Texas mayor tells residents to fend for themselves during power outage:Only the strong will survive

@mattbbpl: 'Buh bu both sidez'.

You're arguing with a brick wall. The evidence has been presented and it's quite clear that this was forewarned and any advice to mitigate a future event was ignored. Anything else is purposeful ignorance and/or trolling.

Are you saying the the state government of Texas isn't capable of enforcing policy on private entities, man of whom, can control their daily lives? Seems like a fairly feckless and impotent bunch of Muppets then. ERCOT is allowed be in the position they are by Texan politicians.

Whataboutism and opinion.

No that's a fact that Democratic policies caused the power failure in California. Given there policies directly caused the worse failure in California state history as late as last year I say that's a little more then an opinion.

But continue to talk about the Mayor's dumb comments as if it had anything to do with what caused it.

@HoolaHoopMan: I know. It's a little ridiculous that they can't say, "we should winterize and/or accept connections from states that do." They seem intent on repeating this situation.

Whataboutism and opinion.

So talk about the thread topic? Okay.

It's not just Texas politicians. Ercot is run independently from the rest the US and was given that power in 1935 by FDR. It would be a process to get put on the Eastern or Western power grid. The fact we have people actually making this political shows how dumb and resentful the general public is. If the TC is talking about the Mayor's dumb comment's then I agree they were dumb but the reality is the problem they face today were created many years ago. The people that run Ercot don't even live in Texas.

State legislature declined to connect to the rest of the country and they didn't enforce the recommendations by federal government. Do you know what you're talking about?

@zaryia: So talk about the thread topic? Okay.

I did, but once you had posters blaming the actual power failure on Republican leadershiip a little research shows they have no clue wtf they are talking about ( big surprise!) And I knew you weren't going to say anything about it because that's what you always do. Create some thread bashing the right with little discussion value and just watch the pile on.

That decision was made in 1935 and approved by.... get this....... a DEMOCRAT! Not like it really matters it happened 85 years ago.

They can't just shutdown ERCOT and connect to the the national power grid overnight that's not how it works.

Ah 1935 before the ideology switch of the parties during the Civil Rights era. Hint. They were conservatives.

Cool il glady claim FDR who was widely considered one of the greatest presidents in modern history. Regardless I'm glad you found a way to somehow blame conservatives.

I'm just stating facts. You're trying to blame Democrats. Republicans are no more the party of Lincoln than a Ford is a Lincoln.

Im not blaming anyone this happened 85 years ago.. Republicans are the party of Lincoln that's a fact. Regardless this is irrelevant and off topic. I'm glad you understand this issue was created 85 years ago now.

Overnight? They encountered this in 1989. And again in 2011. And received recommendations to address it after that.

Edit: And state party leadership is still saying they won't address it.

This. Is. A. Choice.

They plan on doing something about it.

Regardless California is on the western power grid and had worse issues then Texas. This is the first time it's been this serious in the state.

@silentchief: Thank Christ! The nonsense they were saying yesterday was maddening.

CA also acknowledged their failures (taking too much wattage off the grid without replacements ready) and are addressing. That's all I'm advocating for is addressing the issue, as Perry's type of response is unacceptable.

The reason they don't go to the expense (both upfront and ongoing and neither of which is small) to winterize their electric grid is the same reason they don't maintain enough snow plows, sand and salt to deal with this kind of weather. It's not justified given how infrequent they experience weather like this.

I've browsed around the net trying to find a real death toll due strictly to the power outages, and they think maybe 2 people died in the Houston area, but they can't even confirm if those two deaths are strictly due to lack of electricity. It appears that Texas has lost more lives to weather related traffic accidents than to the electrical shortages.

If, 6 months from now, they put it to a vote to raise their electric rates to provide preparations for another weather event like this, you can bet your ass it will get voted down. They'll squeal like stuck pigs now, while enduring the hardship, but once the crisis is past, they'll think better of expending resources to avoid a rare occurrence such as this again.

@comeonman: It would be interesting to see the cost of this.

Again, you seem to be missing the point. ERCOT runs independently from the rest of the US, but it is still at the discretion of the Texas government. Texas allows a privatized company like ERCOT to exist in their current capacity by choice. Texas also chooses to have their state's electrical grid work independently from the eastern/western grids.

These are choices that were directed by top down political leadership (Think TX GOP). So while we can blame ERCOT, which we def should, we should also lay blame at the people who enabled this type of relationship to exist in the first place.

I would too. Who wants to bet that the total cost of winterizing their plants will be lower than the total sum of recovery, aid, and economic dampening of this single incident?

@HoolaHoopMan: To be fair, much of that will be externalized. Federal aid and insurance costs will largely be borne by other states (TX will be burdened with a share roughly proportional to it's population share). That makes not winterizing easier to rationalize.

I'm sure that others will end up footing large portions of the bill. If that's the case it seems like a collective action issue. Either refuse aid to reduce incentive (shouldn't happen), or give aid with condition of winterization implementation (won't happen)...or provide aid and change nothing (will happen). I think the notion of 'winterization costs too much' will fall short of the total impact of costs, independent of whom bears the cost.

Unless of course the uproar is enough that state legislatures demand change.

Don’t forget reduced activity means reduced productivity, less value created as well.
just like the cost of this pandemic alone.

Didnt you whatboutism and used an opinion when you declared this mayor being a republican without even checking into it first? Again that is what I am calling you out on. You are no better then the MAGA folks that do the same thing. Also Texas took care of that mayor. Will you give them props for that?

