Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bark louder, little dog.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Everybody saw this coming.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

The willow is too close to the house.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Infrastructure week. at last.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

No one could have predicted…

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Unfortunately

Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Unfortunately

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… Because that includes the disasters.

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118Comments

  5. 5.

    L85NJGT

    To mix metaphors…
    There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and don’t be the one holding the bag when those chickens come home to roost.

    When a city like College Station is forced to build their own link to the national grid, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong in the utility regulatory environment.

  7. 7.

    Denali

    My 80-year-old sister has been out of power in Austin since early Monday morning. I can’t reach her on the phone today. So worried about her.

  8. 8.

    burnspbesq

    We’ve been lucky so far. Our power comes on and goes off at about two-hour intervals. We’re able to keep phones charged.  We have plenty of food. It looks like we’ll be able to get out by Saturday (if not Friday). But for the average Texan, this is catastrophic.

    It’s possible, but unlikely, that Abbott will pay for this with his job—but whoever would succeed him would likely be worse.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    @L85NJGT

    To mix metaphors…

    “Once in a Blue Moon” from Little Mary Sunshine:

    You’ve made your bed a rolling stone
    And now the shoe won’t fit
    You’ve had your cake and should have known
    You’d have to lay in it
    :)

  11. 11.

    Another Scott

    Heard a headline – “Texas produces more energy than any other state. Why are they having these problems?”

    Annoyed me. (Maybe the issue isn’t gross production!!1)

    It will take decades to integrate Texas with the national grid. And the rest of the country needs work too, to make it more resilient and make it work better with distributed generation and storage (home solar, batteries in vehicles).

    Here’s hoping that Texas voters make good choices going forward…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    burnspbesq

    The El Paso metro area is on the Western grid. There have been no significant outages. You can expect to hear nothing about that from Republicans.

  19. 19.

    Barbara

    How can people get information about where to go or what to do if they have no electricity? I mean, with cellphones they have, hopefully, charged the devices as well as back up power sources, or might be able to do so in a car that they managed to fill up before this happened.  But lots of people probably have no means to make contact with the outside world.

    Seeing that demonizing green energy is the go to defense of Abbott, et al. makes me think nothing will change, because “disasters” are just seen as opportunities to extract more partisan advantage, not problems to be solved through inquiry and reform.

  20. 20.

    Betty Cracker

    Saw Fox News clips on Twitter, and elected TX Republicans like Crenshaw and FN propagandists are blaming this on the Green New Deal, which isn’t a thing now, of course. The infrastructure failure is 100% on Texas Republicans who run the grid, but I fear these liars will successfully convince a majority of the electorate that it’s the fault of do-good socialist hippies.

    This is the latest episode that underscores an enormous threat to democratic government, i.e., lying politicians and TV/social media propagandists creating alternative reality bubbles. I don’t see how self-government survives this development, but I don’t know what the entire solution is either. I hope people who are smarter than me are figuring it out.

  22. 22.

    Another Scott

    @burnspbesq: It’s also much warmer there.  But, yeah, the general point stands.  Someone should do a detailed report on areas outside the ERCOT and those inside that suffered similar weather and the results.

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  23. 23.

    MattF

    @Barbara: Blaming ‘green energy’ for this fiasco is such a brazen lie. I guess I should be grateful they’re not blaming the Rothschilds. Yet.

  30. 30.

    Barbara

    @MattF: ​ Yeah, the winters in MN, Sweden and Canada are hardly balmy and yet they have managed to address turbine freezing through technology upgrades.

  31. 31.

    Barbara

    @Edmund Dantes: ​Now former mayor, but swears he wasn’t running again anyway. Plus, his wife apparently lost her job after she defended his statements, and his whole family is receiving death threats. Which is unfair, I totally agree, because no one should receive death threats, ever, for any reason. Now if only we could make that a generally understood principle along the entire political spectrum.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @MattF

    I guess I should be grateful they’re not blaming the Rothschilds.

    “Why are they refusing to use the Jewish space lasers to warm things up?”

  33. 33.

    MattF

    @Barbara: I can see an argument against making large capital expenditures to insure against very rare events. But making no preparation…

  34. 34.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Baud: Considering how this mess resulted in a spontaneous Blizzard Truther movement in Texas along with attempt to blame windmills, this stuff has to be hitting home if it’s triggering their Cognitive Dissonance.

