Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.

I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:

* Not enough employees at the electrical companies

* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically

* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically

* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)

* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's

* Other??

It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.

The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.

New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/05/map-where-wind-reache...

[1] https://underscoresf.com/the-belated-weekend-catch-up-record...

[2] https://houstonlanding.org/these-houston-areas-received-the-...

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.

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.

They have a very healthy attitude.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

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!

No outage though, the crisis was averted, unlike in Texas where the crisis reliably hits every few years.

Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.

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 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.

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 above comment should not be grayed out, yours should.

You are placing your political fantasies above reality on the ground.

It is absolutely factually correct to describe Texas political and electrical administration as - anthropogenic climate change denialist

- corruptly in thrall to fossil fuel, including 'natural' gas plant expansion where the actual grid is the issue

- averse to integrating with the electrical grid from nearby states, as others do, and averse to standards and standards compliance.

The number of people moving to Texas and your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic.

And

> we don't need no regulamazations

Seem at odds with one another.

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'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.

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.

The CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E and the CFO of Centerpoint came from PG&E as well. So you're more right than you know!

(if you want a swimming pool, dig a hole!)

EDIT: ok I looked

it seems there are two kinds of lines - transmission lines and distribution lines.

Distribution lines can be buried, but it might not be good in hurricane prone areas that are prone to flooding.

transmission lines are hard/expensive to bury, since the insulation requirements are technically challenging.

The hurricane seems to have taken out some large transmission lines in addition to distribution lines.

I wonder if maybe redundant lines might be cheaper than buried lines?

> 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.

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...

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.

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.

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.

You are now free to experience the many other surprising and delightful things that this life has to offer.

   But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.

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.

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.

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.

Not to be pedantic, but this is easy to fix. Burying power lines, trimming trees, and all of the other labor are solved problems. By and large, it's not even a particularly hard technical problem. It's a bunch of easy solutions that are expensive and tedious and politically unpopular (nobody wants to spend money or tell their constituents that roads will be closed for utility work).

I'd also note that Hurricane Sandy was category 2 when it hit NYC, which is inarguably far denser than Houston. New York had power back for 95% of customers in 11 days. New Jersey did the same in less than two weeks. Texas could be doing better.

Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.

Some people bring up the storm Ian in 2021. Winter storms are fundamentally different disasters. Cold snaps drive up local electricity demand sharply and this is the kind of thing that can stress the grid.

Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]

Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.

Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-leg_delta

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-wye_transformer

Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.

What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.

I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.

I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.

Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.

Ding ding ding... so are they businesses or not? I didn't comment on whether you could make money as an electrician on them, but to imply the hundreds of thousands of businesses like what you just described above aren't _businesses_ especially considering they are on commercially zoned property is just silly.

I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect.

In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before.

Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg.

That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman.

The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously.

Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg.

Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be.

Because power was out for so long, everyone threw out a ton of food, but there was no trash pickup in some cases for weeks because of staffing shortages and contract disputes, so there was stinky trash and huge swarms of bright blue flies everywhere. At one point, the mayor suggested people could drive their own trash to the transfer station—after it had been sitting out in 95 degree heat for weeks.

There also was no proper street cleaning, which meant streets and sidewalks were full of storm debris, including things like roofing nails. The lines at tire repair shops were wrapping around the block.

Entergy's meter reading and billing also got completely thrown off. I moved shortly after Ida, and it took months to get any bill at all in the new place, and I only got my final bill for the old place this year, almost three years later, no longer living in Louisiana. (They also never actually sent me the bill or turned on my autopay, so I only knew it was time to pay when the power went out).

I think the derecho took out a lot of the problematic trees and branches.

I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.

On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.

There might be costs (checking before construction for example) and it being normal it helps.

Still, it seems like those parts of Europe (outside of Turkey, which isn't really in Europe) don't have large earthquakes, otherwise all those ancient buildings like the Coliseum and Parthenon would have completely collapsed by now.

For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.

If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".

Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.

But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.

However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.

Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.

Hypothetically, of course.

The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.

The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.

The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.

