I was there last weekend & for the day of the hurricane. This was just a cat 1 hurricane at the time it passed through Houston, and there was SO much damage. I can't imagine the city is remotely prepared for (god forbid, and idk how likely it is that far inland anyway) a cat 4 or 5. We were staying in a hotel that had a backup generator, but every single other building that was visible from our hotel had lost power during the storm.
Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.
I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:
* Not enough employees at the electrical companies
* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically
* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically
* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)
* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's
This wasn't a "grid issue." It is a last-mile issue.
It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.
The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.
New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.
We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.
Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.
The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).
So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.
We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.
The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.
As to your point about it being an urban area:
The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).
I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.
Also live in SF Bay Area, but my sister lived in Houston for ~20 years and I grew up in the Northeast (and got hit by hurricanes Gloria and Bob as a child).
What we saw with the winter storms of 2022 and 2023 was nothing close to what Houston or even the NY area gets with a hurricane. Bay Area topography is hilly; most of the wind is broken by the Santa Cruz mountains. I'm in one of the SF Peninsula canyons that's known for being particularly windy, and we saw maybe 70mph gusts and 30mph sustained. A Cat 1 hurricane (like Beryl, Bob, or Gloria) has 75mph winds sustained with gusts up to 100mph. A Cat 5 (like Katrina at the height of its strength; it made landfall as a cat 3) has 150mph sustained winds and 200+mph gusts.
Hurricane Bob knocked out power to eastern Long Island NY for 2 days in 1991. Hurricane Sandy (also a Cat 1 at landfall, but a direct hit on NYC) knocked out power for 2 weeks. The problem is not unique to Houston or Texas. PG&E has plenty of its own problems, but the reason fewer poles went down our winter storms (and they still did go down; Cupertino was without power for almost 2 days) was simply because the wind was less.
To quantify the winds we're talking about, the record-setting winds in the Bay Area this February peaked at 100mph gusts, with 18 stations recording values between 80mph and 100mph [0] (Pablo Point, out in the middle of the Pacific, recorded gusts of 102mph, but I'd consider that an outlier). Notably, all stations recording values higher than 80mph are on mountain peaks, not anywhere near population centers. In most of the Bay Area the gusts didn't exceed 60mph [1].
During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.
All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.
Consider earthquakes. Preparation and infrastructure are what matter. If you don't do the prep, you'll have a hundred thousand dead from a 6.0. But if you do the prep, you'll have relatively trivial damage from a 7.0.
Texas power, thanks to their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude, has shown itself to be woefully underreported repeatedly in the last few years.
I can't walk by this comment without noting that their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude resulted in a large populous state which people want to migrate to. The other large US state, California, has electricity prices that appear to be 2x higher [0]. And their migratory trends are not encouraging.
People underestimate the heavy burden of a strong regulatory state. High standards and high costs. All in it the Texas approach looks to be pretty good even if it means you have to be prepared for an emergency. I actually lost power for 24 hours recently so I can sympathise; a widespread outage would be horrific for an unprepared person. But being prepared for emergencies is a much more resilient approach in the long term and better than the quite substantial risk of overregulating.
> EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.
The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis triggered by some of the most stunning displays of regulatory incompetence so far this century. So I would accept that the EU is more regulated but I don't think that is the sort of point that plays well right now.
I would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!
"would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!"
Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.
Electricity in Germany is somewhere in the region of 3x as expensive as in Texas. I'd prefer to have cheap power and a contingency plan for a week or so of grid outage than live with those sort of prices.
I've been keeping an eye on how the situation in Germany seems to be developing [0]. It makes for grim reading.
Could you clearify what is the "grim reading" in your source?
Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell! This is an inconvenience but for me power outage is a huge problem (especially 1 week!).
Energy consumption per capita: Down ~30% from peak & dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
Electricity generation: Down ~25% from peak& dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
A country with results like that cannot be said to have achieved success. It looks like a disaster in the making; this is the sort of result I'd be expecting to see somewhere like North Korea or out of some other backwards tinpot nation. From Germany it is a bit jaw dropping.
> Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell!
On the face of it that is an argument I have a lot of respect for - the problem is it doesn't jive with the figures I'm looking at, or the political rumbling coming out of Europe. If energy consumption is dropping by double digit percentages; then the impacts of those prices changes cannot be minor. They have to be serious enough to cause massively less energy consumption. So I'd say that is a convincing argument that the first order effects are contained but not really persuasive that the crisis is under control. The AfD isn't polling where it is because everyone feels comfortable and prosperous.
I'd rather take Texas' grid than whatever it is the German's are doing for their energy policy. Maybe Texas has a history I don't know about where their ability to produce energy is also collapsing, but it'd have to be awful fail to the extent that the Europeans (especially Germans) have managed over the last decade or two. From what I've seen, the Texas strategy is superior.
> ...and this is a problem for industry...
Also, just to point at this one more time - that industry is a big part of what makes Germany prosperous. You need industry to enjoy an industrial-era living standard. Problems for industry aren't something off in the distance people can ignore.
As a French I agree. In France it is also on a downward trend but there are some differences that makes it a better outlook in my opinion:
- per capita consumption seems to be going back up, thanks to some political work on the energy price and renewed Investment/interest in generation
- per capita generation is going back up and still better than Germany (has been since the 90s)
- France has much less heavy industry and never really relied on them to the same extent has Germany, it also has less peoples, considering France still generate the same amount of electricity or more, it is rather positive.
As a side note, some of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains in tools/processes.
The way Germany got there is by enabling their eco-fascists that clearly are against any kind of progress, related to science or not. They have a mindset right out of the dark ages where any risk taken for a potentially better life is not worth it; in general, they would rather have humans go back the way of the animals (preferably others before them, like it always is with those type of peoples).
Since the 80s they have been fighting nuclear power pushing Germany into expensive but still unreliable renewables that need to be supplemented by heavy use of coal (and energy imports, suddenly France's nuclear seems pretty good when they need it in the winter).
To be clear I am not against renewable, I think they are now a great tool for cheap peak electricity generations to supply some process we couldn't do as cheaply otherwise (like air-conditioning or car battery charging) but they absolutely need to be associated with a reliable energy generation for the hard times to at least meet the baseload demands.
The current numbers make any kind of large-scale battery a ridiculous proposition (without even talking about the costs) and overbuilding renewable is not just costly but still is a no guarantee proposition while requiring absurd level of investments.
Just as an example, in the winter Germany still use almost 40% (39.56 last January) of fossil fuels for their electricity generation.
And that's before talking about heating needs, because Germany always had high electricity prices, very few of their homes use electricity for heat, unlike France wich is pretty much the reverse. What Germany does, is use even more fossil fuel for heating (typically gaz but also fuel) and that's on top of their peaker gaz plant needs for just electricity.
To match just their electricity needs, they would need at least twice their current installed base of wind turbine and it's not even clear they wouldn't have blackouts (at least some hours) if they couldn't rely on neighbor's grid imports.
This costly and unreliable installation base is precisely what got them to those prices and the worst is that they try to politically force everyone into the same nonsense. Until recently where it became clearer to the French that nuclear was clearly not optional considering all the other choices and risk associated (much worse than the nuclear boogeyman) they have dominated EU's political trajectory and enforce some stupid anti-competitive rules, especially against France, to prevent them from winning and dominating with their superior choice.
I really hate Germany for this, they may not have won WW2 technically but with the EU they have very much won in spirit.
Leftists are now confused people don't really want EU anymore even though they are some clear indicators of ideological domination by some that lead to pretty bad outcomes in the long term.
Just the other day my grandma told me about some recipe that she doesn't do as much anymore because electricity being much more expensive, they now are pretty costly to do. It's ridiculous and clearly a regression but as long as everything fits the ideological narrative it's alright, I guess.
Recently I read about how Germany's future looks pretty bad with their industries leaving or becoming uncompetitive because of various factors (energy price being one, immigration another).
But as you can see, they will fight you for this, with all the ideological power something as close to religion as it can be.
> As a side note, some of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains in tools/processes.
Although I note that we seem to be agreeing; none of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains. Efficiency gains cause consumption to rise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). If efficiency is rising through all this, that means bad energy policy is actually causing even more damage than it superficially appears to.
The EU had an energy crisis because Germany was high on Russian gas, along with most of Central Europe. Thankfully the US took care of that. Southern Europe also has few fossil fuel options if Libya and Algeria decide to align themselves with Russia.
Power costs are the result of private profit taking not electrical regulation. Look at power costs for municipal providers with the same regulatory burden. LADWP customers are paying maybe 16 cents a kilowatt hour.
