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Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

cnn.com

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Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#181

Post by kkfx »

My two takes:

- 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.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#182

Post by namesbc »

spamizbad wrote: post #105

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.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#183

Post by laweijfmvo »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #151

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the constant repairs after a major storm every 10 to 15 years, Houston actually has one of the lowest energy costs in the United States: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices... 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 http…

does it matter how cheap it is if it’s not available?

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#184

Post by jncfhnb »

galdosdi wrote: post #162
KingOfCoders wrote: post #36

Germany has overengineered and expensive utilities, but I'm happy sometimes that all power and telephone lines are underground.

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 s…

Per person per month for 10 years is a ridiculous unit to choose. Europe benefits from being very dense. The US grid is way more spread out.

Undergrounding costs are around $1M per mile. The US has millions of miles of lines.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#185

Post by akira2501 »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #9

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 d…

> This was just a cat 1 hurricane

_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.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#186

Post by quickthrowman »

blantonl wrote: post #30
gmueckl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with below-ground power distribution for metropolitan areas?

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.

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.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#187

Post by akira2501 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #36

Germany has overengineered and expensive utilities, but I'm happy sometimes that all power and telephone lines are underground.

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.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#188

Post by laweijfmvo »

ndr42 wrote: post #163
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

in the US many people expect their houses to always be between 68 and 72 degrees fahrenheit (or some other ridiculous numbers), year round.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#189

Post by nemomarx »

ndr42 wrote: post #163
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Air conditioning is very common and very cheap here - you get little window units for a few hundred and such.

Re: Houston-area residents enter sixth day without power, air conditioning

#190

Post by jtolmar »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60
bdcravens wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an area northwest of Houston. 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…

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.)

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