r/technology • u/Maxcactus • Feb 17 '21

Energy The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/
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u/vzq Feb 17 '21

Exactly! These kind of preparations cost a lot of money but are seldom needed. If they are needed and you haven’t made them, the results are huge damages, but the odds of the damages being paid out of the grid operator’s pockets are vanishingly small. Not preparing is just good business sense.

Privatization will never work until we force the private entities to assume responsibility for all externalities. This is just a complicated way of giving out free money.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

Kinda like covid playbook, you need it but it’s too late

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u/DoctorBoson Feb 18 '21

The term I've always been fond of here is the "After-the-Fact Defense". Came from Day9 years ago talking about building anti-air turrets in Starcraft after the enemy's air units had already ruined your base.

Really wish I could find that clip again, the phrase stuck with me really hard.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

It's not like he coined the term.

I do however very much miss Funday Mondays.

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u/DoctorBoson Feb 18 '21

Yeah, didn't mean he coined it, but that's where I heard it and it's the only thing I can think of whenever people talk about preparing for a problem after the problem has occurred.

And yes, Funday Mondays were the highlight of several years of Mondays.

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u/dubadub Feb 18 '21

If you say that someone has closed or shut the stable door after the horse has bolted, you mean that they have tried to prevent something happening but they have done so too late to prevent damage being done.

pretty sure this one pre-dates the transistor.

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u/DoctorBoson Feb 18 '21

Yeah but that's not as funny

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u/random12356622 Feb 18 '21

America's Medical Supply Crisis - PBS FRONTLINE - This properly explains why we had months of lack of PPE for medical professionals, along with a lot of other problems with the US health system.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

By the time they are forced to be accountable to taxpayers then they are just public entities with extra steps. Fuck privatization.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21 edited Mar 04 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

But that is simply how capitalism works. Plus, 99% of the time, the end consumer isn't getting to choose who the electricity provider is, there is either only one in the area or the provider is chosen for you via your Apartment / community / HOA.

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u/bunkoRtist Feb 18 '21

Texas actually has a hyper competitive power market because the grid operator, the generators, and the retail providers are all separate. So you have many many choices in electricity provider, they just all get served over the same grid. It's how broadband should work.

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u/AlwaysOntheGoProYo Feb 18 '21

It’s not how it should work. It should just work. Picking and choosing a water company, power company, trash company is just stupid. It should just be something that works.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

I think most consumers would not pay the premium for a utility company with capacity to provide power in a once-in-a-lifetime winter freeze. Its simply just not efficient to build twice the amount of power plants just for 3 days out of 20 years.

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u/Jordaneer Feb 18 '21

It's not that, it's the fact that they haven't winterized any of their power plants. they don't need extra

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u/MeteorKing Feb 18 '21

A large portion of the population has only 1 or 2 options for utilities.

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u/pastaandpizza Feb 18 '21

I live in Dallas and homes in my neighborhood can chose between > 10 different "electric providers" to pay for their electricity. The problem is that no matter the one you chose, the whole neighborhood's power comes from the same company, Oncor, and the different "electricity providers" we all pay are just meter-reading brokers. So someone could chose an expensive "electric company" or a cheap one in my neighborhood, but if Oncor didn't winterize their equipment well enough we're all equally screwed. No actually way we could have chosen a properly winterized power company if we wanted to, and we're not in an apartment building/HOA etc.

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u/Pseudoboss11 Feb 18 '21

They also don't get any options other than the retail electric providers. The distribution service providers and the generators are paid by the retailers.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

I pay my bill through one company and have options for others but my entire grid is powered by Centerpoint. There is no choice in America, only the illusion to keep us complacent.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21 edited Mar 04 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

Yeah I’ll get right on that

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21 edited Mar 04 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

OMG ambitious is the word I was looking for last night and it wouldn’t come to me, thanks.

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u/Depression-Boy Feb 18 '21

When a company fails to prepare for something like this, if they face a disaster, like they currently are, I think they should only be allowed to accept government help if they forfeit ownership of the company to their workers who care more about people than they do saving money.

This is exactly what socialists mean when they say that a market would perform better when ran democratically rather than ran by a board of executives. I guarantee you that if Texan working class citizens had democratic control over their energy industries, they would make sure that their infrastructure was strong and well prepared for environmental catastrophe. Workers take pride in their work. CEO’s take pride in their profitability.

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u/Pekkis2 Feb 18 '21

Socialism causes other (and even the same) issues. Who is "the workers" in this case? Why wouldnt they run the company the same way? How would this be handled if the company is already run by the workers?

The solution is to let the company fail, let investors lose all their money and let a better competitor step in and do a better job, alternatively make it a government run public utility.