Houston actually has relatively low population density compared to other metro areas with only 3,842 people per square mile, and across the MSA (Houston is extremely spread out), that number is much lower. (Compare to, for example, Union City, NJ, with 54,138 persons/sq mile.) There are some 7.5 million people spread out across more than 10,000 square miles across the greater Houston area.
Also, the water table is very high, and hurricanes completely flood entire areas, so transformers etc are often completely underwater. It's just not feasible to bury sensitive equipment when the entire area is under six or ten feet of water.
I don't think it's really possible to predict what will become of Texas. One could imagine such a big, resource-rich state finding ways to work collectively for the better of all, though obviously that's naive to the point of nearly being a joke. Still there is a lot going for it in some sense. Politicians may not care about the people, but their beloved businesses also need infrastructure, so at least there's that.
I've lived in Texas my entire life and there are aspects of it that I love, but I do have vague plans to move north once my remaining ties to the state dissolve.
Would you bet your financial success or life outcome on Texas making rational policy leading to potentially more favorable outcomes for its citizens (based on all available evidence)?
Yes. I am also familiar with the technical challenges and cost of improving last mile electrical distribution to withstand hurricane force conditions where burial is not an option (whether because of a high water table or potential surge conditions, where equipment is suspended at a height above ground level on permanent scaffolding or pedestals). It is expensive, not impossible. It is a choice, and there is a cost. It’s cold, hard economics. The politics are whether to spend or not spend, and the outcome of that decision.
> What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.
In terms of wind speed, quite similar. A category 1 hurricane is only 74-95mph winds. This is pretty mild, as far as storms go. I've been through many, many category 1 hurricanes and it's not much of a storm. Things only start getting scary around category 3.
I have several friends who live high in the hills in the Santa Cruz mountains and they regularly see wind speeds in the range of cat 1 hurricanes.
> A 1998 ministerial inquiry criticized both the Auckland Electric Power Board and its privatized successor, which had halved its staff after taking over in October 1993
> The inquiry report also said, "Internal expertise in 110 kV assets was not maintained at a sufficient level"
It's almost as if you put public infrastructure under the control of people who only care about collecting short term rents bad things happen.
Other comment California has underground transmission lines. And yes sometimes they fail. Had a smaller one oops in my old neighborhood in San Francisco a few years ago.
PG&E is spending about $20b to underground 10,000 miles of lines in fire prone areas. Seems like a lot but it's $40/foot. Still that's only 10% of the total.
In other words, politics scales the other way: The more people you have in the same spot using the same resource, the more different ways they can be unhappy with the management of that resource.
The elevation of Houston is _higher_ than the elevation of SF. Yes, there are many hills, and the _max_ elevation is obviously higher, but there are also plenty of low lying areas and areas at sea level.
Hills make a huge difference impeding winds across the land, storm water drains much faster. Has a hurricane ever hit San Francisco? It’s not a real comparison, typhoons in the area, to a direct hurricane.
It’s also extremely expensive to mitigate, maybe it should be done, but the GP was hand waving it all away. Commenter even “disagreed from experience” and then cited a totally different experience.
Houston geography is just so so different from San Francisco, it's a goofy comparison to make. Both are major coastal cities, one being slightly higher than other is not really material, and thats about where the comparison ends. The impact to Houston is a drainage matter, no where for massive quantities of water to go.
Nonetheless, there are no recorded instances of large storm-induced floods in the SFBay area that I'm aware of. Do you know of any?
Fires, earthquakes, heavy rains causing mudslides that have actually killed people: yes. Some very localized flooding around the Russian River happens all the time. The Guadalupe River in San Jose flooded a few years ago. But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
In the Bay Area there's not much development on the coast. There are fancy cliff top homes, but not much at sea level. Even in SF things go uphill from the ocean pretty quickly. A good chunk of central and southern Marin is below sea level (and yes it floods during big storms) but that's well inland.
Nah, I was just pushing back on the notion that Houston is that much “lower” than SF, when it is not. Wild to get downvoted for that factual statement.
I also wondered this. How do you tell the difference between a climate change induced typhoon and the alternative? Maybe its obvious to the down voters, but you have at least two people here you could potentially teach something to.
Demanding the answer for specific storms is like demanding to know whether a smoker's lung cancer was caused by smoking. Maybe?? But we know in aggregate smoking caused an enormous amount of deaths. We can measure the number of smoking-induced deaths, and the number of climate-changed-induced storms.
I understand the concept, but please show me the statistics that show that storms are increasing in quantity or severity on a timescale consistent with anthropogenic warming.
OP said that specific storms are climate induced - there is no way of saying that a storm formed due to climate change when it would not have formed in the absence.
They said a multi year batch of storms was climate change induced. That's significantly more valid than saying a specific normal-size storm is. The dice even out as you add more samples.
I don't want to look for papers right now. Ask them about the claim that "This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's", not me.
My point is that you definitely can prove (or disprove) it. Your claim that it's unprovable on purpose or something is not right.
But that's absurd to think that you can make claims about the climate based off of a few years worth of data. Multidecadal variance is part of the climate system.
Hurricanes in the US are basically flat [1][2][3]. The past thousand years have seen wild swings, but it's due to natural variability [4].
> It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this.
Not to be pedantic, but this is easy to fix. Burying power lines, trimming trees, and all of the other labor are solved problems. By and large, it's not even a particularly hard technical problem. It's a bunch of easy solutions that are expensive and tedious and politically unpopular (nobody wants to spend money or tell their constituents that roads will be closed for utility work).
I'd also note that Hurricane Sandy was category 2 when it hit NYC, which is inarguably far denser than Houston. New York had power back for 95% of customers in 11 days. New Jersey did the same in less than two weeks. Texas could be doing better.
The water table in Houston is less than a foot below ground, making line burial impossible, and with almost 7 million residents, economically infeasible. Trees are not the problem since Houston has few trees.
Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.
I don't think the difference between the power grid and the power utility is clear to most people. The grid is a statewide wholesale electricity distribution network which consists of generators, substations and high voltage long distance transmission lines. The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses. This hurricane caused a lot of damage to the utility infrastructure. The grid performed fine.
Some people bring up the storm Ian in 2021. Winter storms are fundamentally different disasters. Cold snaps drive up local electricity demand sharply and this is the kind of thing that can stress the grid.
> The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses.
Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]
Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.
Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.
> Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services.
Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.
I sell and run commercial electrical work and I can think of maybe a handful of places I’ve sent electricians that have a single phase service. I live in a large metro area of 4M people, virtually every commercial building over 4-5k sq ft has a three-phase service where I live. Banks, fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc.
What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.
I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.
I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.
Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.
> Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.
Ding ding ding... so are they businesses or not? I didn't comment on whether you could make money as an electrician on them, but to imply the hundreds of thousands of businesses like what you just described above aren't _businesses_ especially considering they are on commercially zoned property is just silly.
In Houston the problems appear to be due to deregulation of the previous HL&P monopoly. If you saw it happen, it was a slow-motion dumpster fire.
I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect.
In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before.
Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg.
That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman.
The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously.
Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg.
Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be.
Ida in New Orleans was a real mess and exposed a lot of issues in the city besides electricity.
Because power was out for so long, everyone threw out a ton of food, but there was no trash pickup in some cases for weeks because of staffing shortages and contract disputes, so there was stinky trash and huge swarms of bright blue flies everywhere. At one point, the mayor suggested people could drive their own trash to the transfer station—after it had been sitting out in 95 degree heat for weeks.
There also was no proper street cleaning, which meant streets and sidewalks were full of storm debris, including things like roofing nails. The lines at tire repair shops were wrapping around the block.
Entergy's meter reading and billing also got completely thrown off. I moved shortly after Ida, and it took months to get any bill at all in the new place, and I only got my final bill for the old place this year, almost three years later, no longer living in Louisiana. (They also never actually sent me the bill or turned on my autopay, so I only knew it was time to pay when the power went out).
I am from central Louisiana (although I mostly have lived outside the state) and have been considering moving to NOLA and this is the kind of thing that gives me pause. Thanks for sharing.
Why doesn’t Tokyo, which almost entirely relies on above ground power cables and gets hit with strong typhoons every year, not experience these problems? What makes the Houston situation so hopeless?
I think there is also a tree maintenance issue, the same problem that lead to fires in California. I'm 2 blocks from where one of the tornados touched down during the derecho and close the transmission lines that were heavily damaged. We were without power for 5 days after the derecho and only 1 day this time. If you look at where power was least impacted and restored the soonest for Beryl it is the same area that was most impacted by the derecho.
I think the derecho took out a lot of the problematic trees and branches.
Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)
There are about 3844 people per square mile in Houston, so that's $650 per person, amortized over at least 20 years, which would increase the monthly power bill by about $2.70 per person (~ $10 / subscriber?)
I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.