  35. 35.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @NotMax:Betcha the lights are on at Dubya’s place.

    Oddly his ranch runs on thermal heat, it’s zero carbon, go figure.

  38. 38.

    Nicole

    @Betty Cracker:

    This is the latest episode that underscores an enormous threat to democratic government, i.e., lying politicians and TV/social media propagandists creating alternative reality bubbles.

    Yeah, this is what has me despairing- people are experiencing the real-world effects of years of GOP policies right now, but as long as there is a propaganda outlet to tell them it’s not the fault of the people they vote for, they are content not to put 2 and 2 together to get 4.  I don’t know how one solves this, either.

  41. 41.

    Ten Bears

    Judging by the front page photo, my first guess is put it in four wheel drive.

    But what do I know? Just an old Oregon buckaroo who mid-winter often forgets to take it out, of four wheel drive. Tho with those fat sand tires it wouldn’t surprise me if it were in and still needs a push.

    True story though: Casandra’s grandson. Really.

  44. 44.

    Barbara

    @MattF: Right.  Even critical components of their nuclear generators apparently froze for lack of insulation.  It’s definitely a conundrum that we face in Virginia for things like snow removal.  How much heavy equipment are you going to buy and keep in good repair for conditions that are relatively uncommon and dissipate on their own within 24-48 hours?  I do understand it’s a trade off, but this is a larger scale catastrophe of the kind of thing that has apparently happened in the past, and it affects critical infrastructure that people cannot duplicate or mitigate the consequences of on their own.  I can stay put and not drive if my streets are not plowed.  At least I will be safe.

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    @NotMax:

    Of course the lights are on at W’s place. If nothing else, the Secret Service will have set up his place with generators.  But in general, richer areas have better contracts with the energy providers that guarantee reliability, while poorer areas suffer the brunt when things go bad.  People have already been posting about how downtown areas have all their wasteful lights on even though nobody is there, while poor areas are blacked out.

  46. 46.

    taumaturgo

    @Betty Cracker: but I fear these liars will successfully convince a majority of the electorate that it’s the fault of do-good socialist hippies.

    The demonizing of the Democrats by the GOP is a long ongoing story. What needs to change is the Democrat’s response which is always either meek or lacking, leaving the impression they rather not get involved in the messy issues, including defending their brand. The younger generation of Democrats like Beto is much better at responding to GOP smears and putting them on the defensive.

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    Well, that’s quicker than expected.

    Demolition crews were spotted Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago removing the helipad constructed during Donald Trump’s presidency. Source

  51. 51.

    Bodacious

    Just gives you one more opportunity to hate “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity. ”  Ted Cruz

  52. 52.

    Hildebrand

    We lived in the Rio Grande Valley for 10 good years.  Loved the people, the borderlands, our places of employment.  Hated the state government, the corporatist/libertarian ghouls who we knew would find ways to screw everyone in the state, especially those living in the Valley.

    We all knew that something would hit that would reveal the utter foolishness of all of their regulation slashing and lack of infrastructure spending.  We all got lucky for so long, but it really was just a matter of time.

    My heart is breaking for all of our friends and their families back in Texas.  The worst part?  This was entirely preventable.

  53. 53.

    Feathers

    It really would be lovely if Green New Deal upgrades of the grid and such were targeted to begin in lower income communities first.

    There was a Twitter thread where someone wrote about how the linemen from another state came after Hurricane Ike in 2008 and discovered that their electricity had failed because the components of their transformer still included 1930s era ceramics. Despite the electric grid company being notified, it still hadn’t been upgraded when this person moved years later.

    Another nightmare to come: part of the reason for shutdowns was that the surge prices for natural gas and oil were higher than the electricity companies were willing to pay. Abbott has just signed an order that all surge costs can be passed on to consumers: https://twitter.com/jmontforttx/status/1361703554789031937

    On second thought, weren’t the massive surge costs passed on after the Enron debacle a major part of the chain of events that flipped California blue?

  55. 55.

    Barbara

    @taumaturgo: Yeah.  No matter how hard I try, I still think that the abiding lesson of Trump and everything his election stood for is that a lot of people, including most elected Republican officials, do not think we are all in this together.  They think there is some combination of circumstances under which they can rise and rise and rise even if more and more of us are forced to do with less and less.

