We have politics in Texas, too, you know. The problems that resulted in the grid outage for most of the state in February are far from being resolved, and politics is in there big time.
Just how would you go about making it technically feasible? you cannot separate the technical aspects from the politics when the state is making the decisions.
but it is all solvable with money. there are no great technical issues to be resolved. where there is money to be made off political decisions there will be politics. that is pretty much inescapable.
Not having studied the issue, and not being a grid scale engineer, I will just say scale the single family dwelling off grid solution by a factor of 500 million. That obviously will bring up a bunch of technical issues, which would be interesting to discuss, and is what I gather the OP was asking about.
Maybe ask the people who installed the energy storage that did this today on California's grid.
One problem in Texas was they had a situation that never had happened before. So you fix things so that it won't happen again, right? Then something even worse that has never happened before eventually devastates you again. One thing to have reserves and standby systems, but when those won't work either you still in trouble and that is sort of what happened.
True, but just some modifications at some natural gas stations that maybe isn't just too costly considering what may be gained would possibly at least let some area have rolling blackouts instead of just being down for as long as they were. Of course when political figures are involved nothing is easy to solve. You can have two ideas where either one may at least have some reasonable benefit but they will refuse to agree on anything, hold it all up and nothing really gets done.
Not sure where you have been hiding but emergency backup power systems for hospitals have to pick up the load within 10 seconds of the loss of primary power, so this fast transfer generator technology you are talking about is hardly new or unique. Every hospital in the USA has it and they are readily available. But for the average backup system, this kind of fast start is not needed.
I understand that. I am not advocating anything at all, just pointing out that there is no impediment to having backup capacity as long as it is something reliable like diesel or NG. It is just about money and politics.
Actually it did happen before almost exactly ten years earlier; it just didn't last as long. That one should have been a wakeup call but the powers that be just turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
I doubt anyone took seriously the chance of this kind of this type extreme weather event extending for such a long time. The fact that it happened ten years ago makes the one in a hundred (or thousand) chance of it happening again in one's life time seem so remote as to be negligible.
But you are advocating that only diesel and NG are reliable as backup power sources. You will find a lot of people will disagree with that.
what other backup system can you get online fast enough to do any good?
The calculation of these sorts of recurrence intervals are far more art than science. For something like this temperature excursion, the record length is far too short to really pin this sort of thing down. Longest records in the US are at most 150 years old, and urbanization can change the max/min temperatures you'll see at any particular location.
On top of that, a lot of the records are somewhat suspect due to being manually collected and collated until fairly recently. But, for this kind of weather extreme, it is not real important to note a degree or two of temperature change from the norm.
True, the maximum excursion during the Texas event was -40F below the norm. It's hard to know on sparse data whether you have a normal, long-tail, or other distribution. Of course, now that you've had 2 within 10 years, it's not going to be 1:100. Or maybe it is; probability is not generally intuitive and says nothing about the spacing between any 2 particular events, only what you'll see over the very long haul.
The fact that it happened twice in a decade does not necessarily make it more likely to happen. It is a more or less random event that we have no good way to quantify.
The US had a "hurricane drought" from 2005 to 2017 where no hurricane of Category 3 or higher made landfall. This was the longest quiet interval since records were kept starting in 1851. The previous record holder was 1860 to 1869. Again, as you say, it's pretty much a crap shoot.
Given climate change, for future forecasts it makes sense to weight the more recent behavior more heavily.
