack of preparation in face of being explicitly told to prepare can and should be criticized without anyone dragging politics into it, as trex and Blacko attempted to do.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I am perfectly willing to (and have) criticize residents of my home state of California when they have no emergency supplies or plans after their homes in the middle of a dam fire zone during record-breaking heat burn down.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I mean, The poeple affected by this are not the poeple who made that decision.

They consistently elect the people who did, though.

For the record, four million of us didn't vote for the people currently in charge. But I guess it's still somehow my fault for not being able to just pack up and move to another state.

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

This oversimplifies things immensely.

How many of those colder states and countries have the humidity of Texas effecting ice growth.

How many of those colder states and countries have the heat of Texas the other 99.9% of the time, its a hell of a lot easier to keep something warm when you don't ever have to worry about it overheating.

How many people understand it not just about cost but there are usually performance impacts as well and do you really want to accept those 99.9% of the time for a .1% chance of OMG or is there a better way ?

Trex is most peoples heat generated by electricity or gas ?

I’ve got family in the affected parts of Texas. Hoping they get power back soon.

 BlackoCatto wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
That was my point.

And even such colder places the possibility of a blackout can still happen. Case in point with California this Summer with the heat, there wasn't a thread mocking Californians for not preparing for hot days taking a toll on their infrastructure, something to be expected from a state that usually pretty warm in a majority.

Really? If I had a dollar for every time a Dakka member snidely mocked California, I’d be buying Games Workshop miniatures again.

 skyth wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

And it wasn't a problem in Texas. Green energy performed better in the cold there than the fossil fuel energy. Certain people chose to spread lies about it for...reasons...

Well sure nuclear energy has been fairly consistent but wind, not so much. Earlier in the month Texas was routinely getting over 300K megawatthours from electricity and now its less than a third of that. At the same time natural gas was around 350kish beginning of the month and is now over 700k. I'm not sure how that can be considered better

Not sure how well that chart will reproduce but link should get you the ability to look things up. Yes I'm eyeballing average but the trends definitely hold. (https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/balancing_authority/ERCO/GenerationByEnergySource-14/edit)

Jerram wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

This oversimplifies things immensely.

How many of those colder states and countries have the humidity of Texas effecting ice growth.

Most of them. Texas unsurprisingly ranks 40 (of 50) when it comes to relative humidity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbrettschneider/2018/08/23/oh-the-humidity-why-is-alaska-the-most-humid-state/?sh=4f1b1422330c

How many of those colder states and countries have the heat of Texas the other 99.9% of the time, its a hell of a lot easier to keep something warm when you don't ever have to worry about it overheating.

But... Texas is hot. Certainly moreso than 'colder places...'
You do have to worry more about things overheating in hot climates. I never had a car's radiator fry on me outside the Southwest, nor things (including AC units) break down in the heat.

I'm not sure you're familiar with Texas.

As a Texan who just got his power back after 3 days

1 Thanks
2 Holy F Texas is UNPREPARED....

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

Did you miss my mention of 1998 Montreal? Even places that deal with snow and ice regularly can get overwhelmed. Parts of Ontario lose power every year to wind and ice storms. Usually they're back up quickly, but sometimes places take a week or more. But houses in Ontario are better insulated and people have warmer clothing on hand, so it's less of an issue.

You cannot build to withstand everything the weather will throw your way. How many people live in building that could take a direct tornado strike? Almost nobody, because the cost vs risk is far too high. Climate change might require re-calculating some of those risks, though.

Generally with design, you (or the relevant building codes) generate a range of extreme events extrapolated from 30, 50, 100 (etc) years of data to estimate the likely 1 in X year event, where X might be 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years (etc). That doesn't mean the thing is designed to last that long, it means there's a 1/100, 1/500 or 1/1000 chance that it'll fail in the next year. That extrapolation is done by fitting probability distributions to that short term data and assuming the tail / asymptote of the distribution holds true.

That analysis is generally done on a location by location basis, as if you design everything for a 1/1000 chance Siberian winter, a 1/1000 chance Japanese earthquake, a 1/1000 year Saharan heatwave, a 1/1000 year West Australian cyclone, etc etc then costs will skyrocket many times over. Instead, things are designed to location-specific reliability estimates.

A flaw is that the existing data often doesn't really have enough data in it to make those calls accurately, and for all the safety factors included in any sort of infrastructure development sometimes you miss something.

Increasingly standards have been including things like "climate change safety factors", but they're typically not huge, maybe 5 to 10%, and if the infrastructure was built 10 or more years ago chances are it won't include those anyway.

the big issue seems to have been not the lack of preparation in Texas (although it's clearly a factor),

but not linking to the rest of the USA grid, the cold hit most of the country but the grid held up, and if Texas was part of it a lot of issues wold have been avoided

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
the big issue seems to have been not the lack of preparation in Texas (although it's clearly a factor),

but not linking to the rest of the USA grid, the cold hit most of the country but the grid held up, and if Texas was part of it a lot of issues wold have been avoided

Well another factor is that many people simply reject the overwhelming evidence for climate change and refuse to consider any proposal that incorporates it. To a lot of people the zeisgeist is "Well, you can believe in all that so called 'data' but I believe it's wrong, and my beliefs are just as good as yours, so checkmate."

