Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
The cause of the problem is of course gay sex, trans people using bathrooms and a lack of guns and bibles.
Filthy sodomites asked for it! Also all the steamy hot gay sex is heating up the atmosphere. Steamy hot gay sex that I never fantasize about!
As long as bitcoin farms have power, there is no problems
/s
Vote Republican again, I’m sure they’ll fix it!
This is Houston which consistently votes blue
The Harris County Republican Party criticized CenterPoint in a social media post for its “seemingly lack of preparedness.”
The reason this keeps happening in Texas is republican deregulation though…
Yes. Hurricanes should definitely be regulated harder.
Texas doesn’t regulate their power grid…
It’s why they can’t connect to the rest of the country’s power grid…
I’d say someone from Texas should know that, but if y’all did you wouldn’t keep voting Republican >
Yeah no shit. But even we can’t stop MASSIVE STORMS from knocking down power lines. It has nothing to do with what grid we’re on.
Hmm well Florida seems to do fine with their MASSIVE STORMS, I wonder why?? Hold on, checks notes
Ah, yup, Florida has a decently regulated electric grid (for now anyways) and is connected with the national grid. Imagine that.
Wow, I didn’t know Florida was hurricane proof. I’m pretty sure people lose power when the LINES ARE DOWN in Florida as well.
Do you know what “redundancy” means?
Do you? If power lines get knocked down, they’re ain’t gonna be no electricity. What states have “redundancies?”
You’re part of the problem. No matter what breaks down in a Republican system you people do whatever you can to avoid the reality that Republicans are greedy. And their greed hurts you. But sure, let’s blame nature even though no other state has a problem on this scale, this often.
Bro, you think Republicans can control the hurricanes and I’M part of the problem? Y’all people delusional.
If power lines get knocked down, they’re ain’t gonna be no electricity
Unless the grid has redundancies…
But like, I’m assuming you didn’t mean to use a double negative there?
I dunno man, I don’t think we’re gonna work this out there seems to be communication issues
If route A is down, route B is used.
This is redundancy.
Texas only has route A.
That is the issue. Power cannot come from anywhere else than route A because there is no connection to the national grid, route B.
This doesn’t prevent last leg localized power outages, but it does prevent the widespread grid wide failures Texas regularly experiences.
But you don’t want to hear this, so go buy a diesel generator instead and enjoy being independent.
I already have a generator. And we are literally discussing the last leg here. Our grid is fine.
It sure would be stupid if Texas wasn’t connected to the national grid because that would make solving this problem a lot slower and a lot more expensive.
Sure would be stupid…
Remember this at the next elections, when you will have that incredible urge to not vote or to vote right.
Republicans in Texas focus their voter suppression efforts on Houston since it is the biggest Democratic voting population in the State.
A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas’s separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:
The storm wasn’t projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.
Houston’s tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps. If it were just a one-off event it might be able to be waved away, but a pattern of failure is emerging.
Whether the storm was projected to hit as hard or not doesn’t really matter, tropical storms and hurricanes are not some new event in that area of Texas, yet the state and local governments seem utterly unprepared. It was only a year or two ago that basically the exact same thing happened, and apparently nothing was done about it to shore up their services. It’s an inefficiency of the private sector, they’re not capable of providing vital services because their primary motivation is not reliability and efficiency, it’s profit and cost cutting.
You don’t see this happening in other states with the same frequency. I’ve never had the grid where I am fail, and we get both extreme heat and cold and occasional tropical storms.
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps
Does it? We had the snow storm in 2021 that hit the news, but after that, are you lumping every local outage in Texas you see in the news together and blaming the “Texas grid?” People did the same thing when we had a severe ice storm here in Austin in Feb 2023 that knocked out power for several days. Well Austin has a municipal utility because we have not deregulated here, so Austin Energy was responsible for that one, and the problem was ice and trees. People were all over reddit blaming the “Texas grid” at the time, when the issue was ice and trees in a localized area.
Let me be clear I in no way support deregulation. I grew up in Houston when Houston Lighting & Power was our utility, though, and we had outages back then too, because we experience severe weather really often in Houston, and there are a bunch of trees that knock down power lines.
Are you saying you’ve never lost power to your house? I’m curious where you live where there aren’t pretty widespread outages after a hurricane that brings you several hours of 80mph sustained winds. Anyway my entire point was this outage in Houston has nothing to do with the “Texas grid” or deregulation. You could certainly criticize Centerpoint for not being better prepared to repair the outages, but the outages were going to happen regardless
Ercot literally said a month ago that they were planning rolling blackouts in August. Texas can’t handle itself under projected circumstances, so of course they will be fucked every time a disaster hits.
ERCOT says that every summer, but also that article says there’s a “12% chance” of rolling blackouts, not that they’re planning them. Last summer was our hottest on record, as it was many places, and there were no rolling blackouts. This summer in Texas hasn’t been nearly as hot as it was last year.
Here are similar articles about pretty much everywhere else:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-midwest-danger-rotating-power-blackouts-this-summer-2022-06-03/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-blackout-risks-across-u-s/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/us/storm-blackouts.html
Again, these outages are due to downed power lines, not ERCOT and not generating capacity. Does everyone here really not understand the difference lmao
Yes. We understand that the difference is the lack of redundancy in your grid due entirely to profiteering and cost cutting.
You’re literally the only person who has had anything productive to say here, so when you say “we,” I’m not sure who you’re referring to. Yes, better grid redundancy would mitigate outages. At the same time, I’d like to see any kind of evidence that Houston has poor grid redundancy compared to any other city of comparable density, or that “profiteering and cost cutting” have played a role.
My previous point stands that ERCOT and the Texas Interconnect being independent has absolutely nothing to do with this
Except that the only reason your grid is independent is so they can cut corners on quality and soak you for every penny they can. If they were connected to the rest of the country they’d have to conform to superior codes.
It’s a bigger economic problem than people are talking about. I have a manager who works from Houston. He can’t work right now. Several other coworkers as well.
At some point, employers will have to consider the liability of employing someone in Texas, simply because a power outage could seriously impact them.
A lot of inertia at the scale of the bulk of the petrochemical industry.
I would not hold my breath. Businesses will simply throw technology at the problem until they can’t see it anymore. Was just in a meeting today where the boss was raving about satellite phones solving our connectivity issues.
So Texas and Florida are out?
Florida rebounds really quick after a hurricane. I do have coworkers in Florida, at most they are out for a day or two.
It’s been 4 so far for Houston. And I’m not talking a hurricane which won’t impact most of the state, I’m talking about any power outage across the state.
I meant Florida is out because most housing insurance companies are leaving the state because they’re losing too much money there.
