We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.
Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.
The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).
So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.
We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.
The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.
As to your point about it being an urban area:
The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).
I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.
Also live in SF Bay Area, but my sister lived in Houston for ~20 years and I grew up in the Northeast (and got hit by hurricanes Gloria and Bob as a child).
What we saw with the winter storms of 2022 and 2023 was nothing close to what Houston or even the NY area gets with a hurricane. Bay Area topography is hilly; most of the wind is broken by the Santa Cruz mountains. I'm in one of the SF Peninsula canyons that's known for being particularly windy, and we saw maybe 70mph gusts and 30mph sustained. A Cat 1 hurricane (like Beryl, Bob, or Gloria) has 75mph winds sustained with gusts up to 100mph. A Cat 5 (like Katrina at the height of its strength; it made landfall as a cat 3) has 150mph sustained winds and 200+mph gusts.
Hurricane Bob knocked out power to eastern Long Island NY for 2 days in 1991. Hurricane Sandy (also a Cat 1 at landfall, but a direct hit on NYC) knocked out power for 2 weeks. The problem is not unique to Houston or Texas. PG&E has plenty of its own problems, but the reason fewer poles went down our winter storms (and they still did go down; Cupertino was without power for almost 2 days) was simply because the wind was less.
To quantify the winds we're talking about, the record-setting winds in the Bay Area this February peaked at 100mph gusts, with 18 stations recording values between 80mph and 100mph [0] (Pablo Point, out in the middle of the Pacific, recorded gusts of 102mph, but I'd consider that an outlier). Notably, all stations recording values higher than 80mph are on mountain peaks, not anywhere near population centers. In most of the Bay Area the gusts didn't exceed 60mph [1].
During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.
All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.
Consider earthquakes. Preparation and infrastructure are what matter. If you don't do the prep, you'll have a hundred thousand dead from a 6.0. But if you do the prep, you'll have relatively trivial damage from a 7.0.
Texas power, thanks to their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude, has shown itself to be woefully underreported repeatedly in the last few years.
I can't walk by this comment without noting that their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude resulted in a large populous state which people want to migrate to. The other large US state, California, has electricity prices that appear to be 2x higher [0]. And their migratory trends are not encouraging.
People underestimate the heavy burden of a strong regulatory state. High standards and high costs. All in it the Texas approach looks to be pretty good even if it means you have to be prepared for an emergency. I actually lost power for 24 hours recently so I can sympathise; a widespread outage would be horrific for an unprepared person. But being prepared for emergencies is a much more resilient approach in the long term and better than the quite substantial risk of overregulating.
> EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.
The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis triggered by some of the most stunning displays of regulatory incompetence so far this century. So I would accept that the EU is more regulated but I don't think that is the sort of point that plays well right now.
I would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!
"would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!"
Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.
Electricity in Germany is somewhere in the region of 3x as expensive as in Texas. I'd prefer to have cheap power and a contingency plan for a week or so of grid outage than live with those sort of prices.
I've been keeping an eye on how the situation in Germany seems to be developing [0]. It makes for grim reading.
Could you clearify what is the "grim reading" in your source?
Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell! This is an inconvenience but for me power outage is a huge problem (especially 1 week!).
Energy consumption per capita: Down ~30% from peak & dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
Electricity generation: Down ~25% from peak& dropping. Metric sits at 1970s levels.
A country with results like that cannot be said to have achieved success. It looks like a disaster in the making; this is the sort of result I'd be expecting to see somewhere like North Korea or out of some other backwards tinpot nation. From Germany it is a bit jaw dropping.
> Sure the prices are high in Germany (and this is a problem for industry) but as a private consumers you pay 50 EUR per month instead 16 EUR. Such hell!
On the face of it that is an argument I have a lot of respect for - the problem is it doesn't jive with the figures I'm looking at, or the political rumbling coming out of Europe. If energy consumption is dropping by double digit percentages; then the impacts of those prices changes cannot be minor. They have to be serious enough to cause massively less energy consumption. So I'd say that is a convincing argument that the first order effects are contained but not really persuasive that the crisis is under control. The AfD isn't polling where it is because everyone feels comfortable and prosperous.
I'd rather take Texas' grid than whatever it is the German's are doing for their energy policy. Maybe Texas has a history I don't know about where their ability to produce energy is also collapsing, but it'd have to be awful fail to the extent that the Europeans (especially Germans) have managed over the last decade or two. From what I've seen, the Texas strategy is superior.
> ...and this is a problem for industry...
