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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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Here in southwest Austin, I think my family has three liters of potable water remaining this morning, and we’ve been quite parsimonious in our consumption since Monday, I’ve only been able to buy a couple liters a day since Wednesday and none before then. We we able to buy some lemonade and other fruit juices, so that’s another few liters of drinkable liquids. The shelves at the grocery store are bare of almost all food. I’ve filled every container I have with snow, so we have some non-potable water to operate the toilets, but we are doing minimal flushes to conserve that as long as we can.
We are almost out of paper plates, and nothing to wash dishes with, so we might be having a severe hygiene problem soon. I hope the gas stations have gas soon so maybe we can drive to outlying towns and buy paper plates and cups, and maybe even food and water.
Hopefully the thaw expected today will allow the trucks to restock the shelves at the store. I hope some how we can get more water today, we’re told through rumor that distribution of water might begin in the next few days, whatever that means.
This is pretty bad. The city doesn’t even know where the pipes are broken, or even if that’s the reason for no water. We were told before it was a power outage at the water treatment plant, but now we learn that was only for a few hours on Monday. They have no clue what’s going on, and little interest in figuring it out or telling us what they know.
After a year of lock downs and no school, my poor teen aged daughter is losing her mind. She lacks the perspective that this is all temporary. Or is it?
This is not the United States. I feel like we’re living in some soviet hell.
It’s bad.
In, for example, Comfort with a small city water system, the crews did incredible work fixing broken mains, but now it’s taken a couple of days to track down homes with pipe breaks that were completely unaware. They still can’t get satisfactory pressure to the entire town until they can get the big residential leaks shut down. It turned out that ten homes were leaking the equivalent of 25 percent of normal system usage.
That schools are still shut down is a travesty. That is entirely a local school board decision.
They’re quite proud of that decision.
Does that reflect what parents in the district want? The parents here were screaming for school to reopen so it was an easy call for us. Attendance in person started over 80 percent and has been above 90 percent since October. Yet I’ve read that in San Antonio it hovers around 50 percent.
It’s Austin. We are 75% democrat. They do what the party tells them to do.
They have in-person school, but it’s really just baby sitting for families that work. Kids have to sit at a desk all day doing on-line work and can’t move from the desk or talk to anyone. And in my daughter’s classes, every class, the teacher talks for about five minutes and then tells everyone to go off line and do work on their own. It’s a joke.
FIFY.
Not directed at you but I, for one, will not let them scrub this part from their narrative. To be fair, I don’t yet have all the facts about what happened to the group of neighborhoods affected by my outage but it appears we went into the first “roll” and never came out of it….for 40 hours or so. Until I get better information, I am going to assume that the “rolling” feature didn’t work and some of us were left out in the cold. (I also realize that, just maybe, someone had to make additional hard decisions about resources and helping me and my immediate neighbors or saving the entire grid…but let’s be as precise as possible with the narrative. (Sorry, I’m a bit sensitive about this at the moment…)
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have taken precautions against such an occurance, though. I’ve heard reports that they didn’t make an effort to winterize everything like they should have.
My prayers are with all of you there in Austin. I didn’t realize the situation was so bad down there. (We live in the DFW area.)
Yep. Ours first went off around 2 in the morning on Monday, but it came back on about 30 minutes later. The second time it went off was around 10 Monday morning. That time it stayed off until around 10 Wednesday morning. 48 continuous hours is a loooooong time to be without power in these extra cold conditions.
I know this is off-topic, but I think the year of isolation due to Covid-related edicts and fears has severed or at least frayed social ties that might have been used to ameliorate some of the effects of the current freeze crisis. A year of everyday life being made difficult has sapped our emotional reserves, so we have less ability to deal with a real crisis.
I totally agree. It’s also sapped our financial reserves – at least for those of us who are going on a year of being unemployed – leaving us with less to help each other out.
Our cul de sac is especially social and we are hanging together pretty well. We also have a hospital nearby, and I’m told that is why we haven’t had a power outage. The hospital has been evacuated now because of the lack of water. I hope the power is stable enough that we keep it going. Temperatures should be in the 50’s today approaching 70’s tomorrow, so that should help fixing the pipes, but if all the snow melts before they fix the water problems . . . Well, we still have the neighbor’s pool to raid. All is not lost, but it certainly isn’t fun.
Seeing how they’re in defensive mode at the moment, I’m not sure how much weight to give those claims. But even if they are 100% serious, I take it as proof that they haven’t been doing their job – which is mainly to do their best to keep something like that from ever happening.
2011 was bad. That was power, and if I remember correctly, it was largely due to failures at coal powered generator plants. Because of the extreme cold. But it didn’t last for more than a day or two.
This is certainly the worst experience we’ve had in 31 years. We missed the 1989 freeze by six months.
If someone wanted to set your house on fire, they could probably succeed with or without a large propane tank.
This is similar what happened to us in NJ in August when we lost power for 5 days. JCP&L is headquartered in Ohio. There was a complete disconnect between the people on the ground and the suits 500 miles away in Akron. Decisions took forever to make.
Our county emergency management office just received a semi trailer load of potable water for distribution. The can is a marvel of American can-do (no pun intended).
