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

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

#371

Post by Sam713 »

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.

A short timeline: In 2014 CNP reported ‘excess revenue’ but were allowed to keep it https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/10/20/texas-puc-leave....

In 2020 a major activist investor put a large stake in CNP https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/12/14/billiona.... The owner of that private equity group also happens to be a major donor to the political party of the current Texas governor, who appoints the commissioners who regulate public utilities (https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/paul-singer-hedge-fund-r...).

Texas electric utilities are regulated in theory, but in practice this regulation seems lax or at least not proactive. This was readily apparent in the 2021 freeze (Uri): https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/10/21/texas-re...

And later in 2021 CNP also made direct political donations to Texas politicians: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/04/texas-energy-industr....

It doesn’t seem like Texas has done much to improve regulation since the 2021 failure. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2022-11-17/texas-lawmakers-a...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/why...

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.

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

#372

Post by Sam713 »

ianburrell wrote: post #321
bdcravens wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing, but migrating to it is very expensive. 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) https://www.houstonchroni…

It is $2.5 million per mile. That is order of magnitude more expensive. Houston has 6200 miles of road compared to 640 square miles. I think $2.5 million is the high estimate, my city is estimating $1 million per mile. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...

Centerpoint website states that they currently operate ~33,000 miles of above ground distribution/transmission lines.

https://www.centerpointenergy.com/en-us/corporate/about-us/c...

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

#373

Post by Sam713 »

mym1990 wrote: post #100
blantonl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/ho...

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

#374

Post by _heimdall »

fy20 wrote: post #347
standardUser wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

With a subsidu of €350 per kWp, does that mean the government subsidizes €3500 for the roof mounted solar that you quoted at €2000 for 10kWp?

If so that seems like a pretty substantial subsidy to me, the government is covering around 63% of the total cost.

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

#375

Post by lsaferite »

binkethy wrote: post #362
roenxi wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Bass ackwards defensive hot take. The above comment should not be grayed out, yours should. You are placing your political fantasies above reality on the ground. It is absolutely factually correct to describe Texas political and electrical administration as - anthropogenic climate change denialist - corruptly in thrall to fossil fuel, including 'natural' gas plant expansion where the actual grid is the issue - averse…

> your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic

And

> we don't need no regulamazations

Seem at odds with one another.

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

#376

Post by _heimdall »

jmward01 wrote: post #276
Scoutmaster wrote: post #205

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…

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?

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.

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

#377

Post by Sam713 »

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…

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.

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

#378

Post by Jensson »

mardifoufs wrote: post #264
Molitor5901 wrote: post #243

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 lon…

You want a mix, you don't full government control but you don't want full free market either.

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

#379

Post by kazinator »

> “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.

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

#380

Post by Jensson »

roenxi wrote: post #359
kolinko wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a simple linear scale of regulations and no regulations. EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.

> 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…

> The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis

No outage though, the crisis was averted, unlike in Texas where the crisis reliably hits every few years.

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