Also, just to point at this one more time - that industry is a big part of what makes Germany prosperous. You need industry to enjoy an industrial-era living standard. Problems for industry aren't something off in the distance people can ignore.
As a French I agree. In France it is also on a downward trend but there are some differences that makes it a better outlook in my opinion:
- per capita consumption seems to be going back up, thanks to some political work on the energy price and renewed Investment/interest in generation
- per capita generation is going back up and still better than Germany (has been since the 90s)
- France has much less heavy industry and never really relied on them to the same extent has Germany, it also has less peoples, considering France still generate the same amount of electricity or more, it is rather positive.
As a side note, some of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains in tools/processes.
The way Germany got there is by enabling their eco-fascists that clearly are against any kind of progress, related to science or not. They have a mindset right out of the dark ages where any risk taken for a potentially better life is not worth it; in general, they would rather have humans go back the way of the animals (preferably others before them, like it always is with those type of peoples).
Since the 80s they have been fighting nuclear power pushing Germany into expensive but still unreliable renewables that need to be supplemented by heavy use of coal (and energy imports, suddenly France's nuclear seems pretty good when they need it in the winter).
To be clear I am not against renewable, I think they are now a great tool for cheap peak electricity generations to supply some process we couldn't do as cheaply otherwise (like air-conditioning or car battery charging) but they absolutely need to be associated with a reliable energy generation for the hard times to at least meet the baseload demands.
The current numbers make any kind of large-scale battery a ridiculous proposition (without even talking about the costs) and overbuilding renewable is not just costly but still is a no guarantee proposition while requiring absurd level of investments.
Just as an example, in the winter Germany still use almost 40% (39.56 last January) of fossil fuels for their electricity generation.
And that's before talking about heating needs, because Germany always had high electricity prices, very few of their homes use electricity for heat, unlike France wich is pretty much the reverse. What Germany does, is use even more fossil fuel for heating (typically gaz but also fuel) and that's on top of their peaker gaz plant needs for just electricity.
To match just their electricity needs, they would need at least twice their current installed base of wind turbine and it's not even clear they wouldn't have blackouts (at least some hours) if they couldn't rely on neighbor's grid imports.
This costly and unreliable installation base is precisely what got them to those prices and the worst is that they try to politically force everyone into the same nonsense. Until recently where it became clearer to the French that nuclear was clearly not optional considering all the other choices and risk associated (much worse than the nuclear boogeyman) they have dominated EU's political trajectory and enforce some stupid anti-competitive rules, especially against France, to prevent them from winning and dominating with their superior choice.
I really hate Germany for this, they may not have won WW2 technically but with the EU they have very much won in spirit.
Leftists are now confused people don't really want EU anymore even though they are some clear indicators of ideological domination by some that lead to pretty bad outcomes in the long term.
Just the other day my grandma told me about some recipe that she doesn't do as much anymore because electricity being much more expensive, they now are pretty costly to do. It's ridiculous and clearly a regression but as long as everything fits the ideological narrative it's alright, I guess.
Recently I read about how Germany's future looks pretty bad with their industries leaving or becoming uncompetitive because of various factors (energy price being one, immigration another).
But as you can see, they will fight you for this, with all the ideological power something as close to religion as it can be.
> As a side note, some of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains in tools/processes.
Although I note that we seem to be agreeing; none of the lower consumption can be attributed to efficiency gains. Efficiency gains cause consumption to rise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). If efficiency is rising through all this, that means bad energy policy is actually causing even more damage than it superficially appears to.
The EU had an energy crisis because Germany was high on Russian gas, along with most of Central Europe. Thankfully the US took care of that. Southern Europe also has few fossil fuel options if Libya and Algeria decide to align themselves with Russia.
Power costs are the result of private profit taking not electrical regulation. Look at power costs for municipal providers with the same regulatory burden. LADWP customers are paying maybe 16 cents a kilowatt hour.
Houston actually has relatively low population density compared to other metro areas with only 3,842 people per square mile, and across the MSA (Houston is extremely spread out), that number is much lower. (Compare to, for example, Union City, NJ, with 54,138 persons/sq mile.) There are some 7.5 million people spread out across more than 10,000 square miles across the greater Houston area.
Also, the water table is very high, and hurricanes completely flood entire areas, so transformers etc are often completely underwater. It's just not feasible to bury sensitive equipment when the entire area is under six or ten feet of water.
I don't think it's really possible to predict what will become of Texas. One could imagine such a big, resource-rich state finding ways to work collectively for the better of all, though obviously that's naive to the point of nearly being a joke. Still there is a lot going for it in some sense. Politicians may not care about the people, but their beloved businesses also need infrastructure, so at least there's that.
