why this is a clear issue and why it hasn’t been resolved? Texas was doomed last year during the snow and now this year with the heat. I don’t understand. Am I supposed to freeze and get a heat stroke?
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ERCOT is the ISO for Texas, which basically monitors the energy market, makes the rules of the market, forecasts the amount of energy needed, and other things. Note that not every single place is under an ISO; places like Florida are “contract-based” meaning there’s no big free market and power is delivered based on private agreements. There’s lots of ISOs around the country like California ISO, the Midwest ISO, and NYISO, and PJM, but ERCOT is unique in how disconnected it is. The connections between the Texas power grid and the rest of the country are few, and I think a lot of them involve converting power from AC to DC and then back to AC. Why this is is a pretty complicated story that I’m not familiar with.
So it’s not as easy to fix Texas’ energy issues when they’re in trouble. Now you might be wondering about the issue with why the weather matters so much. Well, basically, power grid companies and infrastructure officials hired a bunch of statisticians to compute the probability of certain events happening, and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. This happens all over the world. It’s why Florida doesn’t have fire hydrants built to handle cold weather, and why Alaska doesn’t plan on making hurricane proof houses. It would be expensive to make your electrical grid ready for such extreme events, and the expected value of that cost is higher than the expected loss if one of those events were to happen, multiplied by the probability of it happening.
Now, climate change and global warming are starting to force a revision of those calculations. The frequency of such failures will cause statisticians to revise their calculations, and we might well see companies declare that the costs of weatherproofing the grid are less than the expected costs due to crises like these after the probabilities have been adjusted. But it’s pretty much up to the calculations of statisticians and weather experts to determine what’s going to happen now.
Source: Parents are power system engineers
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