  57. 57.

    L85NJGT

    A high voltage DC (HVDC) national grid is the way forward. States legislatures and PUCs have been jamming progress, largely for the dinosaur energy interests. The old coal plant is done if the local utility can pull power from five states away. The economics of wind and solar have been driving the market this way for awhile.

    The green bashing? Maybe recast with national security framing. The Chinese have a significant UHVDC gap over us! Somebody better do something!

  58. 58.

    Betty Cracker

    @taumaturgo: I don’t share your reflexive disdain for Democrats, some of whom fit your description but many of whom do not, including O’Rourke (as you noted). I think the problem is much bigger than substandard brand defense. This fragmented media environment virtually guarantees that a large portion of the electorate won’t hear O’Rourke or Biden or any other Democrat, no matter how vociferously they defend the brand and call out Republicans. In a world where people are suffering the catastrophic consequences of feckless Republican rule, they’re still lining up to elect more of them. It’s a tough nut to crack.

  60. 60.

    SFAW

    @MattF:

    Blaming ‘green energy’ for this fiasco is such a brazen lie. I guess I should be grateful they’re not blaming the Rothschilds. Yet.

    Furture Tucker Carlson rant: “And here’s something even MORE interesting: ‘Green energy’ is an anagram of ‘Rothschilds.’ And also “George Soros.’ Once again, his/their evil is manifest.” [Actually, that probably a Hannity rant, given that he’s the Stupidest Person on TV.]

    And morons like Abbott, Trump, and other RWMFs will lap that shit right up.

  62. 62.

    L85NJGT

    @Ten Bears:

    ?

    I assume RWD. My street has looked like that for two weeks, and nobody is pushing their vehicles.

    They might want to try a couple of bags of play sand in the bed.

  65. 65.

    Geminid

    I wonder what all the Texans participating in the wind power industry think.of Abbott’s bullshit.  I drove I-20 from Atlanta to New Mexico twice a couple years ago, and there were countless wind turbines in West Texas, on ridges overlooking cattle and oil pumps.

    There were very few wind turbines in New Mexico, but that should be changing. In 2018 Michelle Lujan-Griffen won the Governor’s race on a clean energy platform, and the following year  the New Mexico legislature put through clean power legislation. The huge Four Corners coal plant will be closed, and the workers will be assisted in training for other industries. The electrical supply slack will be taken up by wind and solar electricity generation. I hope to get out there again this fall, and I think I’ll see a lot more windmills and solar farms.

  66. 66.

    SFAW

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Tilting injuries.

    OK, but I would think those are relatively minor. I mean, if you tilt too far to the right (in Texas), the worst that can happen is you fall over, right? If you’re on grass, soft landing

    ETA: I was considering writing “He’s no fun, he fell right over,” but thought it would be too obscure a reference.

  72. 72.

    schrodingers_cat

    I have a question for the lawyers of Balloon Juice

    Twitter has banned the Orange person and many white supremacists since the election but in India the BJP blue checks are using Twitter as their Radio Rwanda clearly running afoul of many Twitter guidelines yet Twitter does not ban them.

    Is there a way to make Twitter follow its own guidelines outside the United States using our justice system.

  73. 73.

    LurkerNoLonger

    @SFAW:

    Power failures, cancer — what OTHER bad things are caused by windmills?

    Clog dancing, cookies that are too buttery…

  74. 74.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    I have family who moved to Tx from California because of “taxes”. Now they’re suffering in this dreadful situation. Just one more reason to hate the GQP for their entire fucked up worldview.

  75. 75.

    L85NJGT

    @Feathers:

    ERCOT imports 1% of their power during summer peak, which gives a pretty clear picture as to why they can’t pull from other interconnects. They limited capacity to protect the market, and customers can fuck right off.

    The prof who compared it to the USSR was spot on.

  77. 77.

    Another Scott

    @Barbara: In Chicago, the garbage trucks were also the snow plows.  Things like that can be done to mitigate the cost (to some extent anyway – it makes the garbage trucks more expensive).