I've lived in Texas my entire life and there are aspects of it that I love, but I do have vague plans to move north once my remaining ties to the state dissolve.
Would you bet your financial success or life outcome on Texas making rational policy leading to potentially more favorable outcomes for its citizens (based on all available evidence)?
Yes. I am also familiar with the technical challenges and cost of improving last mile electrical distribution to withstand hurricane force conditions where burial is not an option (whether because of a high water table or potential surge conditions, where equipment is suspended at a height above ground level on permanent scaffolding or pedestals). It is expensive, not impossible. It is a choice, and there is a cost. It’s cold, hard economics. The politics are whether to spend or not spend, and the outcome of that decision.
> What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.
In terms of wind speed, quite similar. A category 1 hurricane is only 74-95mph winds. This is pretty mild, as far as storms go. I've been through many, many category 1 hurricanes and it's not much of a storm. Things only start getting scary around category 3.
I have several friends who live high in the hills in the Santa Cruz mountains and they regularly see wind speeds in the range of cat 1 hurricanes.
> A 1998 ministerial inquiry criticized both the Auckland Electric Power Board and its privatized successor, which had halved its staff after taking over in October 1993
> The inquiry report also said, "Internal expertise in 110 kV assets was not maintained at a sufficient level"
It's almost as if you put public infrastructure under the control of people who only care about collecting short term rents bad things happen.
Other comment California has underground transmission lines. And yes sometimes they fail. Had a smaller one oops in my old neighborhood in San Francisco a few years ago.
PG&E is spending about $20b to underground 10,000 miles of lines in fire prone areas. Seems like a lot but it's $40/foot. Still that's only 10% of the total.
In other words, politics scales the other way: The more people you have in the same spot using the same resource, the more different ways they can be unhappy with the management of that resource.
The elevation of Houston is _higher_ than the elevation of SF. Yes, there are many hills, and the _max_ elevation is obviously higher, but there are also plenty of low lying areas and areas at sea level.
Hills make a huge difference impeding winds across the land, storm water drains much faster. Has a hurricane ever hit San Francisco? It’s not a real comparison, typhoons in the area, to a direct hurricane.
It’s also extremely expensive to mitigate, maybe it should be done, but the GP was hand waving it all away. Commenter even “disagreed from experience” and then cited a totally different experience.
Houston geography is just so so different from San Francisco, it's a goofy comparison to make. Both are major coastal cities, one being slightly higher than other is not really material, and thats about where the comparison ends. The impact to Houston is a drainage matter, no where for massive quantities of water to go.
Nonetheless, there are no recorded instances of large storm-induced floods in the SFBay area that I'm aware of. Do you know of any?
Fires, earthquakes, heavy rains causing mudslides that have actually killed people: yes. Some very localized flooding around the Russian River happens all the time. The Guadalupe River in San Jose flooded a few years ago. But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
In the Bay Area there's not much development on the coast. There are fancy cliff top homes, but not much at sea level. Even in SF things go uphill from the ocean pretty quickly. A good chunk of central and southern Marin is below sea level (and yes it floods during big storms) but that's well inland.
Nah, I was just pushing back on the notion that Houston is that much “lower” than SF, when it is not. Wild to get downvoted for that factual statement.
I also wondered this. How do you tell the difference between a climate change induced typhoon and the alternative? Maybe its obvious to the down voters, but you have at least two people here you could potentially teach something to.
Demanding the answer for specific storms is like demanding to know whether a smoker's lung cancer was caused by smoking. Maybe?? But we know in aggregate smoking caused an enormous amount of deaths. We can measure the number of smoking-induced deaths, and the number of climate-changed-induced storms.
I understand the concept, but please show me the statistics that show that storms are increasing in quantity or severity on a timescale consistent with anthropogenic warming.
OP said that specific storms are climate induced - there is no way of saying that a storm formed due to climate change when it would not have formed in the absence.
They said a multi year batch of storms was climate change induced. That's significantly more valid than saying a specific normal-size storm is. The dice even out as you add more samples.
I don't want to look for papers right now. Ask them about the claim that "This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's", not me.
My point is that you definitely can prove (or disprove) it. Your claim that it's unprovable on purpose or something is not right.
But that's absurd to think that you can make claims about the climate based off of a few years worth of data. Multidecadal variance is part of the climate system.
Hurricanes in the US are basically flat [1][2][3]. The past thousand years have seen wild swings, but it's due to natural variability [4].
We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.
Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.
The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).
So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.
We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.
The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.
As to your point about it being an urban area:
The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).
I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.