Christchurch gets earthquakes instead of hurricanes: http://db.nzsee.org.nz/SpecialIssue/44(4)0425.pdf

No country is nearly as wealthy as the USA, but the USA can't afford to build a bullet train or replace decrepit bridges that randomly fall down.

https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/64650dded34ec179a83...

Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:

   
     DTW23
     
        December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
        from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
     
     U.S. Geological Survey
     
       
         2.83
         453.97
         feet
       
     
   

Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.

"No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!)

"No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty"

"No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out"

It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones.

We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border

They are not talking about Greater Houston.

For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area)

It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".

It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.

Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".

Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".

Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.

To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.

It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.

Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.

Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.

In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.

The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.

Groundwater (especially for coastal cities) and people drilling holes would be very problematic too.

Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.

If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.

If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.

When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)

There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.

In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.

If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.

I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.

All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.

In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.

~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.

Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.

I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.

Regulations on the initial construction? In other words, plan ahead.

But no, I must have my 'Freeeeedooooommmmm'.

You can't force me to prepare.

But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?

Seems like everyone is ready to argue about how impossible everything is. Shrugs "guess it's impossible, we just have to go on like we've always have".

Bro.

Come up with a plan and a budget for your buried cables and sell it to the people of Texas who will have to pay for it.

I expect things will improve, but it may take some years. As these events become more common and people have to suffer every year, voters are going to get fed up, and Republicans would be foolish to keep up their climate denial stance.

Maybe, but no. Texas has its history of major hurricanes. While maybe not as popular of a target as Florida and New Orleans, but Houston definitely has as much of a bullseye on it as a trailer park in a tornado.

Harvey was predicted well in advance that it was going to be a devastating storm. For days ahead I saw the up to 40" of rain and thought that couldn't possibly be correct. Then it happened. Houston took little action and then acted shocked. Of course, Houston has it's own unique set of problems with their lack of zoning rules plus so many other things without having to make some climate denier argument that's not necessarily wrong but just horribly out of place

Politics is definitely a factor.

It's also election year. The state agencies didn't submit the emergency declaration work before the storm hit like they usually did in years past - this is not their first rodeo, so it can't be explained by ignorance.

Also, Houston is Harris county, so not exactly the governor's or legislature's favorite voting county.

It's not nearly as clear cut as "red = head in sand"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike

Burying lines, especially in historic areas, is incredibly expensive and not necessarily a panacea either, although it helps. Is it worth it?

Realistically, for the millions upon millions of people that live in the greater Houston MSA (and of course except for those who rely on power for healthcare equipment, who really need to invest in a small generator or get to a shelter), it's far more cost effective to simply deal with power outages every decade or two.

During Ike, large parts of Houston, especially to the northeast, were literally underwater, so power wouldn't have helped anyway. The number of utility crews lined up along highways from other states, even from thousands of miles away, in the immediate aftermath of Ike is both inspiring and enlightening, especially when you recognize that they were going into a disaster zone, likely without a nice hotel to go back to or even running water after working a 12 hour shift.

So, no, it's just part of living near the coast in a hurricane-prone area. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.

We have to be careful about what is meant by “these events”.

According to the sources I was able to find [1,2], sea level rise (SLR) is perhaps the dominant driver for the increasing damages from tropical cyclones (TCs). Models show some increase (I’m not finding any support for 2x or 3x though!) in the number of high-intensity TCs, and TC intensification is expected to be more rapid.

But the underlying SLR will make even smaller TCs more consequential - even if the number of storms of a given intensity does not change.

[1] specifically says this. And if you look at the consensus report [2], they spend most of their time discussing SLR, in effect as an amplifier for all the trouble a TC can cause. Only in one sentence in a very long discussion do they claim that TCs are themselves worsening, and the statement is quite nuanced:

“For example, hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly and decaying more slowly, leading to stronger storms extending farther inland with heavier rainfall and higher storm surges…”

So if you interpret “these events” as “high dollar damage TCs”, you are correct. But not in the raw number of TCs of a given intensity.