It seems like a lot, but a few billions of dollars also seems like a good deal to secure against increasing risks for severe weather. What's the total economic impact of future storms? To put it in perspective a single Patriot missile battery costs about a billion dollars and a single missile costs $4M.
There actually are a few problems with underground power lines, notably that maintenance & upgrades are much harder and more expensive, they tend to get severed by construction, they tend to get severed by earthquakes, and bad things result if the waterproof conduit around them is punctured.
On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.
True, I forgot about the earthquake in Italy that resulted in a bunch of seismologists being jailed and prosecuted for not predicting it.
Still, it seems like those parts of Europe (outside of Turkey, which isn't really in Europe) don't have large earthquakes, otherwise all those ancient buildings like the Coliseum and Parthenon would have completely collapsed by now.
Funny to think about these costs and the health of the national commons from a point of view of the Federal budget.
For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".
Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.
But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.
> For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].
In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].
Maybe they can budget it in?
What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.
The US dollar literally is constructed as needed. It's pretty darn close to free thanks to electronic banking.
However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.
Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.
Presidents don't print money. Congress approves stimuli in the form of spending. Spending is always inflationary in nature because it injects money into the economy.
The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.
It's free if you spend it on a durable asset that is as or more valuable than the cash was, which can often be true of infrastructure. Your balance sheet goes up not down after the spend then.
There are vanishingly few examples of infrastructure spending that don't turn into massive, wasteful boondoggles; perhaps the Interstate Highway system.
The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.
The interstate highway system is arguably a massively wasteful boondoggle - it subsidises trucks at the cost of the far more efficient and less-polluting rail.
I wouldn't say vanishingly few. Seems like the vast majority of infrastructure built before some certain point in the mid-to-late 20th century was cheap and easily worth it (and we built a TON of it all the time) and it's only since then there's been increasing issues. I don't think it's about infrastructure, there's something else causing the cost overruns and we should figure out what it is.
Railroads got massive subsidies in at least two forms: huge land grants, and the power of the U.S. Army to wage war on the native peoples who otherwise would have stood in their way.
The land grant thing is sort of weird though. Hard to think of it as that big of a subsidy when the land was so so low in value prior to the railroad and the railroad's construction is what made the adjoining land so valuable. I wouldn't call it a subsidy at all -- but rather an investment that turned nearly worthless land into much more valuable land and attracted much more investment dwarfing the original "subsidy"
How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.
The general problem states see is that metropolitan regions are more productive and produce more taxes, so in many cases the state cannot necessarily wash its hands of cities.
The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.
There is no scenario where every mile of road is outfitted with buried power lines, especially considering not every mile of road has elevated power lines. What a nonsensical comment.
New Orleans and Houston are basically built on swamps. In New Orleans, you can’t even bury people below ground, so I doubt you can do much with power lines underground.
So this is weird, but I never saw people buried above ground in Amsterdam like in New Orleans. What the diff? Even if cremation is common now, it probably wasn’t a hundred or two years ago?
Swamp is a poor excuse IMHO. Plenty of my city Christchurch is built on swamp. yet it has slowly been replacing HV and LV power poles with underground cabling for about 50 years now, although there is still some remaining. We don't get hurricanes so I'm not sure of reasons for us using underground cabling. NZ is no where near as wealthy as Texas so Houston should be able to afford to do it too.
Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:
<attr>
<attrlabl>DTW23</attrlabl>
<attrdef>
December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
</attrdef>
<attrdefs>U.S. Geological Survey</attrdefs>
<attrdomv>
<rdom>
<rdommin>2.83</rdommin>
<rdommax>453.97</rdommax>
<attrunit>feet</attrunit>
</rdom>
</attrdomv>
</attr>
I used to live in a neighboring parish to the west of New Orleans. If you dug more than 3 feet into the ground, you were hitting water. Driving pilings is a sloppy mess.
It's funny to me that folks counter criticism of Texas by saying lefty California also has outages. It's like, sure, they do -- so why not show that a right-wing government can do better? What is the actual point of the counterargument?
I think "vibes" is a new weasel word that subtly absolves the author from any responsibility to connect cause and effect. There's a whole lot more to writing than announcing what "vibes" you get.
Berlin, Germany is inland, with an elevation average around 34 meters above sea level. The ground soil composition in Berlin is primarily sandy, draining easily and lending itself exceptionally well to underground infrastructure development.
Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
There always seems to be an excuse as to why America is exceptional and things accomplished routinely in other countries couldn't possibly work here. It's true to a degree. They absolutely cannot work here. But that's more about our political dysfunction than anything meaningful about our geographical situations.
"No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!)
"No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty"
"No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out"
It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones.
We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border
It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".
It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.
Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".
Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".
Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.
To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.
It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.
Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.
Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.
In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.
The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
And thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.
As I understand it, the topsoil in parts of Texas is only a foot deep or less and then it's solid bedrock. This is why most homes do not have basements.
That’s not true in all of Texas for sure. I can vouch for it in Central Texas “hill country” 6-10”around my home and you will hit solid limestone. Makes a nice home foundation (provided it’s not too porous)but I would not want to pay for a pool or basement here.
Much more expensive to install and maintain, and while risk from wind and rain is lessened, you add the risk of any below ground construction accidentally severing cables.
True, but the cause is at least obvious. Underground cables can fail or be cut even without anyone’s knowledge. Then it becomes a matter of digging until the problem is found.
Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.
If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.
If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.
When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)
There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.
Isn't there a third option: redundant overhead power lines?
In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.
If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.
I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.
What I've always heard whenever this subject comes up in Houston is that A) burying lines is expensive (and Houston is very large), and B) Houston floods a lot.
There's nothing wrong with it. But it would take lifetimes of money and time to retrofit a city like Houston to move all power infrastructure underground. And there is no way consumers would ever sign up for the cost to do so. It would be akin to building the Hoover Dam today. It would probably be one of the largest public works projects ever attempted.
Lifetimes of money, really? What is that measurement? Someone above said 2.5 million per square miles. Catastrophic damage from larger storms is often in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, so it feel like it would be in the best interest of most parties to embark on this project, even if it happens slowly.
The poster above misstated the cost. Its $2.5mil/mile. That number actually comes from PG&E in California, so its possibly not relevant to Houston. I couldn’t find that Centerpoint has actually done an analysis for Houston. Just to get an idea of scale, Centerpoint states on their website that they operate ~33,000 miles of above ground power lines.
Putting power lines underground wouldn't mitigate very much of that damage though, would it? I was under the impression that the vast majority of those multibillion dollar figures is water damage to buildings, cars, and other equipment.
Just one anecdote. We lived through the deracho in Iowa, one of the places hardest hit. Huge swaths of the city was without power for weeks. In our house, in the middle of the most damage, was without power for under 24 hours. That's a massive difference. I don't know how much the calculations take into account physical damage versus all up damage including lost productivity. But many of the folks working at the local company were back "in the office" working from home because the business was without power far longer than most of the employees. I have no idea how the overall damages are calculated.
It’s not lifetimes of money, but there are substantial costs.
All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.
In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.
~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.
Underground electric distribution is considerably more reliable than overhead lines. Animals digging up the wire is much more rare than an outage created by an animal crawling up a pole and grabbing the line/transformer.
Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.
Below-ground power distribution is cheaper in sparsely-populated rural areas than overhead lines because utility companies can trench the lines directly through anyone's field or in any random ditch - there's no directional boring required (until customer delivery possibly.)
Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.
Source? The grid was far more reliable where I've lived with underground than overhead lines. Kind of hard to believe. Sounds like that would only happen if your city cheaped out on the conduit material.
Been thirty years since I lived there, but when I lived where there was a coop electric they had data showing underground was overall less reliable. Maybe things are diffarant now.
> Moles, mice, things walking/driving over the top
I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.
Florida took a direct hit from a cat 5 in 2017 and power was back in most places in a couple of days, and iirc they didn't lose a single (new) pole statewide. After Wilma they hardened the infrastructure and this isn't as big a problem there, despite having even worse geographic issues than Texas and New Orleans.
Yeah, well what about existing infrastructure? Most new construction already buries the last mile of power.
But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?
Sure, just stop complaining about not having power.
Seems like everyone is ready to argue about how impossible everything is. Shrugs "guess it's impossible, we just have to go on like we've always have".
I would love it, personally. In addition to being vulnerable to wind and tree damage, above-ground power lines are very unsightly. Just compare any neighborhood with underground power to the ones where you can't look out of any window without seeing ugly poles and wires everywhere.
Does physics dictate how you build power lines?
Where is physics the constraint on more hardened construction? Physics isn't saying, build above ground and 'low cost'.
They are paying for it. It's either on the front end with regulations on more expensive construction, or on the back end with power outages, damage and repairs.