Blaming a generational weather pattern on Texas Republicans is just silly. I guess it all Florida Republicans fault they get the majority of the hurricanes also.

Sorry if someone came on here, which they have, and blamed the Democrats for all the fires in California you go buts. Bunch of damn hypocrites. We need to quit saying it is either parties fault and find real solutions. That is how you fix shit, not all this dumb ass finger pointing BOTH sides is doing!

And you are one of the KING/QUEEN finger pointers on this forum and guess what it solves NOTHING!

In a perfect world you plan for waste cause scenarios. The fact that winters are milder in Texas doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to operate in extreme conditions.

Texas apparently narrowly averted a major disaster here:

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline due to the extreme cold brought by the winter storm, the amount of power supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state fell rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses turned up the heat and stayed inside to avoid the weather.

“It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. “It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.”

...

The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid can take months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot

Edit: Accidentally deleted

Imagine destroying your own state just to own the libs.

I'm not missing the point. You're putting the blame on the Texas GOP eventhough these rules were established 85 years ago. This is partisan finger pointing, Nothing more.

Please cite the rule where the GOP couldn't change that.

Man, what a shit show.

Texan power essentially freezes, leaving millions without power. Some places are running out of water.

Government official says "Fend for yourselves" essentially.

Ted Cruz decides to take a flight to Cancun then, when called on it, says "Oh I was just flying my daughter down there" and comes back because he was caught. Again proving he is not only a terrible person, but a spineless one as well.

Government officials continue to blame green energy as the cause despite the fact it accounts for 10% of the total power grid.

Politicians on both sides tend to be pretty terrible but this is clearly a GOP screw up. Fess up, fix it, and move on. Oh and Texas, vote blue next time.

Are these rules ever enshrined in commandments that Moses himself brought down from the heavens? I was unaware that TX governance, law, and statues were absolute until the heat death of the universe itself.

It is not all the politicians fault, but ERCOT is overseen by the Texas legislature and is also overseen by the Public Utilities Commission, which in turn is itself a creation of the Texas legislature.

This is normal everywhere and whatever form of independent electricity system operator, along with whatever form of utility commission exists, they are always creatures of the legislative branch whether it is a state in the US, a province in Canada, or anywhere else in the English speaking world...AUS/UK/NZ. This is because all of those places have the same roots in regulatory law and it doesn't matter if the assets are privately owned or publicly owned...if they are connected to a public network they are ultimately subject to political/legislative oversight. That's just the way it is.

Within this regulatory framework, the entities are required to assess resiliency and periodically update their plans. You can't responsibly run an electrical network without doing resiliency and business continuity planning. Why they never acted upon input and advice from previous issues and/or previous resiliency planning should be investigated.

Doesn't mean this fiasco is all about politically based mistakes as the legislature typically relies on the experts to do their jobs, which is why you have IESO and PUC entities in the first place. But politics is a live and die by the sword business, so yah the various administrations over the years are ultimately accountable.

They haven't had any issues in 10 years and even that was nothing like this. I suspect they didn't want to go through the trouble of changing their power grid as it's been in effect for nearly 85 years and the hassle of doing such was never addressed. Regardless they are launching an investigation so I expect they will do something.

I should have also noted that energy networks whether generation, transmission, or distribution are areas that have had a lot of political interference since they were first created and across all geographies. It is almost certain to happen at times simply because of the core importance and costs to society at large. Mostly too much meddling by politicians.

But again, that doesn't mean this particular case is the defacto result of political screwups.

other states ready to send power to texas:

That's literally not a whataboutism. And I asked a question, I didn't make a factual statement.

You're mad at me for no reason, and seem triggered as hell over nothing.

to sum this whole talk about. are power grid is duck tape together ...

due to greed.

nothing else. on both sides.

Not preparing for harsh weather conditition is inexcusable. Preparing and helping people in crisis is in my opinion the reason for governments and should be their top priority. Of course to me talking about crisis and seeing -5 or something like that is a little odd, when yesterday we had -30 C and I still went to do some grocery shopping, walking about 1 km to the store since I don't own a car. And I wasn't only one walking outside. Life just went on here like a typical day in Febryary, which it was.

So southern conservatives. And overseen by them, mostly, even up until this storm.

We can't put the entire blame on TX legislature, but zero blame is not very smart either.

Saying they couldn't have done better or didn't make poor decisions over the decades is just as silly.

Still waiting for an answer to this.

@zaryia: Just like old people are willing to die of COVID-19 for the economy according to Texas Lt. Governor.

For a party whose constituents are known for claiming evolution is fake, they sure love Darwinism when it’s applied to public policy.

Why would they? They are better off fixing the current power grid they have at this point.

@silentchief: I'm getting a sense of deja vu.

almost like spending money on pandemic preparation when pandemics are rare occurrences.

humans tend to be dreadfully bad planners

Then I guess you're done blaming people in the past since you're giving a pass to people in the present for the disaster.

You just did it again calling me a far right snow flake. Great job you HYPOCRITE! You are just as hateful as the MAGA people. Seriously I feel bad for people like you. I really don't understand how you make it in life always pointing fingers instead of coming up with real solutions.

I place blame where it primary should belong which is with the heads of ERCOT.

You are just looking at another reason to bash the GOP.

Utilities have oversight.