    Freak weather events can happen anywhere, and it’s impossible to plan for every contingency.  But if you wall off your power grid to prevent federal regulation, then don’t try to shift the blame when you don’t have enough power when those freak events do happen…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  78. 78.

    taumaturgo

    @Betty Cracker: This fragmented media environment virtually guarantees that a large portion of the electorate won’t hear O’Rourke or Biden or any other Democrat, no matter how vociferously they defend the brand and call out Republicans

    The same media environment you describe applies to the GQP as well, and as far as the evidence shows it has not affected their lying or smear tactics by much, they continue unabated to attack Democrats with almost impunity. Every democrat leader has been under a long barrage of lies and smears, they have seen their personal brands blemished and diminished. Yet their counterattacks or defense -whatever they are- must be labeled at best weak and it is up to the core members of the party to point out the damage these ineffective messaging tactics have caused. Fight Democrats, fight.

  81. 81.

    scav

    Ahhhh-mmaayyyyyy-zing how Texas, Holy Texas, Unmesswithable bootstrap-levitating Texas, was the only state in the Union to really embrace — boots and all of course — wind turbines and green energy.  That map really shows them shine.

    Damn I love that map.

    (Seriously, that linear feature really interests me too.)

  82. 82.

    catclub

    @Feathers: ​
     

    On second thought, weren’t the massive surge costs passed on after the Enron debacle a major part of the chain of events that flipped California blue?

    I would say no. They got grey davis turned out of office for Schwartzenegger.

  84. 84.

    chopper

    @Betty Cracker:

    texas is trying to be that noble conservative guy living in the woods off-grid, but without a generator, firewood, and extra food.

    i mean, if you’re going to avoid connecting your electrical grid to other states so as to dodge “the eebil heavy hand of gummint regulations”, you need to make sure your grid is robust and has backups and redundancies in place. that means making sure the existing fueled plants (oil/gas) have on-site storage in case of fuel disruption, that means having plans to spin up idle plants as quickly as possible.

    texas has done none of those things because they also believe in no taxes. this is 100% on the state of texas and its republican government.

  87. 87.

    Eolirin

    @taumaturgo: You completely missed the point. To be more succinct: It doesn’t matter what defense a Democrat presents when the people being lied to by Republicans never hear it.

  88. 88.

    Kent

    @Another Scott:@Barbara: In Chicago, the garbage trucks were also the snow plows.  Things like that can be done to mitigate the cost (to some extent anyway – it makes the garbage trucks more expensive).

    I don’t think any city in TX has municipal garbage trucks.  When we lived there it was all Waste Management Inc. doing the garbage collection.

  89. 89.

    germy

    There are Republicans sitting in the dark in Texas right now eating canned spaghetti and trying not to freeze to death and they are convinced that somehow “green energy“ is to blame. They have an entirely separate information ecosystem that just feeds them lies all day long. https://t.co/h1NAhOToqq

    — MZS (@mattzollerseitz) February 17, 2021

  90. 90.

    Ramalama

    @germy: My in-laws live in Toronto and experienced no power for maybe 2 weeks in winter. Maybe 5 years ago. It’s a fire hazard, but what saved them were these tea candles in adobe bread pans. In fact my sister-in-law to this day keeps candles and a few clay pots nearby at all times in case she experiences another power outage. It totally worked for her. And for so many of her neighbors. I’m surprised people in Texas aren’t looking at the many youtube videos of Canadians talking about how they stayed warm. But then that would require power to watch videos. Hmm.

  91. 91.

    burnspbesq

    @chopper:

    this is 100% on the state of texas and its republican government.

    Not quite. The original decision to stay out of the jurisdiction of the then-Federal Power Commission was made during the second administration of “Ma” Ferguson, a Democrat. In fact, Texas went 105 years (1874-1979) between Republican governors.

  94. 94.

    Ksmiami

    @Ramalama: I was fortunate enough to have prepped like crazy for the pandemic here so I’m good but most Texans just didn’t and combined with a lack of the right layers and equipment it’s potentially a catastrophic event

  95. 95.

    Ramalama

    @Ksmiami: How are you able to communicate with the known world right now? Do you have solar panels? Did your neighbors think you were nuts for having aforementioned made-up solar panels (unless you actually do have them)?

    You’re right. It’s a dire thing, freezing. There was an immense ice storm in Quebec maybe 20 years ago. People here in Quebec still refer to it. And people here are plenty used to winter. Most if not all the townsfolk here have a wood burning stove or fireplace, in addition to other forms of heat like electric and or gaz.

  97. 97.