It's likely a combination of multiple factors. Texas, being a red state, most certainly has a stronger climate denial sentiment, which is going to affect policies and regulations. Texas may be unprepared because major hurricanes were uncommon in the past. Global warming means hotter temperatures which makes long power outages more unbearable. And probably other reasons I can't think of.
I expect things will improve, but it may take some years. As these events become more common and people have to suffer every year, voters are going to get fed up, and Republicans would be foolish to keep up their climate denial stance.
>Texas may be unprepared because major hurricanes were uncommon in the past.
Maybe, but no. Texas has its history of major hurricanes. While maybe not as popular of a target as Florida and New Orleans, but Houston definitely has as much of a bullseye on it as a trailer park in a tornado.
Harvey was predicted well in advance that it was going to be a devastating storm. For days ahead I saw the up to 40" of rain and thought that couldn't possibly be correct. Then it happened. Houston took little action and then acted shocked. Of course, Houston has it's own unique set of problems with their lack of zoning rules plus so many other things without having to make some climate denier argument that's not necessarily wrong but just horribly out of place
I just know what I hear. Power outage during freezing temperatures in winter time, and their response? No handouts, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. As if people in a major metropolitan city can just go into the nearby woods and gather firewood.
It's also election year. The state agencies didn't submit the emergency declaration work before the storm hit like they usually did in years past - this is not their first rodeo, so it can't be explained by ignorance.
Also, Houston is Harris county, so not exactly the governor's or legislature's favorite voting county.
Centerpoint applied for $100 mil in funding from the department of energy in 2023 to make their lines more resilient to wind and storms and were turned down.
It's not nearly as clear cut as "red = head in sand"
Hurricane Ike was a category 4 that traveled nearly directly over Houston in 2008. (It wasn't a category four when it passed over, since, like all major storms, they weaken as they move inland.)
Burying lines, especially in historic areas, is incredibly expensive and not necessarily a panacea either, although it helps. Is it worth it?
Realistically, for the millions upon millions of people that live in the greater Houston MSA (and of course except for those who rely on power for healthcare equipment, who really need to invest in a small generator or get to a shelter), it's far more cost effective to simply deal with power outages every decade or two.
During Ike, large parts of Houston, especially to the northeast, were literally underwater, so power wouldn't have helped anyway. The number of utility crews lined up along highways from other states, even from thousands of miles away, in the immediate aftermath of Ike is both inspiring and enlightening, especially when you recognize that they were going into a disaster zone, likely without a nice hotel to go back to or even running water after working a 12 hour shift.
So, no, it's just part of living near the coast in a hurricane-prone area. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.
(Not an expert, but try to follow climate science as part of $Dayjob. It’s always hard to write quick summaries in Earth Science, because the system is very complex.)
We have to be careful about what is meant by “these events”.
According to the sources I was able to find [1,2], sea level rise (SLR) is perhaps the dominant driver for the increasing damages from tropical cyclones (TCs). Models show some increase (I’m not finding any support for 2x or 3x though!) in the number of high-intensity TCs, and TC intensification is expected to be more rapid.
But the underlying SLR will make even smaller TCs more consequential - even if the number of storms of a given intensity does not change.
[1] specifically says this. And if you look at the consensus report [2], they spend most of their time discussing SLR, in effect as an amplifier for all the trouble a TC can cause. Only in one sentence in a very long discussion do they claim that TCs are themselves worsening, and the statement is quite nuanced:
“For example, hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly and decaying more slowly, leading to stronger storms extending farther inland with heavier rainfall and higher storm surges…”
So if you interpret “these events” as “high dollar damage TCs”, you are correct. But not in the raw number of TCs of a given intensity.
And you are right that the situation is quite dire already:
“Annual frequencies of both minor and moderate coastal flooding increased by a factor of 2–3 along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines between 1990 and 2020” [2]
The same source says models predict a 5-10x increase in flood events by 2100, which is truly staggering. The recommendation of the GP commenter (“If you don't like it, move somewhere else”) seems to be poorly informed about how important adaptation will be.
Yes, that's the argument. Of course, some of it remains to be seen, because as of now we're not actually seeing more or more intense storms compared to historical averages (at least that we know about).
Houston has, on average, one large storm event every decade or so, and that hasn't really changed much over the last 100 years. https://www.weather.gov/hgx/major_events
We’re probably about to see more and more intense storms over the Atlantic. Hurricane Beryl is the earliest category five Atlantic hurricane in records going back around 100 years ([source](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9r3g572lrno)).
So it’s just a matter of time.
Also, looking at your source, I see 2 tropical cyclones between 1900-1950, 3 between 1950-2000, and then 8 in the 24 years since. To me that looks like an increase in tropical cyclones over time.
It's obvious that everyone wants to blame it on their favorite villain, whatever that is.
A more rational approach would be to look at comparable cities and see how they cope with big storms, whatever the storms' cat numbers. My guess is, no matter what comparables you pick, Houston comes out on the bottom.
Maybe it IS deregulation! You can be in favor of it in general, and still admit, "OK, maybe in this instance it didn't work." That doesn't mean you're giving free rein to the people in favor of the government regulating everything.
Look to Asia, all the major coastal and island cities have far bigger storms than whatever Houston experiences, many times a year, and they pretty much all fare better than this.
Someone (maybe in Houston!) should compile a list of all those cities, the storms they've had, and the number of power outage days they suffered. Not a cherry-picked list of "good" cities; ALL of them.
Houston is a low-lying coastal city surrounded by rivers and bayous whose population has increased 10x since 1950. Not really an ideal situation to build out that kind of housing for millions of people in floodplains.
I’ve lived through a lot of big hurricanes. Cat 1 storms can be worse than more intense storms, as they are often slower-moving, so they can dump a LOT more water per square inch. Not sure if that was the case here, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’d fare significantly worse under higher category storms.
I see people talking about deficiencies in the Texas grid, and that may be true but hardly seems relevant to Houston; it's the Houston grid that seems to be acutely problematic. In fact, it occurred to me that with much of Houston still offline, the TX grid is probably less stressed than usual and a look at the dashboards on ercot.com would seem to confirm this - capacity is well over demand.
The state grid is problematic at other times, but in the case of storms, it's irrelevant when a fallen tree takes out a physical power line. It's more of a "last mile" issue.
The solution to last-mile problems is fewer miles. Fact is metro Houston takes up 15x more land than is really called for. A factor of 15 makes a significant difference in the cost of wires, pipes, and roads.
SimCity and Elon Musk to the rescue! See, we put satellites in space with giant solar panels on then and then just beam the energy down from space, directly to a receiver dish mounted on your rooftop, next to the starlink dish.
> I can't imagine the city is remotely prepared for (god forbid, and idk how likely it is that far inland anyway) a cat 4 or 5.
In the past they've never had a cat 5. The last cat 5 was Carla in 1961. The last cat 3 was Alicia in 1983. The last cat 2 was Alicia in 2008 (although that was actually east of Houston and just hit Houston with its weaker winds).
Climate change should make such storms more likely to form, but it should also change ocean and air current patterns which could affect the chances they make it to Houston.
The list I got those from noted that in 1961 air conditioning was still novel, which makes me curious. How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning?
The average July temperature in Houston nowadays is 4.2℉ (2.3℃) higher than it was in 1970, and climate change tends to cause more extremes, so I'd guess that the highs are also higher and extreme days more common, so maybe AC has become more of a necessity nowadays?
There were a lot of behavioral adaptations that don't seem as practical now because the extremes are so much hotter and more frequent. Porch sitting, the siesta, outdoor sleeping on porches and roofs, etc. were all ways to mitigate the heat.
Wealthier people built big houses with lots of thermal mass and tall ceilings while poorer people lived in shotgun houses with aligned doors and porches that created constant airflow.
If I remember correctly, Houston is one of the most Air Conditioned cites on earth. In the older days, Houston was much smaller with less concrete and paving that holds the heat in, making the entire area warmer. Plus, older houses were designed for the climate that they were in. Now, every place in the US basically gets the same house design regardless of the climate.
I'd expect the population of Houston in those days was also a little more self selective, in that of you couldn't deal with that heat, you probably didn't want to live there anyways.
There's a reason a lot of southwestern cities like Phoenix started booming in population when AC became more readily available.
It might have been normal but people are people and would still seek out more comfortable climates. And if you stretch the definition of air conditioning a bit, we've had that for about as long as we've been living in semi enclosed spaces. Running a fire at night to keep the cave warm is air conditioning. Building your home to have water flowing under the floors so that you can cool or heat the floors passively (I believe the Romans were doing this) is air conditioning. Hanging a wet towel to allow the water to evaporate and cool the room a little is air conditioning.
