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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

#401

Post by kjkjadksj »

S_A_P wrote: post #275

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 w…

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.

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

#402

Post by kjkjadksj »

nxm wrote: post #283
namesbc wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PG & E is "heavily regulated" and yet Newsome allowed them to not upgrade power lines which eventually caused massive wild fires

Part of the issue is that its listed on the stock market

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

#403

Post by kjkjadksj »

olddustytrail wrote: post #209
bluerooibos wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

In the US companies are sometimes considered people, which really perverts what they can do.

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

#404

Post by kjkjadksj »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #364

Are roof top solar panels able to survive hurricanes? I think for a rich sunny region like texas, best answer is resiliant microgrids with rooftop solar and powerwalls.

Considering the entire roof might come off, I doubt it.

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

#405

Post by randcraw »

bastawhiz wrote: post #337
blantonl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#406

Post by [deleted] »

lazide wrote: post #361
roenxi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 EU also has very high taxes and very high energy costs.

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by [deleted] »

lazide wrote: post #361
roenxi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 EU also has very high taxes and very high energy costs.

[deleted]

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

#408

Post by Dylan16807 »

alexk307 wrote: post #394
Dylan16807 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use statistics. 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.

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

#409

Post by slater »

slater- wrote: post #315
anonfordays wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot compare states to cities. >Compare those cities to traditionally Republican run states The South was traditionally ran by the Democratic Party.

[flagged]

https://www.studentsofhistory.com/ideologies-flip-Democratic...

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

#410

Post by snowpid »

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…

"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.

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