And you are right that the situation is quite dire already:

“Annual frequencies of both minor and moderate coastal flooding increased by a factor of 2–3 along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines between 1990 and 2020” [2]

The same source says models predict a 5-10x increase in flood events by 2100, which is truly staggering. The recommendation of the GP commenter (“If you don't like it, move somewhere else”) seems to be poorly informed about how important adaptation will be.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/a-force-of-nat...

[2] https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/, and expand out “key message 1”.

So it’s just a matter of time.

Also, looking at your source, I see 2 tropical cyclones between 1900-1950, 3 between 1950-2000, and then 8 in the 24 years since. To me that looks like an increase in tropical cyclones over time.

A more rational approach would be to look at comparable cities and see how they cope with big storms, whatever the storms' cat numbers. My guess is, no matter what comparables you pick, Houston comes out on the bottom.

Maybe it IS deregulation! You can be in favor of it in general, and still admit, "OK, maybe in this instance it didn't work." That doesn't mean you're giving free rein to the people in favor of the government regulating everything.

That would be a lot of research, for sure.

I believe that's a statement Houstonians can get behind enthusiastically.

(Although PG&E is also doing well in this race to the bottom".

without wireless power transmission I'm not sure what people want.

Where do you put lines that can't be buried or blown over?

In the past they've never had a cat 5. The last cat 5 was Carla in 1961. The last cat 3 was Alicia in 1983. The last cat 2 was Alicia in 2008 (although that was actually east of Houston and just hit Houston with its weaker winds).

Climate change should make such storms more likely to form, but it should also change ocean and air current patterns which could affect the chances they make it to Houston.

The list I got those from noted that in 1961 air conditioning was still novel, which makes me curious. How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning?

The average July temperature in Houston nowadays is 4.2℉ (2.3℃) higher than it was in 1970, and climate change tends to cause more extremes, so I'd guess that the highs are also higher and extreme days more common, so maybe AC has become more of a necessity nowadays?

Wealthier people built big houses with lots of thermal mass and tall ceilings while poorer people lived in shotgun houses with aligned doors and porches that created constant airflow.

There's a reason a lot of southwestern cities like Phoenix started booming in population when AC became more readily available.

Arable land that isn't habitable for weeks or months out of the year wasn't terribly valuable or sought out.

We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)

In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.

Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.

(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)

if you were there during beryl you know the winds were strong enough to take trees out yes? trust me houston is not a stranger to hurricanes we all went through a cat 4 harvey years back. which well funnily enough didnt have any huge power problems. more so a house and car totally flooded problem. or 10in of water in the house for weeks problem. mold problem.

tropical storm ike before that took out power for weeks causing $30b in damages in the states

wish people would put their energy into helping or something instead of just thinking about their own agenda. or talking crap i dont know i wouldnt wish this on anyone its hell

_just_. The definition of "just a cat 1" is winds from 75 to 95 miles per hour. There is some debate over whether it picked up to cat 2 levels just before it made landfall and reweakened to cat 1.

> Other??

Political corruption preventing elected officials from actually enforcing any laws or authority over Centerpoint.

I don't think anyone could argue that Quebec has a deregulated power grid, it's the complete opposite in fact. Power generation, distribution, and last mile connections are all nationalized.

An entirely different energy market model (MISO/Entergy) was also heavily impacted. The Woodlands, Conroe, et. al. are on a completely different grid. I don't get to pick a "retail electricity provider" and I live 20 minutes from people who can. Doesn't seem to matter.

All markets hit by Beryl are approximately the same degree of screwed, regardless of any specific underlying ideologies.

Between this and the ice storm s couple years ago Texas has shown itself incapable of utility grade service.

In general I think the disaster resilience afforded by home solar is simply not valued enough by subsidies and incentives policies.

Texas is a much richer economy than where I live, so I see no reason why it couldn't be a requirement, at least for single family homes.

If so that seems like a pretty substantial subsidy to me, the government is covering around 63% of the total cost.

And then hail punches through your solar panels and you have to pay for that.

If there were a cheap, easy solution, people would have done it already.

Some who didn't have hail damage are now having difficulty getting other roof damage repaired because in order for their warranty to be valid they need certain people to remove the panels before other roof work can be done. But those people are massively backed up by all the other people needing panels removed/reinstalled/replaced.