Arable land and climates comfortable for people tended to have a very large overlap until the the invention of modern irrigation techniques like center-pivot irrigation. Before that, you need pretty special conditions to be able to successfully farm in many of the places in discussion.
Arable land that isn't habitable for weeks or months out of the year wasn't terribly valuable or sought out.
Why start at 1970 when Houston has a temperature record back to 1889? Start in the 60s and the jump is far lower. Or any other year and the difference changes.
We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)
In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.
I live in Seattle’s Ballard area, but work with people on the east side. Big storms blow down branches all the time on the other side of the lake, causing power outages. We have less trees here in Seattle, comparatively, or maybe Seattle power and light is better at tree maintenance, but ya lots of trees = lots of power outages from what I can infer.
Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.
Downtown Ballard had a lot of power outages over the last two years. Apparently they were using a different transformer than everywhere else, all of which are getting old, and some procurement mistake lead to the spare parts being back-ordered by a year.
(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)
_just_. The definition of "just a cat 1" is winds from 75 to 95 miles per hour. There is some debate over whether it picked up to cat 2 levels just before it made landfall and reweakened to cat 1.
> Other??
Political corruption preventing elected officials from actually enforcing any laws or authority over Centerpoint.
its funny people comment and act like they know how strong a hurricane and how much damage it should do like theyre all the same. or that they know how much infrastructure is supposed to break or not break.
if you were there during beryl you know the winds were strong enough to take trees out yes? trust me houston is not a stranger to hurricanes we all went through a cat 4 harvey years back. which well funnily enough didnt have any huge power problems. more so a house and car totally flooded problem. or 10in of water in the house for weeks problem. mold problem.
tropical storm ike before that took out power for weeks causing $30b in damages in the states
wish people would put their energy into helping or something instead of just thinking about their own agenda. or talking crap i dont know i wouldnt wish this on anyone its hell
Deregulation is a terrible idea for life supporting and necessary utilities, power specifically. By deregulating the market, everyone is forced to compete for a finite amount of transmission ability for low profits, each one trying to undercut the other IMO. It completely destabilized the Texas power market. At this point, it may be worth considering putting the Texas power grid into some type of federal receivership.
I think this is just confirmation bias. We have plenty of power outages, some that last longer than this (the 1998 ice storm in Quebec took down the power for weeks). Last year we were out of power for 4 days, again right in the middle of Montreal. It just seems like HN likes to see stories about the Texas power grid, since I don't even remember a story about Montreal's outage last year hitting the front page for long.
I don't think anyone could argue that Quebec has a deregulated power grid, it's the complete opposite in fact. Power generation, distribution, and last mile connections are all nationalized.
I don't know that this event is a great example for your argument.
An entirely different energy market model (MISO/Entergy) was also heavily impacted. The Woodlands, Conroe, et. al. are on a completely different grid. I don't get to pick a "retail electricity provider" and I live 20 minutes from people who can. Doesn't seem to matter.
All markets hit by Beryl are approximately the same degree of screwed, regardless of any specific underlying ideologies.
Texas is a highly urbanized state and a significant number of families don't have the ability to install home solar, so it cannot be viewed as 'minimum requirement' and some other solution is neccesary.
Maybe people could club together and form some form of group which provides that minimum requirement for the whole area. You could perhaps have an equal say in the group, and have a meeting every few years where you elect some people to run the thing on your behalf.
Or the state government could implement a regulatory regime that ensures its citizens have reliable electricity. A feat the other 49 states seem to have mostly accomplished.
In my country the price of roof mount solar is now under €2000 for 10kWp. That includes government subsidies, however they are not that high (€350 per kWp).
Texas is a much richer economy than where I live, so I see no reason why it couldn't be a requirement, at least for single family homes.
I have multiple friends who have had significant damage to their home solar setups this year alone due to hail and high winds in North Texas.
Some who didn't have hail damage are now having difficulty getting other roof damage repaired because in order for their warranty to be valid they need certain people to remove the panels before other roof work can be done. But those people are massively backed up by all the other people needing panels removed/reinstalled/replaced.
A lot of panels are pretty solid these days. For the friends I had in mind its regular roof damage. High winds tearing up the shingles leading to water ingress inside their homes.
Yesterday I spoke with a Generac (home standby generator) dealership owner in the Houston area, and they are getting swamped with calls (80 a minute at times) and they have 20 people manning the phones.
One of the problems I see is that people aren't prepared. I live my life by the motto "Be Prepared" (see username). One of the Merit Badges I teach is Emergency Preparedness, and with camping, my Scouts are okay going without electricity and electronics. Even if you're not interested or able to participate in Scouting, swing by your local Scout Shop and pick up an Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge booklet and learn what you can do to Be Prepared. It doesn't extend to just hurricanes.
We live in a society and preparing as a group means that we can efficiently use resources and focus our energy on things that are interesting instead of everyone being overly prepared. Everyone going out and buying a generator is expensive, wasteful and incredibly inefficient. Why isn't it reasonable to just expect reliable infrastructure and quick responses to issues?
I think it is better to put that energy into improving things and building a better future for everyone. As a country it feels like we have forgotten that we can work together to do big things. I still think we can.
Due to occasional failures we should now throw our hands up and label systemic undercutting, and poor governance as unfixable.
Because things are bad sometimes let's excuse unlimited incompetence when expected situations are ignored and cause inevitable catastrophic failure.
Sometimes plans fail so let's excuse failure to plan.
When a huge storm blows through with minimal fuss because preparation and regulation was taken seriously let's downplay the risk and deregulate and dismantle safety apperatus as they are clearly unneeded....
It goes on and on... why did we hire these security guys we never have breaches, why did we hire these sys and network admins everything always works, why do we have all these pesky earthquake codes no buildings have fallen recently...
After nearly 40 years I still can't understand the mental gymnastics required to be so obdurate. It's just nihilistic slash and burn thinking isn't it.
What you're describing here makes our society sound particularly weak. You're basically describing a society that can't be bother with the basics of survival, we're only capable of having those taken care of for us so we can focus on whatever we think is interesting and actually worth our time.
Note: this isn't a power grid issue. Texas is famously not connected to the national grid [1]. This is an issue of downed power lines.
An obvious question is: why doesn't Houston have underground power? It turns out that Houston really shouldn't exist. It's built on a swamp. It's also hot so heat dissipation is an issue. So it's expensive [2]. Houston is also famous for its lack of zoning [3]. Combine this with a lot of really old neighbourhoods that don't, for example, have sufficient setbacks to bury cabling and you have a hot mess.
It's also worth pointing out that Houston is one of the worst urban sprawls on the planet. It's almost as large as LA with slightly more than half the population.
It's accurate to describe Houston as a low-lying car-dependent hellscape built on a swarmp with no urban planning in a hurricane zone.
One of humanity’s greatest accomplishments is putting huge cities in spots where we really have no business living - I mean just look at Vegas. The world itself is actively discouraging us from setting up shop there, but humans are like naaaahhhhh just slap some concrete over it, it’ll be fine.
Nobody really likes to think about the consequences of building in spaces where it’s not well-suited to human habitation at that scale - or about who too-commonly pays the price.
Another poster pointed out that the cost of moving lines underground is really only a one time fee of about $5 per person per month for about 10 years. This does not seem too expensive for a permanent increase in reliability. One thing I will miss about living in Manhattan is the power never ever went out, at least not due to the distribution grid.
And, it's a minor, minor thing, but as a bonus, having lines out of sight is very nice.
Yeah. My job at the time was in the fidi and we had power trucks lining the streets for months. I saw the cars floating upside down with my own eyes. It was quite a time. Anyway:
That is not the comeback you think it is. New York was unprepared for that and intra not designed for saltwater flooding because nobody had ever expected that kind of weather to make it up here. It triggered a lot of changes now that New York knows it needs to be ready for serious hurricanes and saltwater flooding
Also I never heard the term SoPO before. We called it hurricane sandy.
I get that America is big, but the amortized per-person cost is what's relevant. If something costs $10 M per mile, but there are a million people per mile,
suddenly that's not all that expensive. I'd pay more than $10 to not have my power go out for a week after a big storm that's likely to happen again in a few weeks and next year and the year after. A backup generator costs way more than $10.
The amortized per person cost is obviously not going to be constant when the demographic density and line mileage changes. That’s why it’s a foolish standard
There’s NEVER 1M customers per mile in a distribution system. There’s only going to be a few thousand per substation. Half of the line miles will have customer counts in the tens or ones.
...but... that's like, uh, how projects like this actually get financed. On a per customer (which I know is distinct from per person) and per monthly bill basis, capitalized and amortized. Why would I use a lump sum unit when that's not how it's going to be paid for, or a per distance unit when pieces of dirt don't pay money, people do?
