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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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I find it very hard to believe that Texas would have to ask permission.
It depends on someone’s priorities, too. If there’s a possibility of people dying, versus someone losing their job… Don’t you think they should be willing to lose their job?
The Left seems to be very concerned with “green energy,” even if it means people freeze to death.
I can’t find the article, but I think that the federal response, though not explicit in itself, authorized increasing to the requested mega-wattage output. I hadn’t heard about it declining emergency status.
Should? Yes. Would? Not really. How familiar are you with the types of people who generally rise through the ranks of these types of organizations?
Also, its not just their jobs…I can imagine that current and future permits/licenses of various types are on the line with the federal behemoth also. That doesn’t make it right…but your scenario just isn’t realistic.
I probably should act so naive, but why would the federal government have control over how much power is put out in an emergency? Or not in an emergency? The world has gone mad.
No, I didn’t know either. It would have boosted certain levels of polluting emissions above the prescribed federal thresholds.
The issue would seem to be the power generated by “dirty” coal plants etc. If in order to meet demand, perhaps to keep people from freezing to death, your only remaining source of power is coal, and the feds say “no coal, no how, not ever” then that’s their stick-up-the-@ss.
Thus starts a series of questions that should lead to some familiar ground in conservative circles…
It will be blamed on Trump, of course.
The decisions have already been made, and are tied up in the rates. The rates include all the crap that was unsustainable in every possible condition, meaning the windmills, and not paying for hardening for that tail risk event.
So yes, it comes down to rates, and getting what you paid for in the rates. The last thing I’m saying is that that’s good; in the current state it’s horrible. Talking about engineering professionalism has, I think, very little to do with it.
And that’s just the windmill component.
They don’t – they would have no idea about what to do, how do to this safely, etc. It’s not just a throttle that you turn up or down because Grampa’s coming over.
Most utilities operate under FERC regulation because they either transmit or distribute energy across state lines, and I don’t think states that operate a utility (ERCOT) have to adhere to the same regulations.
https://www.ferc.gov/about/what-ferc/what-ferc-does
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, is an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. FERC also reviews proposals to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and interstate natural gas pipelines as well as licensing hydropower projects. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave FERC additional responsibilities as outlined and updated Strategic Plan. As part of that responsibility, FERC:
What FERC Does Not Do
Many areas outside of FERC’s jurisdictional responsibility are dealt with by State Public Utility Commissions. Areas considered outside of FERC’s responsibility include:
Thursday I was delivering food and water in 6 inches of snow and yesterday it was 73. I sat on the porch with the windows open. The last little pieces of ice and snow have finally melted.
Looking outside today, it’s hard to believe that at this time last week we (the Weeping Family) had just experienced the first hour of what would turn out to be 48 hours of no electricity. It’s crazy.
Haven’t been this happy about warm weather in quite a while. Glad it’s turned the corner for you.