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On Texas: Fire Them, Fire Them All
Between 2005 and 2008, I worked as a principal engineer for Amazon where I had technical oversight responsibilities for a significant chunk of the Amazon.com retail website. Amazon is one of the most operationally competent companies on the planet but such competence doesn’t happen by accident.
The level of operational availability that Amazon achieves on its website is a consequence of intentional planning and foresight and it comes at a cost. To maintain availability in the face of unexpected events, substantial excess capacity is continuously maintained. At the time I was there, our operational doctrine required us to provision 150% of our expected peak load and to spread that total capacity across three separate geographies. This allowed for the possibility of losing an entire geography without losing the ability to still serve 100% of peak website requests. At one point while I was there, we were using fully 10% of our entire available capacity merely to probe the system for availability problems so that we would discover them before our customers did. A customer-visible problem caused by an engineer could be a career-ending event at Amazon during those years.
Part of my job was to serve on the “availability team”, which consisted of senior technical personnel who were tasked with doing an unforgiving postmortem analysis of every single event that affected the availability of the website. This “after-action” analysis was, to a certain extent, ruthless, and we did not play kissy-face games regarding human mistakes. Typically, if someone brought the website down due to having failed to follow operational best practice, he would be summarily fired. And the pre-firing interrogation could be…painful.
Which brings me to Texas.
As I write these words, I have been without power for 15 hours overnight and the temperature is 19 degrees outside. We were without power also the night before and the temperature was 1 degree in the morning. We’re doing well enough because we have a gas fireplace and we have rearranged the living room furniture – squeezed up close to the hearth we can generally maintain a situation where we’re not completely miserable. But others are not so fortunate and some are, quite literally, dying.
Something is seriously and dangerously amiss when websites are maintained with more competence and care than the competence being applied to the maintenance of the power grid which keeps actual human beings alive. There are preening politicians and bureaucrats in Austin who put plaques on their walls celebrating their “green” sensibilities, having supported the expansion of wind power and deepened Texans’ dependence on it. These politicians and bureaucrats should be made to stop licking the boots of the Greens and, instead, be frog-marched to the high plains of northwest Texas, and be made to lick the frozen turbines sitting motionless there, at least until they thaw enough to start turning again.
Texas has increased its dependence on wind energy to the point that 23% of Texas power is generated by wind turbines dotting the prairie landscape. But at the first unfortunate weather event, half of the wind generating capacity folded like a cheap suit, sending paroxysms of dysfunction throughout the power grid, leaving millions of Texans without power when they needed it most.
But that is not even the worst of it. The collapse of the power grid in the face of a mere 10-20% loss of generating capacity suggests we have been running the grid, something that human lives depend upon, with catastrophically thin operational margins. (We have apparently been running our healthcare system the same way, given the panic that ensued at the outset of the pandemic when we were besieged by a continuous alarmist drumbeat to “flatten the curve” lest we overwhelm ‘the system’.)
What the winter of 2021 has taught us is that the politicians and bureaucrats of Texas are less competent than the lowliest software engineer at amazon.com.
It appears 2021 is going to continue what started in 2020 when the “experts” and politicians were exposed for the pompous, fraudulent grifters that they are.
Fire them. Fire them all.
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ERCOT (the Texas operator for the system) apparently counts wind and solar reserve capacity at its average output. But the actual power output of the windmills — assuming all are operational — varies from 65% of nominal down to 2% of nominal.
The average is somewhere between those two numbers, but there will almost never be an average day. In fact it varies so much it is a burden to keep the non-wind power fluctuations in line so the output remains steady.
I would argue that for emergency reserve purposes, the contribution of wind and solar should be assumed to be zero.
Amen.
As of yesterday afternoon we had been without power for over 30 hours. After one very cold night for kids and all and no indication electricity (and heat) were coming we were bugging out. Unfortunately, the damage was done…dead water pipes walking. (That long with no internal heat at all…rolling outages my arse…is a death sentence for the house.)
Others have [it] much worse but not happy about this at all. Heads should roll (figuratively, of course) over this.
A cynic might wonder if millions of bourgeois Americans freezing to death in the dark is a feature of the bureaucrats’ scheme rather than a bug.
We have had a stream of governmental policies that could lead us to believe this.
Examples: Energy, Covid-19, and 2020 Law and Order. Others can add more specifics, I’m sure.
How foolish for you to presume that anyone in government will ever be held accountable (unless it is Trump for things he didn’t do).