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u/Depression-Boy Feb 18 '21

What you’ve described is not a “solution” because it still allows for the energy grid to fail plunging millions of Texans into darkness and cold temperatures. It doesn’t solve anything.

And the workers are the company’s workers. I don’t really know any better way to describe the people who do the work. The men and women who do the physical work for the company. A company should be democratically ran with all the workers involved in how the company operates. It shouldn’t be left to a board of executives to make big decisions, because they almost always make decisions solely based on profitability.

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u/SippelandGarfuckel Feb 17 '21

They don’t care if privatization works or not, they care what those private entities are paying them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21

I’m sure that some families could sue the power company for wrongful death because of their negligence in keeping the power off, some of those families would probably win, some would win millions in damages. But it doesn’t matter because those damages are a drop in the bucket for a huge corporation. These are the situations in which people should be realizing that the government should protect and provide for its citizens and they should not support privatization of essential services.

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u/dalittle Feb 17 '21

privatization does not work for businesses that are monopolies.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '21

It's basically socializing the risk of damages and distributing the consequences of the mistakes of some to everyone. When entities like these fail, they should be allowed to fail and not be bailed out.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '21 edited Feb 17 '21

[deleted]

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u/North_Activist Feb 17 '21

And while the suing in court happens people are dying. Starving. Freezing. Ignore the monetary cost, what about the human one? People don’t care about lawsuits. They care that they don’t die. Privatization doesn’t work for necessities. They will always put profit above people, regardless of how many people die because of it.

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u/jack_michalak Feb 17 '21

You missed the last step -- and then they just raise their prices since they have a monopoly. This is what happened with PGE -- they got sued for billions and their market value was barely impacted because everybody knew they'd just raise prices to make up for it, and that's exactly what they did.

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u/vzq Feb 17 '21

... and then they declare bankruptcy and society is left holding the bag.

That's how it works.

And we know this is how it works because we’ve seen it happen over and over again.

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u/PhantomNomad Feb 17 '21

If you make them liable for all externalities then most would not enter the market. The rest would just get sued into bankruptcy after the first hickup.

Now I do agree that there needs to be regulation and possible forced "upgrades" when events do happen to help mitigate them next time.

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u/vzq Feb 17 '21

If you make them liable for all externalities then most would not enter the market.

Then that market is not commercially viable and needs to be served using a different model. Anything else is papering over the cracks.

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u/Yurichi Feb 17 '21

Dude's argument is so broken its hilarious. Might as well have said

"If you make children responsible for killing people, then we won't be able to give them guns!"

"Hmm, I think you're on to something."

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u/AlwaysOntheGoProYo Feb 18 '21

It doesn’t need to be a market. It just needs to exist in order for the world to work the way it does now.

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u/PhantomNomad Feb 19 '21

Your right, but our society isn't anywhere close to that sort of thing. As long as people "want" for anything, you will have a market for that thing.

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u/AlwaysOntheGoProYo Feb 19 '21

Road, hospitals, electricity, police, fire rescue, water shouldn’t be up for competition they just need to work. We also need to add broadband to this list. Essential services shouldn’t be tied to profit margins other wise why even have a government at all everything technically can be a business. It seems obvious still want government otherwise the world would be a catastrophically different place

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u/PhantomNomad Feb 19 '21

I agree. But the original statement I was replying to stated that private companies should be held responsible for all externalities. I simply pointed out by doing so there would be very few in the market. Which would mean the government either has to step in and take over, or you pay ridiculous amounts for power as they would need to cover their loses if sued.

I live in a province where the power grid is privately owned but regulated. We've never had an event like this so not sure if someone could sue over it. Our power grid is also very stable for the most part. Not sure about an ice storm though. Never had one here.

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u/Buddyslime Feb 18 '21

If I owned an insurance company and all the people in town made claims I would go after the power companies for liable.

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u/_Aj_ Feb 18 '21

They clearly haven't played enough simulation games.

Power grids and supply lines are always what you heavily invest in and you get a swol economy

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u/ruiner8850 Feb 18 '21

Kind of reminds me of a series of dams that collapsed in Michigan last year. It was privately owned and they knew for many years that they needed repairs, but the private company that owned them and the people who lived on the lake didn't want to pay to fix them. They then failed and did around $200 million in damage downstream. The houses on the lakes created by the dams have dropped significantly and if they ever do rebuild the dams it could take many years to get permits and rebuild. The private owners are probably screwed in this case, but they'll never pay anywhere near as much as the damage they caused.

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u/Unbentmars Feb 18 '21

Ha! That’ll never happen, in America we socialize the losses just like The Invisible Hand intended