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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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As I read more about the problems that came up this week, it does appear that it’s not just the wind power issue. [I’m a relatively new resident of Texas (2.5 years), so I’m still figuring some things out.] Although the extremely low temperatures are not unprecedented, the combination of extremely low temperatures for several days in a row is unprecedented. Also, apparently many of the fossil fuel plants are not insulated against such long term cold, and so mechanical failures occurred, such as bearing grease solidifying and water supplies for boilers freezing. Building power plants and transmission capabilities to withstand many days of extremely low temperatures would cost a lot of money, which utility customers would need to pay for.
But nonetheless . . . both federal and state legislation are responsible for some of this week’s mess. Legislation and regulation pushed utilities to use particular energy sources for particular functions, increasing single point of failure vulnerabilities. Also, many have pointed out that with the push to natural gas over coal or nuclear, electricity generation is at the mercy of “just in time” fuel delivery – no ability to stash a reserve of coal or nuclear fuel at the power plant. So, when natural gas supplies become thin, no ability to generate electricity.
I agree it’s probably not zero, but — until magic batteries appear — it should be treated as an unreliable source, and not counted for emergency capacity.
Frozen masked people will gladly get on heated boxcars “for their own good”. Green is the new black — as in “blackout”.
I live in Missouri. Yesterday morning we experienced our punishment in the form of a forced rolling blackout. It lasted 3 hours, even though it was only supposed to last 30 to 60 minutes. The excuse for this was the extreme cold weather. It caused too much stress on the electric power grid. My question immediately was, why? In the midwest 99% of furnaces are powered by natural gas, not electricity. Yes, electricity does run the blower. But that uses only 10 to 12 amps. I have to wonder what will happen this summer when all those furnaces using gas become air conditioners using 50 amps of electricity. If we stress the grid with 12 amp air movers what is in store for us when the big electric grabbers start pumping cold air in the summer? I agree with the author. What is happening in Texas is inexcusable. Governor Abbot is acting as if he has no responsibility for this tragedy. Wrong! He has every bit as much blame as Cuomo in New York. BTW, my house temperature dropped 30 degrees during the forced outage. It was -5 degrees outside when they decided to turn the electricity off. After the power was turned back on it took 4 hours of constant running to heat my house back to the temperature it was before the outage. My next question after why is how much. How much net energy was actually saved by that display of arrogance from the electric company?
Yet here in Florida we have been having a very warm two weeks even for a Florida Winter. Its been in the mid eights almost every single day. We actually had been having a very cool Winter were I did not have my air condition turned on for like 10 or 11 weeks. Which I can’t ever remember happening that long in Florida. We typical get a few days of 80 degree weather each month in the winter.
Also from I think I agree with Jerry. From everything I have read Texas Grid is very well run. Its just not designed for extreme temperatures and maybe has not kept up with the massive immigration into Texas. Maybe they have under invested in expanding capacity but it gets real expensive to keep up with infrastructure in rapid growing areas. Even well run goverment don’t react to change well in the short term.
I am unsure of what the issue is but I suspect the answer is socialism and green energy.
Correct
OK, good point. Obviously, something went wrong, because the power is off. I was trying to make the point that it’s hard to pin the cause on any specific cause, without more information.
The cause(s) may also be different in different areas. I’m not sure about how widespread the power outage might be.
Yeah? Well there isn’t a profit motive or any motive for those that manage the power grid to do a good job. We let the government oversee them.
And it’s a fact that the infrastructure is significantly different too.
Are there Waffle Houses in Texas? Are they open and warm?
I think I recall reading that College Station, TX is the only SEC team town without a Waffle House. As for the rest of Texas, I have no idea.
I wonder how long it takes for “Biden” (supposedly) to re-authorize Keystone and then take credit for having gotten it off the ground to start with during the Obama years?
That might be a tad unfair since grid operators are utilities and beholden to the utility boards. Building 150% excess capacity might be a good idea, but those utility boards will balk at the cost.