Not enough, apparently – else the grid would already be built out to sustain this type of event and this post on Ricochet wouldn’t exist.
All the discussion above really goes back to one thing – rates. You get what you pay for. The types of hardenings, building out infrastructure to support resiliency and redundancies, would be paid for in rates. What do people complain about? Electricity rates. What do “activists” complain about? The cost of electricity for the current disadvantaged group of the week.
The needs for infrastructure investment are hard to easily articulate in a sound bite. Most people do not pay attention until something no longer works, or hits them in the wallet. A billion-dollar investment for Texas wouldn’t be an insane amount of money to help prevent these events in the future – it could be many billions. That might mean $100 power bill jumping to $130/$140/$150. For most folks with a decent income, this would seem like small tatoes, and well worth the investment. For other folks, that $30-$50 bucks is a lot of money.
Which makes getting these investments past regulatory commissions an enormous amount of work for utilities, and they spend a lot of money to manage regulatory engagements, public engagements, and provide regulatory reporting.
This all goes back to what I said earlier – it’s a complex issue, made more so by gov’t mandates around renewables. We haven’t talked yet about solar interconnects, have we?
The above can makes me metaphorically happy in the pants.
FEMA: Can you ship us roughly 47 gazillion tons of water in cans?
Budweiser: Hold my beer.
Completely concur. If you had asked people a month ago what it was worth to secure the grid from extreme cold events – a 5, 10, 20 percent increase in their electric bill they would probably have said 1 or 2 percent, and many would have said no. This really was an outlier of an event.
I watch the weather constantly. In a rural fire department the weather makes a huge difference when we fight brush fires. I saw this event forecast 10 days before and we started warning people on social media. And yet many were caught completely unaware. We were delivering food and water to people at the height of the snow storm because they didn’t have enough food for a week in their home. In many cases we found that neighbors who were within walking distance could have taken care of them but it was easier to call 911. Generally we would set up a neighbor after the fact so we could avoid a return. Now that things have cleared up we are just doing water deliveries and helping where asked.
No, it comes down to decisions. This why engineers are supposed to be professionals. Professionals are supposed to plan for possibilities. While this storm was particularly severe, cold weather is not unheard of in Texas, especially where the windmill farms tend to be.
This is a great example of what could have been avoided, if people had just done some small prep work, on their own. Now it’s *ss-biting time. I don’t blame folks for missing critical messaging, or thinking it “won’t happen to them”. It’s the normal human response, but the individual needs to own it.
Well, being in the middle of the event right now keeps me from being current on all that is known but I am reminded of a book on my “need to read list” (unfortunately, it has been there way too long) about big failures such at this (Breaking the Mishap Chain: Human Factors Lessons Learned from Aerospace Accidents and Incidents in Research, Flight Test, and Development)…and come to think of it, I seem to remember Malcolm Gladwell’s treatment of the series of errors that led to a notable airline crash in one of his books (unfortunately, all my books and notes are sitting in the dead, wet house right now). Anyhow, the point is I suspect there is much to be learned about what happened and what was supposed to happen with respect to “the grid” (and the operational plan of it) that will likely become much clearer as the
fog clearswater drains. I’m not going to be too smug in my commentary until then…That’s an excellent point. When the Mrs was flying for USAF every T-38 crash (in particular the formation accidents) were after a chain of events went wrong. At any point in the chain different action would have changed the final outcome. In the case of this grid failure we are talking about some events happening years before this weather but they will still turn out to have been critical links in the chain.
Unfortunately it will be hard to sort out the analysis from the political preening. I read a statement on social media by a state legislator who said on day two she spent all day “demanding answers” from ERCOT. I’m sure that was a big help.
I have no expertise in this area other than what is traditionally called cost-benefit analysis. I haven’t heard any that would even come close to making the case for the solar/wind energy advocates as relates to the power grid. Texans just need to make sure these matters get the proper consideration going forward.
It would have been nice to have gotten some answers. The lack of response was appalling, especially regarding water. They kept telling me to “boil my water” after three days on only air in my pipes, and it wasn’t until the fourth day that they even made any admission that some places didn’t have any water. They have been making plans to distribute water, but I only know that because my neighbor works at the civic center where they are still “expecting” shipments of water to come. I heard a rumor that water was available for pick up at a local city athletic facility, but there were no announcements of that.
I can put up with a lot of things. We had been melting snow, but now the snow is all gone. What I find inexcusable is the lack of information, even if the information is “I don’t know.” Seven days with no water, grocery stores bare, gas stations with no gas.
There’s a lot of misfeasance that is happening now, let alone from the past.
Well, hallelujah! Wife tells me the water is on. We just need to turn our supply on from the street (disabled in case it came on at night and there’s a leak in the house.
For example, if this is true:
They should have done it anyway, “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission.” And then made a big stink over it afterward.
Although I can see a validity to letting them get what they think they wanted. If there hadn’t been such a disaster, including deaths, it would have seemed like a nothing-burger and Biden et al may have even taken credit for it.
Yeaaaaah…it would be nice to know someone had the fortitude to do that but I just don’t think that is how things work with these kinds of things.