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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

#411

Post by mistermann »

AlbertCory wrote: post #398
mistermann wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are also people who are big talkers but can't defend their "non-supernatural" claims when challenged.

oh, you're just so busy here, aren't you? we don't have to prove the negative; you have to prove your claim.

Impressive, but fairly normative[1] rhetoric[2].

Can you please take that courage over to the thread in question, where the cat seems to have gotten your tongue?

Some alternatives:

1. Engage in even more rhetoric (which is easily identified)

2. Pretend that you have not seen this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954874

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...

Note:

- you and I are both Humans

- this conversation is "a situation"

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

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

#412

Post by AtlasBarfed »

vel0city wrote: post #335
throwaway4220 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/2013/HAIL.png Here is a hail map. https://solarpower.guide/solar-energy-insights/infographics/... Here is a rough solar install map I think it’s not necesarily true that people avoid Solar because of hail, although anecdotally I know a friend who is reluctant for this very reason That being said, flooding happens very often and yet homes in Houston are not flood proof. And let’s not get i…

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 ot…

Truly an insurmountable problem for our civilization.

Well, better keep driving 5mpg trucks and dying when the power company fails then.

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

#413

Post by alexk307 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #408
alexk307 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hurricane-landfalls-us [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5#Sec2 [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45112-6

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

#414

Post by spyspy »

gmueckl wrote: post #356
spyspy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Above ground you have the risks of e.g. cars crashing into poles and trees falling on the 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.

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

#415

Post by neilknowsbest »

kazinator wrote: post #379

> “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 t…

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.

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

#416

Post by rangestransform »

epolanski wrote: post #8

To me it's crazy people run so much AC at home. 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 sum…

Imagine priding yourself on the amount of discomfort you can endure

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

#417

Post by sdenton4 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #398
mistermann wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are also people who are big talkers but can't defend their "non-supernatural" claims when challenged.

oh, you're just so busy here, aren't you? we don't have to prove the negative; you have to prove your claim.

Uh, OP here.... Calling the Rock's San Andreas a documentary was, in fact, a joke.

You are now free to experience the many other surprising and delightful things that this life has to offer.

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

#418

Post by icehawk »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #350
sojournerc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 HVAC fan alone in a surban house can draw 1KW. That’s pretty much all heat. The AC cools the house at the cost of many more KW. The house gets cooler but this is all heat from the electrical usage.

To put that into perspective:

The AC cools the house using about 3-4kW, total.

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.

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

#419

Post by AlbertCory »

sdenton4 wrote: post #281
AlbertCory wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was a pretty bad flooding event portrayed in the documentary movie San Andreas. https://youtu.be/jvIGFhqbe0c?si=ZCaVjWjw-oi84HgD&t=1m39s

Sorry. I've had so many "jokes" taken literally that I don't even try it without the /s anymore.

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

#420

Post by bastawhiz »

randcraw wrote: post #405
bastawhiz wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most.

And this is also not a hard problem, just expensive, tedious, and politically unpopular.

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