3 million without power in Texas

My wife and I visited Houston during that 1989 event. It was minus 23 when we left home in Findlay, Ohio. When we got to Houston it was 19 above. Way warmer than what we left behind but because of the higher humidity there, it chilled us to the bone. There was water squirting up out of people's lawns. My sister-in-law's water pipes we in her uninsulated and unheated attic. Big flood! I spent a big part of that day up there fixing broken pipes with air hose and hose clamps.

Then we went to the Astrodome to watch the Browns & Oilers in an AFC playoff game and froze our buns off. I'm pretty used to the cold -- or I was back then -- and I was shivering like a chihuahua dipped in rubbing alcohol.

 

Don't tell me, let me guess: February 18th is bizarre-figure-of-speech day?

 

Apparently so.

 

Ok, here's a guy who saw this as a good time to push the idea of, instead of rolling blackouts, just letting the consumer price/kWh rise without limit so the consumers will have "choices" to consume less.

It's not April 1st yet, so I guess he's serious.

The state's wholesale prices did rise from $0.05/kWh to $9.00/kWh on Monday, so I guess the next obvious idea if you're a libertarian-walks-into-a-bear type is to just pass that right along to the retail customer, because "there are all sorts of ways for people to economize".

Well, sure, there are all sorts of ways for people to economize, if that's what you've been consistently thinking about in selecting your appliances and lights and home upgrades. There probably aren't as many ways if you've spent the last twenty years believing that to give any thought to such matters would be to sell your side out in the culture war, and then on Sunday night you are notified that tomorrow your electric cost will be multiplied by 200.

I suppose if the state really wanted to go that way, and everyone was on board, so you would just know that "yeah, my electric bill is normally around $100 a month, but every now and then we get a month where it's $20,000", there would probably spring up businesses selling what would essentially be bill insurance. You'd pay them a predictable premium, which they would set high enough to cover the risk.

If you've got the savings to just enjoy paying your cheap electric rates ('cause the utilities aren't spending on resilience) most of the time, and just write the occasional $20k check when those times come, you do that. But if your pockets aren't quite that deep, you probably sign up with a bill insurer. If the insurers are adequately regulated, they'll need actuaries to examine how riskily the utilities are behaving and set your premium accordingly, so you won't be fooled by artificially cheap prices from nonresilient operations.

The utilities around me actually started offering bill-predictability plans several years ago. The one from the gas utility was reasonable: they would base a level bill amount on your historical usage, and square up each year whether the estimate was over or under. I didn't sign up, but it was a reasonable plan.

The electric utility saw that and soon was advertising their own plan: you pay their estimated level amount, and you pay them any shortfall at the end of the year if it was under, and if it was over, you get nothing and like it.

In a world of 'bill insurers' without adequate regulation, probably they'd generally be like that.

But I guess it's an idea with authentic Texas flavor. Hey, tomorrow we multiply your rates by 200. Now whatever you have to do is your choice! If you've got the dough, great! If not, just step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.

 

Sorry, did not read through the entire thread.

But people need to take responsibility for their own life and safety. My family are not survival/doomsday preppers, but we keep 30 gallons of water and varying amounts of gasoline (depends on the season) in the event power goes out.
kris

 

If you lived in a regime as proposed by Mr. Giertz, and your cash flow situation didn't lend itself to occasional $20,000 electric bills, would you be willing to recognize participating in some sort of bill-insurance program as one legitimate way that people could take responsibility for their own life and safety?

 

If they don't get on the ball, they could be like Lebanon.
Lebanon electricity crisis: Stealing power to survive - BBC News

On the island where we used to live off the coast of Honduras, the electric company owners were so corrupt that the whole system was on the verge of collapse until an American billionaire bought them out. They had been giving free electricity to their friends, but who knows what other shenanigans to the point where they not only ran out of money to buy fuel for the generators, they ran out of credit to borrow money to buy the fuel. And that's not to mention maintaining a grid that gets blasted with salt 24/7. It seemed like the power was off as much as it was on.

Once the American businessman took over, prices did jump quite a bit, but the reliability slowly improved as they continued chipping away at the maintenance deficiencies.

 

the voting public must agree with rick, et al. so they're left with the consequences of their own actions.
perhaps this debacle will change some minds, but i doubt it

 

I guess another nifty thing, if you sell folks on the "choice" of variable 'scarcity' pricing in their electric rates, is how much extra you would then be able to make by 'creating' a little 'scarcity'.

And maybe, having been just about twenty years since that other time, there'll be enough people who won't remember.

 

I think I will just let Texas be Texas.

The next time I vote for a governor there will be the first time.
I do have to admit that I did ask a tester I was working with out of Ft Worth why us folks in red-dirt country were smart enough to have backup power at all of our water pumping facilities.....
He took it well and said that he and his were executing their OS plan and they were not inconvenienced very much....and were helping family and neighbors.....LIKE Texicans usually do.

 

It gets better! His opinion piece is written as if he's just suggesting a way of doing things where the volatile scarcity pricing could be passed on to customers ("what if electricity customers had choices...").

Apparently, for at least some customers, that's already not a what if:

As Texas deep freeze subsides, some households now face electricity bills as high as $10,000

 

I saw that in NBC news this evening:

Griddy | Wholesale Electricity | Texas Energy Company

It looks like they offer wholesale spot market prices with no markup, other than a $9.99/month service fee.

How to adjust usage on the fly? They have an app for that, for 'smart home' customers.