Also I never meant for this post to get like this, all i meant to do was express concern and hors for the well being of any of our brothers in texas since it's getting the lions share of the hardship in this awful artic assault. The first reply was a moan about it, and it went into politics and religion after that. Any dakkanauts caught in the texas crisis may not be able to give us a sitrep so all we can do it hope for them and to hear from them that they made it thru.

Voss wrote:

Jerram wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
There's no planning for once-in-a-lifetime weather events like this.

But putting 25% of your grid on wind power means those big events are going to hurt all the more, compared to coal/gas/nuke plants. Is it worth the cost to build backup capacity in case your renewables go down? Any government with a large % of wind/solar power is going to have to consider this going forward.

Yet somehow, in colder states and countries this is not a problem. Strange?

This oversimplifies things immensely.

How many of those colder states and countries have the humidity of Texas effecting ice growth.

Most of them. Texas unsurprisingly ranks 40 (of 50) when it comes to relative humidity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbrettschneider/2018/08/23/oh-the-humidity-why-is-alaska-the-most-humid-state/?sh=4f1b1422330c

How many of those colder states and countries have the heat of Texas the other 99.9% of the time, its a hell of a lot easier to keep something warm when you don't ever have to worry about it overheating.

But... Texas is hot. Certainly moreso than 'colder places...'
You do have to worry more about things overheating in hot climates. I never had a car's radiator fry on me outside the Southwest, nor things (including AC units) break down in the heat.

I'm not sure you're familiar with Texas.

Look at your link the eastern third of Texas is about as humid as anyplace in the country, the middle third (where alot of the windmills seem to be) is almost as humid and its only the very western portion which screws with the state average. I don't think most people realize how frickin huge Texas is which makes state by state averages once again an oversimplification.

It would be interesting to see which windmill farms are still working well and their geographic location.

Update from Fort Worth, TX: Still have power. We think the reason we've never lost power is because, as the bird flies, we're less than a mile from a fire station and a natural gas well. Still under a boil water order. In fact, more of Fort Worth got put under a boil water order yesterday (or day before?), so nearly half the city is under a boil water order. Still have a bunch of in-laws in the house today, but they're planning to return home today.

I really do feel for the folks caught up in all of this. I do not blame any individual Texas citizen that they have warm weather insulation, no winter gear, and are unprepared for snow, ice and cold. Why should they be prepared for it? It rarely ever happens!

I hope that our Federal and fellow State governments act quickly to lend a hand, as well as the appropriate charitable organizations.

That said, America in general is ill prepared for natural disasters and seem to prefer to react instead of plan for them. That IS a failure of political will and leadership. Why do today, what you can put off until tomorrow?

 Easy E wrote:
I really do feel for the folks caught up in all of this. I do not blame any individual Texas citizen that they have warm weather insulation, no winter gear, and are unprepared for snow, ice and cold. Why should they be prepared for it? It rarely ever happens!

I hope that our Federal and fellow State governments act quickly to lend a hand, as well as the appropriate charitable organizations.

That said, America in general is ill prepared for natural disasters and seem to prefer to react instead of plan for them. That IS a failure of political will and leadership. Why do today, what you can put off until tomorrow?

The truth if this is very real. In the past when we had freezes, it would be 70 the next day. Why salt the roads...its just gonna be all melted in 12 hours.

I have a fireplace in my house that i have never wanted to light until this week cause its never been worth the hassle and ive lived in this house for almost 10 years.

so yes we could all be better prepared..but until Sunday..we've never had any evidence we have needed to

-Ray

 Easy E wrote:
I really do feel for the folks caught up in all of this. I do not blame any individual Texas citizen that they have warm weather insulation, no winter gear, and are unprepared for snow, ice and cold. Why should they be prepared for it? It rarely ever happens!

Because they were told it would.

NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I really do feel for the folks caught up in all of this. I do not blame any individual Texas citizen that they have warm weather insulation, no winter gear, and are unprepared for snow, ice and cold. Why should they be prepared for it? It rarely ever happens!

Because they were told it would.

To me, that is not the citizens fault.

That is the part where I say....

America in general is ill prepared for natural disasters and seem to prefer to react instead of plan for them. That IS a failure of political will and leadership.

It is a failure of our elected officials and non-elected officials, not of general citizens.

 rayphoton wrote:

The truth if this is very real. In the past when we had freezes, it would be 70 the next day. Why salt the roads...its just gonna be all melted in 12 hours.

I have a fireplace in my house that i have never wanted to light until this week cause its never been worth the hassle and ive lived in this house for almost 10 years.

so yes we could all be better prepared..but until Sunday..we've never had any evidence we have needed to

-Ray

Interestingly enough, we did have a big freeze in Dallas/Fort Worth 10 years ago, just before the Super Bowl was held here. That freeze also shut down the area for most of a week, as the snow and ice didn't completely clear up until the sixth day. However, that freeze didn't impact the whole state like the current one did, and the temperatures then weren't as cold as now.