Pal, this is just how basic corporate accounting works, something you might like to look into if you are interested in opining on what units are best for comparing capital costs.
I already responded to that two days ago in adjacent replies.
You’re also completely wrong. Utilities do not get to pass on costs to specific customers. It is, at best, just a compelling point with regulators to build it into the rate case for capital spending.
So? That just means the regulators are part of the decision. If the stakeholders (regulators plus utility managers) choose to, they can do this, and it is affordable. If it takes an act of legislature to make it work, whatever.
The point is there's no technological barrier, just made up paper barriers.
The water table in Germany and the water table in Texas are two different things. Notably, the city is right next to a giant body of salty ocean water, which is why they get hurricanes in the first place, but it also severely complicates the process of creating underground utilities.
Downtown Houston has a big underground tunnel system connecting building so people don’t have to walk outside. The first big plan to reduce flooding in Houston was to create tunnels similar in size to the ones under Tokyo to funnel water from Houston area to gulf.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environm...
I'm not the one that came up with the idea that the US has worse weather. I got the idea from that article.
>The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually.
Europe doesn't have hurricanes. Europe has 1/4 as many tornadoes as the US.
Which part of Iberia's weather are you referring to?
Much more complicated in Houston than Germany. Aside from the density which has been mentioned, Houston regularly floods so the lines would frequently be underwater. Plus, the rise and fall of the water table causes the ground to expand and contract. That’s why the sidewalks are constantly buckling.
I was directly hit by Beryl, and just got power back today. For us, the issue was trees taking out the power lines. We live on acreage with a lot of pecan trees, and lost 4 of them in the storm. 2 of them toppled over on the power line. I personally don't think that Centerpoint has done a bad job here, Houston is a large land mass and there is no way that you can get everyone back online with as much wind damage as we sustained much quicker than what happened. This storm was so much different than Harvey, which was a flood event. We did have some flooding but nowhere near that level with Beryl. Really, its just one of those situations that just sucks, and there isnt a whole lot you can really do about it.
Ie. If power lines at one end of the street get felled by a tree, power just comes from the other end of the street instead.
High voltage distribution lines can be done the same - every transformer getting fed from at least 2 places.
Obviously with many lines down, such a system might leave everyone with power, but total power deliverable is still lower. For that, you need smart metering that integrates with consumers distribution boards such that at times of stress on the power network, less important loads are turned off by default (ie. Pool heaters), whilst lighting and fridges stay on.
Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.
> Ie. If power lines at one end of the street get felled by a tree, power just comes from the other end of the street instead.
That would imply a live wire under a tree. Not a good idea.
> Nowhere in the US does that for consumers yet I don't think.
Tons of places do that, in exchange for a lower rate you install a box that lets the utility shut off your AC when demand is very high. It's available in almost all states last time I checked.
Why don’t they keep up with the trees? Other places with trees they will use chainsaws from helicopters and regular mowing to maintain the transmission lines. In neighborhoods they cut very generous Vs in trees that are close to wires.
Incredibly, my fiber internet never went down the entire time. That part of my infrastructure is buried and they back it all up with proper generators.
I'm in the affected area. The contractors that they used to install the last mile fiber didn't do a great job. They not only damaged other cables like the coax but "buried" isn't how I'd describe the fiber. In the easements the fiber is only a couple inches below ground at most, in some places it was above ground and I had to bury it myself.
I do wish Comcast (and Tmobile) would use generators instead of battery backups. We get about 4 hours of internet when the power is out and I run the home router off of a generator.
For some real numbers for Houston specifically in the middle of the hot summer months, input 77002 (a Houston metro zip code) into Texas govt's electricity provider search engine https://powertochoose.org/ ; it will show most plans are around 12-14 cents per kwh, down to 10.9 c/kwh on a variable 12 month 500kWh plan.
And then go begging for disaster relief and emergency funds from the federal government, so the rest of the country gets to cover the costs. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
That's something you could decide for yourself and vote by moving there or away. Many residents of Houston would gladly tolerate an occasional outage to not see prices go up, and critical services like emergency services, hospitals, and datacenters all have generators, so it seems to be something that can be worked around with a bit of effort and expense.
Part of the reason Houston electricity is cheap is because a lot of power generation is from natural gas https://www.gridinfo.com/texas/houston, and Houston area is also a trading hub and hosts some of the largest nat gas refineries in the US. TDU charges are relatively fixed for utility providers in Texas, so transmission infrastructure tends to have less impact on rates than supply and trading.
Why is Texas infrastructure so brittle? It’s a wealthy, prosperous state unencumbered by regulation or legacy stuff that tends to cause issues in other states.
It is the lack of regulation that is the problem here. The power company is incentized to make higher profits year around by not preparing for a disaster.
The fact that PG&E, in a much more regulated and liberal California, also has power problems is interesting and valid, but Newsom's only been governor since 2019 (the Camp Fire was 2018), so you can't put that much blame on him, and there are decades of blame to go around.
Profit does not rise proportionally with costs as reliability increases (i.e. it costs a lot of money to make it more reliable, but you don't get to charge substantially more). The electric company monopoly does not have incentives to spend money to be more reliable. All the downsides of widespread power outage are externalized onto the customers.
We had a power outage in March for like 4 days, that spanned the entire city of Montreal last year. We were lucky the weather was pretty warm. This type of stuff just happens sometimes.
We also had a 2 weeks long power outage 20 years ago. Again, in Quebec
Seems like this was a problem with last mile delivery, which isn't a uniquely Texas problem. Oregon and California have had plenty of major outages due to wind and cold snaps in the last few years as well.
Not true about California. Outages in storms are highly localized. Some rural areas get power turned off but only when fire risk is extreme. There have been no large cities without power for a week like Houston.
Not a week, but just earlier this year there was a storm in the SF Bay Area where there were many people without power for 3-5 days. Most of the damage was due to last mile transmission failures from debris. And I'm sure that had the storm been in the hurricane strengths, the damage would have been even worse.
Portland too had that major cold snap where power was out due to last mile transmission problems. I know at least one city in the metro area that sped up their plans to bury their power transmission because during that storm large parts of that city were without power for days.
A public utility is a natural monopoly. If given lack of regulation (or, wrong/weak regulation) it will of course seek to maximize profit at all cost, which means very little is spent on grid quality and maintenance (these things eat into profits, thus bad).
You've answered your own question. The incentives of capitalism "unencumbered by regulation" and the necessities of investing in and maintaining infrastructure are often at odds.
See the crumbling privatised water infrastructure in London/England as another example of this. The companies in charge allowed the infrastructure to crumble all whilst paying out massive shareholder dividends and holding huge amounts of debt. Then they dare to ask for government bailouts and increased utility bill prices. Someone explain how that's even allowed.
As usual, socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits.
It's worse than that. Those massive debts are from loans from a loan company. The parent company of the loan company is also the parent company of Thames water.
It's all a massive scam. It would be better if companies were not able to own other companies.
- due to climate change alone AND business predatory practice alone infrastructure are very vulnerable and there is no easy fix at infra level;
- p.v. and batteries for large slices of the inhabited planet where they are meaningful AT CHINESE PRICES are an expensive backup that can pay back itself even without emergencies.
Corollary: doing our best to annihilate companies who makes absurdly high margins on p.v. and batteries and do individually our best to be covered. Personally I eat my fingers a bit when 4 years ago I decide for a small (8kWh LFP) backup with only 5kWp p.v. instead of 10kWp/30kWh witch would give me enough also in winter in case of a blackouts. In summer I can be autonomous since local climate is hot only during the day, no need of A/C from early evening to mid-morning.
Corollary of the corollary: built modern well insulated homes is needed, not only to consume less as a whole society but also to live well individually.
Something that did go well is water movement. It was neat to see the bayous rise to just below the flood point then stay right there as the weirs of flood mitigation ponds take off the excess. I’m looking forward to checking out the data to compare the rain/flood gauges compared to past events. [0] Thank you federal tax payers for contributing to this effort!
WRT the local utility, I can appreciate that they have some hard choices ahead. There are two branches of possible futures: one where many more people are charging cars etc and require more power to domiciles; two where battery deployment at the edge bears the brunt of peak loads and requires a lower constant trickle or even nearly nothing as PV is more broadly deployed.
> “Seniors in assisted living and nursing homes should have been more of a priority for power restoration.”
That shows a gaping misunderstanding of electricity.
For that to be possible in this situation, the assisted living and nursing homes would have to have their own, dedicated power plant that is knocked out by a hurricane, separate from the knocked-out power plants for anything else. Then you prioritize fixing that power plant first.