    Poe Larity

    “at least we had electricity and water in 2020”

    TX friend who still can’t smell two months after Covid and blames green energy for his frozen pipes.

  99. 99.

    Martin

    @Ramalama: Don’t even need to go to exotic Antartica. Iowa is 3 states up, is more reliant on wind than Texas is, and routinely hits these temps, with snow, ice. They’re fine.

  100. 100.

    Subsole

    @Barbara: Yeah. These people are basically feudalists. Imagine an 18th century plantation owner’s fuckup bastard wastrel offspring married to Chaucer’s clergy and you have a good picture. Made worse, as Churchill noted, by the dim lights of perverted and often only half-grasped science.

  102. 102.

    Subsole

    Also, dedthred I’m sure, but what’s up with that spot in Oregon on the outage map? It looks like we do down here.

  103. 103.

    Subsole

    @Barbara:

    Nah. Fuck him, fuck her, fuck their kids, fuck their kids’ kids too.

    You mouth off to a bunch of freezing, hungry, frightened people, you get what you get. It’s time conservatives have to live in the world they expect everyone else to endure. No more of this ridiculous triple standard.

    I mean, basic common sense should have told him to display a little empathy.

    Then again, it’s Colorado City…

  104. 104.

    Ksmiami

    @Ramalama: I lived outside of Detroit for 5 years and had to walk my husky during the polar vortex- it was a lesson in how the human body isn’t designed for cold. It can be 115 in Redlands, CA and your hands will still work but even with gloves get below 0 and you start losing your ability to function. Suffice to say I have been lucky so far

  106. 106.

    Kelly

    @Subsole: Worst ice storm in maybe 40 years. Usually the freezing rain lasts for one day. This one went for three. Massive number of trees down on thousands of power lines.

  107. 107.

    Gretchen

    My conservative Texas brother was posting on Facebook last week that solar and wind don’t work in the cold. It’s like Fox News knew this was coming and put out the propaganda ahead of time. Now he had to find a friend to stay with, as his home is without power, and he’s convinced it’s because us stupid liberals forced stupid wind turbines on them. If we’d just let them have Keystone and coal he’d be fine.

  110. 110.

    Ken

    @Another Scott: Someone should do a detailed report on areas outside the ERCOT and those inside that suffered similar weather and the results.

    The map in Beto O’Rourke’s tweet seems detailed enough for me.  The outages are pretty much coterminous with the parts of Texas that are under ERCOT.  The northern and western panhandles and a strip along the eastern border are fine, and they belong to the western or eastern interconnects.

    The caption could be “Texas: Infrastructure Rivalling Appalachia’s!”

  111. 111.

    tokyokie

    But wait! There’s more!

     

    Several wastewater treatment plants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area lost power, leading to boil water notices for several hundred thousand people. We still have water, but haven’t had electricity since 3:15 Monday morning and don’t anticipate its return for a while. We were going to decamp to a hotel yesterday, but as we were packing the car to go there, the hotel called and canceled our reservation because it had lost power and water. So now we’re in the house of a friend of the spousal unit’s who’s out of town in a town 20 minutes south of our house.

     

    Although some of the problems with the Texas grid have been explained in other posts and links, another problem is that years ago, the legacy Texas electric utility came up with the idea of spinning its transmission infrastructure into a separate entity (Oncor). The old utility had crews on staff that would drive around neighborhoods looking for potential problems and addressing them (usually by trimming tree branches). Oncor got rid of those guys and now only brings in crews in the wake of a destructive storm. I suspect our outage is related to that, and it will take several days for a crew to find the damage and fix it. But the weather is supposed to get up into the 40s tomorrow, and it looks like we’ve missed the heavy dose of precipitation that we were supposed to get today.

  115. 115.

    Chris T.

    @Other MJS: “Remember when the Texas GOP was taking victory laps while Californians were suffering? I do.“

    Probably this is a dead thread, but I’ll add that Texas is starting to suffer from the exact same problems California had with the deregulation. They did do a better job of writing up their rules, but deregulated systems are inherently vulnerable to these kinds of issues.

    The current crop of problems is caused by the unusual freeze, but will help the unscrupulous find the wedge points in the system.

  117. 117.

    Denali

    Finally heard from my sister’s son. She is fine- her friend stopped by to check and help her recharge her phone. Thank you everyone for your kind thoughts.

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