Want price protection? They have a program for that too, to lock in a rate for a whole season. Unfortunately it looks like this program starts March 1.

 

A number of media outlets are blaming this Texas cold snap on Climate Change, claiming that CC makes these events more common. However, a local weather and climate prof, Cliff Mass, argues strongly (yet again, he brings this up every few years) that CC makes these events less common, and backs it up with some data.

I'm generally in Mass's camp on this. I'm certainly remembering more frequent cold waves and deep snow in my youth than now. It seems to me that as these events become less common, many older folks are forgetting, the younger generations haven't been around long enough to have many first-hand memories of them, and the long standing habit of being under-prepared just keeps getting worse as reminders become less frequent.

E.g. a very destructive ice storm that hit the East a few years ago, the worst in about 20 years, was really not much different than storms that used to hit about once per 4 or 5 years. But going two decades without a reminder had caused very many people to slack off from resiliency measures, and allowed more vulnerable infrastructure to accumulate.

Is the Texas Cold Wave Caused By Global Warming?

"Texas and neighboring states are experiencing a major cold wave causing substantial snowfall and power outages affecting millions of people.

A number of major media outlets are making the claim that such cold is a "sign" or "indication" of global warming (see sample below)

Disturbingly, a few prominent public scientists are parroting these claims, suggesting that the cold waves are examples of "global weirding" caused by greenhouse warming.

Such claims are demonstrably untrue and can be easily proven to be untrue.
The facts are clear:

• Global warming has been occurring and has preferentially warmed the Arctic, the source of cold air for North America.
• The number of cold waves and cold temperature records have declined as the Earth has warmed.
• Cold waves are the expressions of the natural variability of the atmosphere.

If global warming caused more cold waves, then we should be seeing more of them, since global warming is occurring. We are not seeing more or stronger cold waves.

Consider this graph from U.S. EPA website showing the trend in cold waves from 1910 to now over the lower 48 states. There are LESS cold waves.

..."

Read more of his article at:
Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Is the Texas Cold Wave Caused By Global Warming?

 

This is where the straw man is set up so he can knock it down.
None of the scientists, nor media that I have seen, argue that climate change causes more cold waves.

There is a big difference between trends, and specific weather events.
Stating there are fewer cold temps is not the same as proving one particular cold wave event didn’t occur in part due to climate change.

Here is a good, short, video about the scientific position on the issue in general:

Katherine Hayhoe, the scientist in the video, is actually a resident of Texas.

 

I grew up in southern lower Michigan, where winter tended to begin right after fall and last until spring. As a young adult I moved to west central Indiana, and at the time I moved it was very similar. It was actually colder and snowier, which surprised me, being a slightly lower latitude, but of course we've got nothing but plains to our west, and not the moderating influence of the Great Lakes.

The changes right here have been crazy dramatic just over the quarter century I've lived here. In my first years here we would be under snow from before Thanksgiving-ish until maybe spring equinox-ish. It was cold, it was consistently snowy, I was bike commuting and owned actual studded snow tires for my bicycle.

In recent years it is not unusual for me to be outdoors in shirt sleeves doing yard work or car projects in January, shoveling some snow for maybe a week some time in February (we're having that week just now), and back out in shirt sleeves for more yard work the week after.

So certainly, the overall effect here has been warming. The other noticeable effect is volatility. When we get the February thing that leaves snow for a week, it's not unlikely to roar in over a matter of hours with a dozens-of-degrees temperature plunge, and drop a foot and a half of snow, which will be gone without a trace sometimes less than a week later. (We're a bit past the week mark this time, but not a lot.)

But that's all what happens up here in the latitude-40s. Where Texas is concerned, I think it's also the volatility part of the picture that people are talking about. Not that anyone is saying the weather is trending colder or to more frequent cold snaps, but that a cold snap when it comes may be crazy abrupt and freeze up power plants down to latitude 30 and statewide.

How far back in Texas history do you have to go to find when that was a regular occurrence that the young'uns have just forgotten about?

 

weather prediction is a complicated thing. it's nice when forecast models all agree and than the predictions are subsequently proven correct in short order, especially when predicting approaching, climactic or if you prefer disastrous, weather events, or systems if you prefer..

Is there an approaching shift from El Nino to La Nina or vise versa, relating in anyway to the current strange weather patterns we're experiencing ATM?

Global Warming is easy enough for most of us to comprehend as one issue for discussion. Although the weather systems and sub systems that contribute to our perception of the Global Warming concept are not so easy to comprehend.

 

The situation in Texas prompted me to dig out our DVD from Bowling Green State University about the Blizzard of '78. That was the year before we moved there and there were still evidences of it in the cafeteria of the factory where I worked. It turns out that the crew on shift when the storm started spend three days in that building with no electricity. The whiteout made it impossible to leave. So they broke into the vending machines for food and warmed the food over alcohol that they burned in metal cups on the cafeteria tables that blistered the formica. I asked about the scarred tabletops and that's how I got the amazing story.

In all, 51 people died in Ohio from that storm, half of them frozen to death in their stuck cars. One friend's family spent three days in their farmhouse camped out under the kitchen table which was covered with blankets trying to stay warm till the National Guard dug them out.

Someone put the WBGU video on YouTube. It's almost an hour, but it does a pretty good job of telling what happened.

 

oh, the memories. we were married february 18, 1978. almost didn't happen

 

Yah, Boston had a rough winter, too. Scientists in the 70s were spreading the alarm that an ice age was coming.