txlpo78

> I don't know of a single enterprise customer that doesn't have their data replicated to two datacenters, and then backed up to some other medium (tape or disk-based backup appliance) for anything business critical.

Longtime consultant here with BCP/DR insight into 20+ large F500 companies... I think you would be seriously surprised at how common it is for even enterprise customers to not bother with multi-DC or even offsite backups. And even among the ones that do, many of the ones that are non-cloud-based are so immature at it that I would not put money on their backups being restorable if needed. And this is even more true for your “we’re a startup, we don’t have time to worry about backing up our data!” companies, which are in abundance.

For a small peak, go look at how many people were freaking out about losing their entire business due to the loss of a single OVH data center.

Of course, as a consultant I do naturally skew towards customers that need help with this stuff, so my perspective is probably biased towards the companies that are worse off in this regard. But they’re definitely out there.

Almost certainly not. AFAIK the technology to do street-level imagery from satellites is still mostly only on government spy satellites, and certainly isn’t cheap enough to put on thousands of nearly-disposable sats. The type of imagery you see from Google Maps is taken from airplanes.

Did you misread my comment? I didn’t say this event was due to Mother Nature, and the entire second half is specifically about how the Austin Energy grid is mismanaged and victim to cut corners.

Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.

> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.

I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.

That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.

Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.

My family in the area lost power for more than a day. And as another anecdote, my friends in Lubbock (also not part of ERCOT) were powerless for two days.

I’m in Austin, and while things indeed seemed worse here than either Lubbock or Beaumont, they were still quite bad in those places, too.

For reference, the Laredo, Railroad, and Eagle Pass ties are all connections to Mexico’s power grid. They’ve been at zero most of this week because Mexico is also dealing with major power outages along the border, and so they don’t have any electricity to share.

The North tie connects to the Western US grid in Oklahoma, while the East tie connects to the Eastern US grid near the border with Arkansas/Louisiana. They’ve been fluctuating between 0-600 this week depending on how much power has been available on those grids.

I’m in Austin and I have to agree. The media and especially social media would have you believe that the literal apocalypse happened this week (if you dare, go read r/Austin and witness how many people are having ragefits insisting they are going to actually die if Adler doesn’t personally restore their power ASAP). This situation has been very bad, especially in terms of property damage (broken pipes etc), but it still has been an easier situation than something like a hurricane or the floods in Houston, yet I don’t see r/Houston turn into a harbinger-of-doom support group whenever a hurricane hits.

I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.

> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.

That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.

You asked if extreme cold weather had caused problems in states other than Texas. It did, and I commented so.

But if you want to play “move the goalposts”, I’m not going to bother trying to discuss something with you that you obviously have already made your mind up on. Keep stubbornly believing what you want to believe, I don’t care.

I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding.

That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc).

It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO.

There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.

> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.

Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri all had blackouts this week. The SPP had to stop sharing electricity with the Texas grid because they had no spare capacity due to dealing with their own power emergencies.

The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.

> although the interconnect bandwidth was fully utilized, we need solid data on whether the neighboring states facing similar struggles could spare significantly more capacity. If not, then having more interconnect bandwidth would not have helped much. If they had power to spare, then the interconnects were indeed a problem.

As a data point: the interconnects were not fully utilized, as the Eastern DC tie had to be severed yesterday because power emergencies in the Eastern US meant that grid had no electricity to spare.

The Texas producers all currently exceed the national-level recommendations for winterization. Also AFAIK, the natural gas providers are subject to federal regulations (they are not part of ERCOT, unlike the generating stations that use the gas) and they still froze over, which was a huge contributor to the problem.

Then throw in the fact that power producers all over Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were all struggling with power production too, despite the fact that they are all of course regulated federally by FERC, it doesn’t seem like the national regulations were a magical solution here.

Is it possible that more stringent regulation will help avoid repeats of this in the future? Yes. Would the existing federal regulations have prevented this situation if ERCOT was subject to them? It doesn’t seem so.