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That's a likely consequence when you build a plant in a third-world country with a crappy infrastructure

"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is one of three power grids in the USA and is a completely independent system unable to borrow power from other states"

What a disjointed mess, typical American do nothing to avoid spending money.

There was a proposal to join all the grids together to avoid this very thing but it required companies to spend. Why spend when they can pay dividends instead and watch Rome (texas) burn.

Here in the UK we can and do share a grid with France.

There's also the factor of independence from federal control & regulation, apparently decided in the 1930s. I'm assuming decisions in the intervening 80-odd years have been taken to keep it like that, partly out of independence and partly out of money as you suggest.

France and Belgium and Ireland and (soon, I think) Norway... There's pretty much a pan-European grid.

Actually, all of Europe is one grid with all the generators synchronised to the same sine wave.

I cannot tell if your tongue is in your cheek, but IIRC our connection to France is DC* - I don't think we are synchronised - but maybe this has changed recently.

*Yeah I know it could be pure rectified AC and we could lock to that etc etc...

There's actually a great Tom Scott video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bij-JjzCa7o

Borrow the old Indian strategy of self sufficiency, where manufacturing plants all have their own power supplies because of the unreliable grid.

Diesel tends to gel/freeze at very low temperatures so the generators might not work.

Not a clever way of doing it if we're still thinking of transitioning to lower carbon intensity energy sources. Unless you're planning on deploying a small, modular nuclear reactor (apparently there are some in the drawing board)

I spotted this days ago after investigating why none of the SpaceX Starship video feeds were working!

There were over 4M without power at one point yesterday. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas shows this is now less than 3M, but it's night time at the moment and may get worse again.

Not sure why it's taken on long to make the news in the UK.

Because it's ALL ABOUT COVID these days...

Maybe it's not usual in Texas, I guess that such cold weather is more unusual in Athens this week compared to Houston area. Although the Greek utilities seem to have managed to keep their power on.

But in the US, in the 90s, I was in the Bay Area and we used to get regular daytime power cuts from PG&E during the hot months when all the aircon was on. They just accepted it as normal. Has it changed and better now?

"Samsung has shortlisted Austin as the location for a new chip plant, and is seeking big tax cuts as it plays off Texas and other states in an effort to find best place to invest"

Typical bullshit divide-and-conquer that works because there's always at least one (and usually many) idiot that falls for empty corporate promises, just like you always find many idiots ready to fall for empty political promises. That's one of the problems of having tax decided at a municipal/local level.

When the lights go out in the multi-billion chip fab might be the time to think whether avoiding taxes in general and settling in the state with the biggest tax cuts is a good idea after all.

I mean, if we starve the public sector, can we expect the public sector to function?

I'll get my coat, it's cold outside.

With all of those semiconductor manufacturers in Texas, they could try looking at large scale thermoelectrics, even if they won't scale enough torun a chipworks they could still use any temperature difference to produce some useful power.

That's the power reliability rating, it looks....

It's a bit more complicated than you might imagine. Have you seen the sodding weather? It was -23C the other day in North Texas. Most Texan homes are not kitted out for arctic survival and apparently many homes were internally sub-zero if you did not own a log/gas fire.

The power demand has hit a record demand by a considerable margin (10% higher than any other day on record). I work in wind power and had a huge number of tech support queries. Most 'basic' wind turbines will switch off at -10 to -20C (or if the control sensors on the roof freeze over). There are cold-weather turbines that will happily run down to -30C, but honestly I can understand why you would not spend the money in North Texas (expecting a typical low of 5C?). Add in, the general variable of low wind in some areas, that didn't help.

The largest drop in power is from the nuclear/gas thermal power plants. It turns out you need employees and water to run these plants, neither of which are easily available (the roads are frozen, the snow is 10-40cm deep in places) and the rivers and water supplies have frozen. The oil and gas wells have frozen pipes (rock solid) and don't have any electricity to keep gas extraction pumping out of the wells, so even those are shutdown.

As a comparison, at one point they have 45GW of disabled power, enough to power the whole of Britain (easily). Amusingly, they run hourly power auctions, where the prices paid went from ~$50 per unit to the legal maximum $9000 per unit. Ouch.... supply and demand huh?

PS I am not 100% sure HVDC interconnected states is the solution in Texas. Sure - they could do with some 200-300km interconnections as backup, but on either side of the state, is it really practical to build 500-100km power lines to Alabama and Oklahoma?

I think they could do with a moderate-massive extension of battery storage and locally stored hydrogen generation (there is a giant movement towards this in the UK, Denmark and Australia at the moment) and frankly Texas is known as a superpower in the power industry. I suspect there will be a move to move technologies.

If nothing else, it is a real political headache to implement 500km of HVDC lines across mostly private property. The lawsuits and land fees will escalate quickly!

Am I missing something here? They reached out to people with backup generation and asked them to shut down. Why should they if they do what the grid supplier tells them to do with their own backup power? I don't get it.

With their backwards mentality I am not surprised of what is happening. A new part of the "Third World"