alt Hacker NewsTexas loses power one time for a week and the redditors will never let it go. Wild how this is still a cringe joke so many years later.
Replies
> Texas loses power one time for a week and the redditors will never let it go. Wild how this is still a cringe joke so many years later.
Texas had the most number of power outages between 2019 and 2023 [1].
It wasn't one time. And it's not a joke. Infrastructure weatherization is a very real overlooked (and expensive) investment that still has not taken place.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116952/documents/...
I'm not sure what is meant by Redditors... I haven't used Reddit in many years.
Admittedly anectodal, but I don't remember any power outage here in Chicago over the last 11 years I lived here, but I was in Texas for work for a few weeks this summer at the NASA balloon base and there were multiple power outages.
Texas' grid was very reliable when I was growing up there. Since deregulation however, it's no longer reliable. It used to be mandated that grid facilities were overbuilt to have some headroom for emergencies. That's no longer true. Now, Texas utilities only maintain the minimum infrastructure needed for normal operations and they have no cushion if something goes wrong. Any CEO of a Texas utility that spends money building overcapacity gets fired by Wall Street.
This was supposed to change after the 2021 crisis, but I haven't seen much evidence that it has.
It's not just the "snowpocalypse". In Houston, for example, there have been multi-day power outages since then, often during hot weather where lack of adequate cooling can become a life-threatening concern. Personally I don't find it any more "cringe" than the weird boasting people like to do about our state.
it was an avoidable catastrophe, not just a minor blip
I still remember the northeast blackout from 2003 too and that was only a part of a day for me
Texan here. Going without power for a week during the 2021 winter black out really, really sucked. It had huge economic consequences.
[dead]
"There have been 263 power outages across Texas since 2019, more than any other state, each lasting an average of 160 minutes and impacting an estimated average of 172,000 Texans, according to an analysis by electricity retailer Payless Power (https://paylesspower.com/blog/blackout-tracker/)"
Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.