The “war on poverty,” the “war on drugs,” “gun control….”
You can’t. They work for government. That’s one of the reasons they took those jobs. They can’t be fired.
I just read today that the ERCOT chairman doesn’t live in the state. Governor Abbott is already in trouble over his early COVID decisions. If he wants to have any future political career he will make big changes in ERCOT and the grid. What stinks is we won’t have this sort of weather again for years so we won’t know when they start doing stupid stuff again until it’s too late.
things in the world are changing. I was on the UPS Air infrastructure server team. Our operations model was redundancy over redundancy. A 2 minute outage would have got a team fired. Our goal was 6 9s availability. UPS Worldport was never to be down, every second cost millions of dollars. That was 15 years ago. Yesterday I heard UPS Worldport voluntarily shut down for a 5 inch snow storm. I am shocked. I remember going in to work in 10+ inch storms and any complaints would have been a RPE.
With utilities being a government-regulated monopoly in most cases, I don’t see how they can become operationally equivalent to businesses that have to compete in the marketplace.
You could fire everyone and hire in vastly more competent people, and still not change a damned thing. These sorts of SNAFUs are baked into the pudding. Governor Abbot can reform and reform all he wants, and it won’t do anything more than shuffling deck chairs on cruise ships.
This is the paradox of utility regulations at play. Utility companies are not really allowed to charge, much less to change rates based on evolving market conditions. Every state has its utility boards, and they are ruthless in the regulation of pricing and access, which is in direct contradiction to everything they teach you about supply and demand in Econ 101.
These various utility boards at the state and federal levels are very keen to punish utilities for things like “price gouging”, or cutting off people for not paying their bills. They make it extremely difficult for utility companies to justify things like building out excess capacity in generation and transmission, or to build up cash reserves – after all those are “evil” excess profits, and how in hell can they justify hoarding all that cash when someone’s grandmother just had her power cut off!!111!!!!
Utility companies ultimately run, therefore, on thin margins (which they still have to politically justify), and when they get those margin calculations wrong they then have to go begging for bailouts while being castigated for their greed. And because that industry is plagued by politics, those politics go right down the chain. This also explains why utility companies have had their hands out for windmills and other green crap – this is basically free money for them. They’re getting subsidies and grants and being told to go spend that money, which is a relief from having to justify to a Utilities Commission why they just spent 3 years upgrading old substation transformers.
Amazon has no such strictures in its redundancy planning, what it charges, or how it spends its funds.
You can fire everyone in your state power companies and it would fix nothing. You could fire everyone in your state utility commissions and that would fix nothing – the next people in would still have to obey and enforce state regulations.
Or you could try to change the state regulations and dispense with the old “public utilities are a right!” mentality. Good luck with that one.
This should be a warning to all who suggest any industry or online service “should be regulated like a utility” – the service turns into a mediocrity plagued by occasional disasters.
UPS and Fedex are the primary inbound and outbound shipping options for my company – we’re all small parcel stuff. UPS’s service and back-end support have not only not kept up with the times, they have degraded in quality over the last decade. I used to avoid shipping via Fedex because their service to us had a long history of being terrible, but in the last 3 years that has shifted. My customers and vendors have likewise been shifting away from UPS.
Yesterday they didn’t even run any routes around central Ohio, and couldn’t even be bothered to tell their customers that they weren’t getting any pickups. Which hacked off a few of my customers who were expecting shipments. Fedex? They were here.
It’s probably not absolutely zero…IF the sources are interconnected over a wide-enough geographical area…but I bet it’s no more than, say, 20-30% if you want to maintain high reliability.
One way to look at the intermittent sources is that they do reduce fuel consumption but at the expense of considerably increased capital investment. The capital cost per kwh is greater for wind/solar than it is for a gas or coal plant, plus you need at least 2-4 hours of battery storage to allow for backup plants to come on-line, PLUS 70%-80% of the capex that would normally be required for the gas or coal plant. Overall, probably at least of capex multiple of 3:1, partially recovered from the fuel cost savings.
We joke that any of these typical services can get anything to our receiving dock from anywhere in the world in two days…but the receiving dock is at least a week from anywhere in the plant.
UPS is unionized, I think. What about FedEx?
I’m gonna be contrarian here.
I haven’t looked up the statistics on this storm, but it appears to be an absolutely bizarre and unprecedented winter storm, for Texas. Why would you expect a system to have a sufficient margin to handle such a rare event?
