Pretty much yeah. Texas R's refuse to integrate their grid with the fed one which would add new rules to theirs and mandate upgrades which could lead to less outages.

In this particular case there might be a bit of shitey business practice as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

There is a financial incentive to keep things failure prone, because demand pricing allows them to make the same amount of revenue with whatever (lack of) production is available.

So when only a few neighborhoods still have power they just end up paying for the whole damn city. It’s nuts.

[–] Diplomjodler3 47 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because they don't want to. Everything they do is designed to enrich their sponsors. The interests of the public are entirely irrelevant.

[–] Coreidan 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They don’t want to because they are trying to do everything they can to destabilize the US to appease their Chinese and Russian overlords.

Project 25 anyone?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Project 2025*

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

insulation > isolation

Texas wants it own grid. That's fine. I don't want that grid attached to the grid that literally the rest of the US is using.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Because the grid is load balanced with crypto

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

I'm CERTAIN the Voters of Texas will VOTE OUT the people Responsible for this JUST like they did last Election after the Snowstorms!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The citizens of Texas voted for this to happen

[–] neclimdul 4 points 5 months ago

Not all of us. But yes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Don’t worry, guys…Lt. Dan is on the case! /s

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Bruh, I wish we had Lt. Dan...

TBH, we'd be in a much better place if literally any of them was replaced by a shrimp in an aquarium.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I’m sure a Vermont IQ of 75 could figure it out

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I mean... A hurricane hit, and it damaged power equipment along several major cities. Some parts of Houston saw flooding, and a lot of roads are still inaccessible right now which further delays repair efforts. Not sure what else you'd expect to happen.

This isn't like the previous failures of Texas's busted-ass power grid in recent years; those previous outages weren't from weather damage, but from being unable to keep up with demand due to our government's stubborn refusal to make use of the national grids. Those outages could've been largely mitigated if not for bureaucratic bullshit, but there's little you can do to prevent a hurricane from doing hurricane things. The article goes into pretty great length to detail the damage the hurricane left behind, yet doesn't seem to link the cause to the effect.

I'll happily shit on our medieval government 7 days a week, but this feels like a stretch.

[–] mkwt 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not sure what else you'd expect to happen.

Houstonians are upset because when it comes to hurricanes, the category matters a lot.

When it passed through Houston, Beryl was a tropical storm sitting just under the threshold for category 1 hurricane status. Category 1 is the lowest grade of hurricane there is. Even still, 85% of Centerpoint's grid lost power at the peak.

That's a worse result for the power grid than previous storms that were higher category storms. So it definitely looks like Centerpoint has been neglecting maintenance recently.

[–] CreativeShotgun 6 points 5 months ago

This right here. Ive lived here all my life and this storm ranks really low on my list of shit I've seen and high on shitty recovery. The flooding wasn't even that bad, a normal amount for rough storms and it drained quickly

[–] Rakonat 23 points 5 months ago

Difference here is that parts of the state not hit by the hurricane or otherwise saw inclement weather to any degree are also suffering power outages well outside the zone that would be acceptable. Texas (utility) companies doesn't want to invest in redundancies to give their power grid more endurance than it needs for anything more than a mild breeze and some light rain. Over 2 million people lost power, despite many of those people not seeing any other effects of the hurricane. These things don't happen anywhere else along the gulf coast where hurricanes are just as common, and just as heavy hitting. Texas just doesn't regulate their grid anywhere near the Federal standard everywhere else, and it shows with every year for the last 4 years running regional storms taking the grid out in areas far removed from the zone affected by the storm.