That would require them to be on their own dedicated circuits, separate from everything else in the same city block. And for the problem to be local to them, and not the outage of a big power station far away.
Idea: maybe these homes should have their own wind, solar and generators, not to be 100% reliant on the grid.
I don't think there is any misunderstanding. The issues are with local distribution, not generation or transmission. So it's simply a matter of prioritizing the restoration of distribution circuits which serve hospitals, seniors, etc. They don't need to have separate circuits and separate power plants that exclusively serve those loads in order for them to be prioritized.
In Europe (at least some countries), all electricity consumers belong to one of 3 categories. E.g. medical facilities are 1 category higher than regular homes.
Each category has their own reliability targets, although I don't think policy specifies how that target is met: separate circuits or a backup generator.
My point -- it's all already known for 50+ years. And I believe it's all must be already done in Texas as well.
I’m surprised people still live in that area. The aftermath of Harvey in 2017 would have been the eye opener. Yet the area sees a massive influx of residents every year [1]
Any area near coast line is going to disappear over the next couple of decades due to climate change.
Houston isn’t particularly near the coast, believe it or not. And the flood control infrastructure has been dramatically improved since Harvey. This occurrence seems to be a failure of the local transmission and distribution monopoly.
I‘m curious, Texas seems to get a lot of sun - how common are private solar installations on the roofs? Combined with a battery you could lower your electricity bill and would be safe from this kind of problem.
In my neighbourhood in northern germany about 5% of the houses have them. They pay for themself in about 5-10 years.
Solar installations are common and growing. I put one on my Houston roof this year. However, battery backups to allow you to keep the lights on with your solar when the grid is down are much more expensive. Many people have gotten gas backup generators in the past few years instead.
Are you suggesting that the vast ghettoes and low-income areas in Houston all install solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls? Many people in hardest-hit areas struggle paycheck to paycheck- if they're working at all.
This is what financialization is for -- allowing homeowners to get "free" panels in exchange for paying back out of the savings over the years. Leasing panels is not uncommon.
If these kinds of services don't exist in enough quantity, government subsidy could help.
More government money going directly over the people who most need it into the hands of the people who least need it. The property owner class redirects another crisis to their benefit.
The landlord could put panels on it, and pass the lease fee on, and advertise the house as, eg "$1000 a month plus $100 FLAT FEE ELECTRICAL! You never pay more than $100 per month for electric AND IT'S STEPS AWAY FROM EVERYTHING" or some such
No I do not. I was not aware of the vast ghettoes. But some kind of middle class has to exist as the article headline talks about air conditioning - in Germany air conditioning is not common even in the upper middle class - this may be different in the US - idk.
Germany is way farther north though. Houston is further south than Israel, about the same latitude as Kuwait City and the Sahara Desert. The temperature averages 20-30°F warmer than Berlin (33-40°C), or put another way, Berlin's record high temperatures are a typical day in Houston. Also very humid since it's right near the ocean. Comparison charts:https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~75981/Comparison-of-...
So yes, air conditioning is very common there, even if you're poor that's one thing you will try to find a way to get.
In the ghettos it's normally an old window unit, not central AC. Also shotgun shacks, which are houses setup with a straight-through floorplan so that if you open the front and back doors the whole thing becomes kind of a wind tunnel. Not as good as AC, but better than nothing.
In those neighborhoods, you'll also often see people (especially elderly and children) hanging out at the neighborhood church or mom and pop store, where there is air conditioning, if they don't have AC or it isn't working.
“Vast ghetto” is a bit extreme but a lot of the gulf coast is very poor indeed. Texas has plenty of very poor neighborhoods as does Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida right in prime hurricane paths.
“People have a right to be extremely frustrated with CenterPoint. People are suffering through terribly oppressive heat, a lack of food and gasoline availability, debris everywhere, and much more,” Patrick said. “The poor and most vulnerable are suffering the most.”
Not, “People have a right to be frustrated with the government,”
From the outside, your own country seems to have a dystopian liking for government control of speech and the internet.
If your daily experience does not align with this perception, consider that Texans might be in exactly the same boat as you, perception-vs-reality-wise.
The government of many places, like the EU and Australia, openly and regularly make moves to crack down on individual freedoms in favour of state power - and they aren’t even in criminal trials.
> Not angry enough to get their elected officials to make the power grid changes needed
Do you have the magic solution that makes them resilient to natural disasters short of burying every single power line underground? Which is not only impractical but insanely expensive. The infrastructure has been physically damaged or destroyed. You fired off a politically charged comment and offered no specifics.
> Do you have the magic solution that makes them resilient to natural disasters short of burying every single power line underground? Which is not only impractical but insanely expensive.
"Do you have any suggestions other than what would actually work??"
Increased trimming of trees near power lines. Apparently CenterPoint spent significantly less than some of the other power suppliers on maintenance.
I don't know that it would help in this specific instance, but connecting Texas to the rest of the power grid would likely make the system overall more resilient.
> I don't know that it would help in this specific instance, but connecting Texas to the rest of the power grid would likely make the system overall more resilient.
Irrelevant wishful thinking. The outages are caused by localized physical damage. There is no shortage of grid power. Inter-ties to every grid in the world wouldn't help when the wires on the last mile have been physically destroyed.
Note that I said "I don't know that it would help in this specific instance"
Previous outages have been caused by issues with the grid rather than lines. Apparently CenterPoint is predicting that this summer power usage will near the grid's capacity and supposedly CenterPoint is known for underestimating.
Improving a percentage of a net has reduced down percentage for a reduced timeframe, so it seems like there are obviously better alternatives to the hand wringing approach if the goal isn't actually to justify doing nothing.
I just got power back late last night (6th day of outage). This comes directly on the heels of a prior power outage that also lasted nearly a week from a severe storm back in May. CNP seems to have majorly dropped the ball on this one from a logistics and disaster preparedness standpoint (especially considering they had a trial run only 2 months ago). Unlike the storm in May, a) Beryl was forecasted to impact Houston at least 24 hrs beforehand, b) its hurricane season so CNP should be ready to go. They routinely seem to lag behind on electrical grid improvements and maintenance. From my personal observations, a lot of outages could have been prevented by better tree management. (Anecdotally, I had a tree catch fire behind my house last year due to limbs contacting lines; I called CNP to report and they did nothing; said to watch it and let it burn out. They haven’t trimmed trees on the line behind my house in the 4 years i’ve lived here). With Beryl, it has become painfully apparent that CNP was simply not logistically prepared to handle the impact of hurricanes, and did not prepare in advance, a major failure for a utility provider operating on the gulf coast. These are not black swan events.
Root cause seems to point towards prioritizing shareholder value over providing services, and lack of regulation enabled by Texas laissez-faire handling of utility providers.
It’s hard to see how these apparent conflicts of interest (and lack of regulation or consequences) don’t create an environment where a state supported monopoly can abuse their position by putting short term profits first.
> “The grid is a whole different issue which we’re addressing, have been addressing, and will continue to address,” Patrick said. “The power is down because the lines are down, and the transmission lines are down primarily because trees fell on them.”
Yes, building the infrastructure in the cheapest way possible has consequences.
Underground lines would not be vulnerable to falling trees. But they are a lot more expensive to install, and when they require maintenence for any other reasons.
As European I find it strange how few power and telecom wires seem to be buried in the US. What's up with that? I get that in rural regions digging a ditch isn't worth it, but the Houston area has pretty high population density and still has wires on poles.
A lot of the infrastructure was established when density was much lower, so it was built out in the cheaper way, and now changing it is more expensive than just keeping on keeping on.
That and a lot of Europe got to do some involuntary infrastructure rebuilding in the 1940s that the US didn't.
For comparison, the Houston metro area (which is basically just the original city limits + what used to be its suburbs but have really just all grown together) is the size of the entire country of Belgium.
My understanding is that its largely a byproduct of how many of our major cities developed. When power infrastructure was originally being run, our cities were much less dense than what was already in Europe. They installed power above ground because there wasn't the density to really support funding underground lines, and because above ground lines are easier to add to as the city does become more dense.
I lived on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple years. The island gets hit with storms pretty regularly, two or three major storms in my lifetime if I'm not mistaken. All of the power lines were above ground until maybe 5 years ago for two reasons - the island had a pretty low density for full time residency and buried lines are expensive, and they were worried about issues with burying lines in a sand island that can quite literally move and shift after a major storm. It seems like the latter either isn't a concern today, and its a good thing because those power poles were always causing problems on the island.
Houston doesn’t have high population density. It has a gigantic population over an utterly enormous land area. And that’s why they “can’t” build infrastructure correctly and cost effectively.
If this happened every year they’d be underground. Situations like this aren’t common enough to create the need for a real fix. They’ll just patch it up and move on.
What he means (but can't say directly) is that this isn't like the last couple highly public Texas blackouts. This time the power is available, there is enough generating capacity online and connected, they just can't get it delivered.
Texas famously wanted to be "independent" from the energy market and has steadfastly refused attempts from the federal government to have it join regional grids for the purposes of redundancy and resiliency, saying it can handle its own needs just fine.
Until every power grid failure, when they ask the Feds for relief money (this is notwithstanding that in cases like this, they are not just asking for money for the grid failures but the general aftermath of Beryl, but it is a component).
They don't need to be regulated, they need to be forcefully taken into public ownership. Utilities shouldn't be privatised, and neither should public transport for that matter. All these companies do is siphon off profits to shareholders without re-investing and maintaining the infrastructure as they should.
Does the mayor have any influence whatsoever over Centerpoint, the private company given a monopoly by the state government which has been run by Republicans for god knows how long?
Take any metric you like: child mortality, educational outcomes, hunger, per capita income, media income, purchasing power parity, you name it.
Compare those cities to traditionally Republican run states.
Try it.
There is a very very good reason why the best and brightest leave rural republican areas and move to the big cities: it is better in almost every way we measure human wellbeing.
This is what happens when the only "history" you consume is from reddit comments. I'm embarrassed for you. This is top-tier /r/confidentlyincorrect cringe. No, not the Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party. From your GP above:
"... traditionally Republican run states."
The South was not "traditionally Republican run", it was solidly Democratic: "The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964."[0] Traditionally the "Red" states you opine about were a staunch voting bloc for the Democratic Party.
It's like making global warming a worse problem with AC, so it gets hotter and we use more AC.
I live in Rome, Italy, we had 40C (104F) degree max temperatures during day, and even at night it doesn't fall below 29C (84) and we survive without AC just fine, not just me but the rest of my family in their houses too, of course it is sometimes uncomfortable, but that's summer.
The worst offenders though are the many shops that blast AC 24/7 and have their doors open! Put some goddamn sensors and sliding doors!?
I just can't look at it. Even worse, electricity comes and goes all time during summer and it's hard to work at times (I'm full remote).
I'm fully convinced nobody gives two damns about global warming and our own impact. It's better to just ignore our actions and focus on evil corporations so we keep avoiding doing anything, maybe buy and change our EVs every 3/4 years as it didn't make it worse.
In places like Houston, which is effectively built on reclaimed swamplands, it's not the just the temperature, the humidity plays a huge part too. When it's 40C and humidity is at 100% and wet bulb temperatures are approaching 30+C, lack of AC becomes a life threatening problem. It becomes practically impossible to cool off and maintain a safe body temperature, especially for the very young, chronically ill, or elderly people.
The point is that Houston is both hotter and more humid. People have already died due to heat because of this loss of power. The AC is not a luxury but a necessity.
Perhaps your original comment made it to the wrong post? This article was about the problems Houston is having from power and AC being out for days so people are naturally expecting comments and their ensuing discussion to also relate to this.
Homes/buildings in your area are built with not having AC in mind - window locations, shade, insulation, etc is all purpose driven. Homes in Texas and generally the US are built with AC in mind, so we can’t not use it - it would get 104 inside.
I've also noticed that newer homes tend to have this problem more than older ones. They're better sealed thermally, so while they're more efficient to keep cool, when they get hot they stay hot for a lot longer. Great for winter, not so much for summer heatwaves.
I used to live in an apartment built in the 70s which was a pain to cool or heat because it was so badly sealed. But the one benefit it did have is that on hot days with cool nights it'd very quickly cool off, without needing AC. My current place requires AC unless I mind waiting until 4am for it to cool off.
It's pretty easy to temporarily "unseal" a house though - open doors/windows.
A well sealed and insulated house takes less to cool too, though. It doesn't just help in winter.
Sadly, in central Kansas where I live, it regularly forgets to get cool at night. Last summer we did our corn silage chopping at night and slept in the day, as we were getting burned trying to operate equipment. At night it was still very hot and muggy. IIRC the dewpoint was in the mid-to-upper 80s F.
AC isn't a problem if the energy feeding it is carbon neutral. With a strong mix of renewables and nuclear this is achievable, but instead we continue to burn coal and natural gas to provide base load.
Visited NYC several times. Metro was unbearable in summer because trains heated up outside and blasted the warm air into tunnels and stations through AC.
AC doesn't really create heat though, aside from minor amounts from the compressor/fan motors, it merely moves it from inside to outside, or into the metro stations as you mention.
The roof on the house (assuming 29N because the article is about Houston, so between 10AM and 2PM, that's a Solar irradiance of 1kW/m^2) is receiving 157.9kW of sunlight, and then absorbing about 85% of that.
My point is that it doesn't create heat, thus does not contribute to climate change on its own. Only the energy source that powers it potentially does.
Since ACs are pretty far from 100% efficient, they turn electricity into heat. There's also heat generated along with the electricity because generation isn't perfect either.
Lowering energy usage doesn't solve the climate problem it just slows the devastation. We need to use clean energy regardless if it's for AC or for work to have a worthwhile impact on that half of things. From another view: it's better to live well sustainably than be proud of unsustainably living miserably. To do that we need to convince people to pay more for electricity generation instead of pointing out they likely wouldn't die if they used less dirty energy.
Heh, just got burned by this in the Czech Republic. Far on the east side, hotel advertising A/C but it’s only in a common area - not in the room itself.
Many homes in the US are not build with stone but thin wood. Houses in Europe with stone take some time to heat up. We lived in a 100 year old house in Berlin and it took 2 months until the walls were warm. Also took some months in winter until walls are cold again.
[Edit] This is not about insulation but heat capacity.
Modern "stick built" homes in the US are well insulated and actually quite efficient. Stone walls would be a poor choice in most areas in the US due to extreme conditions.
As you mention, once a stone house heats up in the summer, that is an incredible amount of thermal mass to cool. Your AC would run non-stop. Similar issue in the winter, super high heating costs in cold regions.
Heat capacity doesn't mean much unless the walls are several feet thick.
The frost line where I live is around 5 feet deep into the ground- meaning that footings for any building have to be that deep to avoid shifting as the ground freezes and thaws.
Summer months thick stone walls can be nice if you are able to keep humidity out, but if you don't and your walls actually stay cool you're dealing with a lot of mold and mildew since water will be condensating 24/7.
I don't know how thick a feet is, where we live we don't measure distances by the length of the feet of the king.
But I have lived for 10 years in a house with 30 cm thick walls and it has a tremendously positive effect, when outsite it is 30C and inside the walls are still 20C into July.
"mold and mildew"
Didn't have that problem in 10 years. This more happens with modern insulation than thick stone walls from my experience YMMV.
There's a fantastic service called the internet, which helps with things you don't know about. According to Google, 5 feet is roughly 1.5 meters. That means that the ground is frozen solid on average 1.5 meters below surface level in winter. However much thermal capacity your walls have, it won't be long before your attempt at heating or cooling your living space is competing directly with the outside environment. It is less of a concern in summer, since the difference between inside and outside is much smaller, but critical for energy usage in winter.
As for mold and mildew, you only get that with modern insulation if you have a poor envelope- i.e. drafts in the walls due to improper sealing. It's not the sort of thing drier climates have to worry about at all, but in very humid environments such as where I live, preventing condensation inside is important. That means not having walls that are cooler than the dew point of the air getting inside.
Basements here are very prone to getting mold or mildew, because (a) they have solid walls, (b) are kept cool via the earth acting as a heat bank, and (c) will readily absorb moisture through the stone or cement.
Most around here have some sort of sealant paint or active dehumidification running in summer to avoid mildew. If the basement walls didn't have to be load bearing, solid wall construction would absolutely be the last choice for basements because they're definitely the worst for thermal and moisture resistance properties.
Those walls would be nearly 30C in the inside already, if my house was built with them. The average temps for the past few weeks (low + high / 2) have been 30-32C. Its still somewhat early in the hot season here, so that will still go up.
There are months of the year where it doesn't get less than like 32C. save for rare cold snaps were it'll dip down to 26C or so for an evening or two.
My pool, which also has some decent thermal inertia, is already at 30C. The average temperature is still going up outside.
All of Europe is further north than most of the US. This does some big things for the climate.
such houses are great in mild climates, but the us is generally not mild.
thin wood as an engineer has many advantages over stone. Stone seens stronger but often it isn't where strength matters while being stronger where it doesn't-
The world uses vastly more energy for heating homes than cooling them. It would be more energy efficient to live in the desert using AC than burning natural gas for heat in northern countries.
Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.
I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:
* Not enough employees at the electrical companies
* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically
* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically
* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)
* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's
* Other??