There is a high cost to preparation, which often proves unnecessary. Like most things in life, it’s a question of costs and benefits, and balancing risks.
Even figuring out what went wrong, if anything, may be difficult. Is the problem really wind power generators freezing, or is it natural gas pipelines freezing, or is it something about the distribution network? I have no idea.
I don’t think the unionization issue has much bearing on UPS’s issues. Like I noted, Fedex used to be terrible, while UPS could seemingly do no wrong. The problems in UPS seem to be problems of leadership, and either complacency or befuddlement at the way freight demands have shifted in the last decade.
You can see this in their shipping software – Worldship used to be very good, while Fedex’s software crashed often and was such a memory hog that it bogged down the sorts of low-buck PCs people stick in their shipping departments. Well, Worldship is now terrible at many many levels (with configuration functions now so buried that fixing anything is a chore), and regularly frags its own database (ironically once doing so during a DB backup). Fedex, by contrast, runs smoothly, and while the UI is still poor, the software is otherwise snappy.
That part made me giggle. (Well, sort of.)
Well, the point of view I expressed is not unique to me (see the links below).
Your point about the cost of preparation is the discussion we should be having. It’s the point, actually, that I’m making. We’re running very thin operational margins – is that wise? Is that really what we want? Is the level of risk acceptable? We should be having that discussion, but if they can get away with it, the politicians and ERCOT will avert their eyes and try to move on.
The notion that we can’t know what went wrong is false, but would be deeply problematic if true. It would mean that we have chosen to have lives depend on systems that are inherently and randomly unreliable without the ability to diagnose and improve them. To the extent ERCOT is running a power grid that they don’t understand and can’t manage, it would be yet another example of their fatal negligence and an additional argument for replacing them.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6232641136001#sp=show-clips
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2021/02/16/nearly-half-of-texas-wind-turbines-frozen-in-winter-storm-limiting-states-power-output/
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-winter-storm-freezes-texas-wind-turbines-hampering-electric-generation/4483230001/
Maybe the people in Texas who are having outages because of no wind power, especially in “green” areas such as Austin, need to be reminded “This is the wind power that you wanted.”
Only the pilots.
My only available option to indicate agreement is to “Like” your post although the circumstances both anger and frustrate me. So sorry for the impact. My church has 1 inch of standing water in the entire second floor because of a burst fire extinguishing system. A family member had the infrastructure to their in-ground swimming pool essentially explode. So, albeit indirectly, I feel your pain.
Alas.
This storm has been described as a once in a century occurrence. If so, Jerry you are right. If it is a once a decade occurrence, not so much.
I understand that there are three power grids, the Eastern US, the Western US and Texas. Texas did not want the Fed’s in their business, so they refuse to connect outside of the state. (This is not unlike how PSA got started, as it flew only between California airports so its rates were not regulated by the Civil Aviation Board (CAB) which was later abolished in 1978 in one of the better moves by the Carter Administration.) Maybe it is time for Texas to interlock with the other two grids?
Does the wind power operation in Texas pay for it creation and continuing power production out of sales revenues?
Texas should avoid connecting with the Western grid, at least, if it would mean subsidizing the People’s Republic of California.
Hahahahahaha. It will never get close to paying for the federal subsidies. In fact, large windmills do not generate the amount of energy required to make them over their lifetime.
Texas was in my view a very desirable place to live because if was not only conservative, but it had it’s own independent electrical grid, one that wouldn’t be brought down by a chain-reaction failure of the US grid’s failure from, say, a Carrington-like solar mass ejection.
Then Biden reverses Trump’s ban on Chinese parts in the electrical grid.
Then Representative Biedermann has formally filed a bill that would put Texas on track to be the first state to secede from the nation.
And now Texas is off-line even though it was supposed to be the most stable and secure, and the rolling blackouts aren’t actually rolling.
I know that this is all just coincidence, but the timing couldn’t be more inconvenient.
No, Texas did not decide to do this. Wind power companies picked Texas to execute their rent-farming operations because parts of Texas have better-than-average wind consistency. The federal government did this to Texas with its subsidies for green power and its mandates for grids to accept green power.
While ERCOT may have been more enthusiastic about this than it should have, it didn’t have the authority to stop the spread of grid-destabilizing green energy there in Texas. The people who need to be fired are politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, DC. Good luck with that.