Who do utility boards answer to? In most places positions are filled by election, but I’ll bet most people don’t know who the board members are, what their policies are, or when they voted for them. In other words, folks, who got us into this mess? WE DID. Mostly by pressing the boards to keep rates low rather than plan for the future.
It’s also unfair to single out wind power since that’s mostly a federal government gig and not something the grid operators had the liberty to reject.
It must have been nice working for Amazon.com, where the company had control over everything and could make decisions like having 3 geographical presences and lots of excess capacity. Electrical power in Texas is nothing like that; the federal government and hundreds of other government entities have their fingers all over it.
And it’s worse than you think. Each municipality and county might have its own electrical utility board, and a company like Centerpoint (electrical grid operator) is beholden to all of them.
It’s probably worth noting that even something as “extreme” as a 150% excess capacity, doesn’t translate directly to a 150% increase in bills.
While a healthy sense of skepticism is a good thing, sometimes that feeling to be overly generous in that department should just be ignored. Noticed a couple of good examples here…
I live in northwest Austin. My power went out about 2:00 AM Monday morning and just came back on this evening. 63 hours without lights or heat. Florida is looking really good to me, even with alligators and giant snakes.
Isn’t Austin like the Bluest/Greenest part of Texas? Seems like you could do fine just by moving to a less-Blue/Green part of Texas.
I live in southwest Austin. Power has been good except for 10 minutes at midnight last night. We lost water this morning and that really sucks.
Don’t worry about Florida. There the giant snakes eat the alligators.
And there are – or at least were – videos of it on youtube.
I’m hoping the californians take this as a sign to get the hell out of TEXAS.
Good point!
PRC has been having “rolling blackouts” for some time already, in large part because they don’t want to build their own power plants. But it doesn’t get cold enough to kill.
Little known fact: Keystone had a plan B. It is still going in, just not using federal lands or needing federal permits. The Indian reservations are quite happy for the income if the pipeline goes through their land. North Dakota’s section is done, South Dakota’s section is nearly done. Nebraska’s legislature is currently dithering (Nebraska has always been a weird state – neither Left nor Right), but is expected to act soon, in which case the pipeline will proceed, Washington be damned.
You are expecting utility boards to engage in rational thought?
Well they probably get the pressure from the customers who think a 150% excess capacity means their bills will go up 150%, which is not correct.
I wondered about that some time ago, even before Biden acted on his promise/threat to rescind the permit. Part of my interest was that only crossing the Canada border should be a federal issue at all, and from what I’d been reading, that part was already completed, possibly even before the election. Although I haven’t read anything about it since then. But it could all be part of the plan as I’ve outlined, for Biden to take credit for what he tried to stop, as with Obama trying – and failing – to shut down drilling on private land and then claiming credit for lower gasoline prices. (And like Clinton taking credit for signing “welfare reform” after first vetoing it several times.)
Greater Dallas area here. We went for 48 hours without power – in a nice suburban neighborhood, not a rural area. I have no idea why. Some of our friends reported repeated blackouts, so I have no idea why we went so long without a break. It was crazy. I agree: heads should roll.
Our neighborhood has no water and grocery stores are closed or practically bare shelved. I’m told gas stations are empty of fuel. It’s like we’ve learned to be Soviet these past two years. (Two years ago we had severe water contamination.)
No outages for me, either gas or electric or water. But I’ve been building inventory for months since moving here, I continue to buy a 32-roll pack of TP each time I’m at the store, regardless. It’s not expensive, and I have plenty of storage space now. I could fill a whole “bedroom” (one of TEN) just with TP and not miss it. I also have a large number of canned meats etc, that are good for at least 3 years. Coming soon will be a Coleman camp stove and a supply of fuel for that, plus for a Coleman lantern that I already have. And been looking at a couple high-capacity electric heaters (240v) in case there’s a time when power might be available but gas isn’t. Radiant heaters (no fan) running from gas are also available, but more expensive.