protist

You don't understand how electrical grids work at all

ERCOT says that every summer, but also that article says there's a "12% chance" of rolling blackouts, not that they're planning them. Last summer was our hottest on record, as it was many places, and there were no rolling blackouts. This summer in Texas hasn't been nearly as hot as it was last year.

Here are similar articles about pretty much everywhere else:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-midwest-danger-rotating-power-blackouts-this-summer-2022-06-03/

https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-blackout-risks-across-u-s/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/us/storm-blackouts.html

Again, these outages are due to downed power lines, not ERCOT and not generating capacity. Does everyone here really not understand the difference lmao

Uh...none of these say anything about how connecting to another interconnect would affect anything about these Houston outages. The Texas grid has been up and running this entire time, the current outages are due to downed power lines in the Houston area

Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps

Does it? We had the snow storm in 2021 that hit the news, but after that, are you lumping every local outage in Texas you see in the news together and blaming the "Texas grid?" People did the same thing when we had a severe ice storm here in Austin in Feb 2023 that knocked out power for several days. Well Austin has a municipal utility because we have not deregulated here, so Austin Energy was responsible for that one, and the problem was ice and trees. People were all over reddit blaming the "Texas grid" at the time, when the issue was ice and trees in a localized area.

Let me be clear I in no way support deregulation. I grew up in Houston when Houston Lighting & Power was our utility, though, and we had outages back then too, because we experience severe weather really often in Houston, and there are a bunch of trees that knock down power lines.

Are you saying you've never lost power to your house? I'm curious where you live where there aren't pretty widespread outages after a hurricane that brings you several hours of 80mph sustained winds. Anyway my entire point was this outage in Houston has nothing to do with the "Texas grid" or deregulation. You could certainly criticize Centerpoint for not being better prepared to repair the outages, but the outages were going to happen regardless

Connecting to any of the other interconnects would make absolutely no difference in this case, where the issue is a hurricane knocked down trees and power lines. The Texas grid has functioned just fine every single day since the 2021 ice storm that landed it in the news. What's happening here is a local outage like would happen in literally any city that experiences a severe weather event

Edit: Lots of downvoting but no one explaining how connecting to another interconnect would make any difference at all here. For context, Hurricane Beryl and Hurricane Sandy made landfall with the same sustained wind velocity. Sandy knocked out power to over 6 million people for days in NY and NJ

A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas's separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:

The storm wasn't projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.

Houston's tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees