Watching Perseverance landing on Mars, team discussing future ESA orbiter to Mars, NASA rocket picking up samples from the ground and other top-class projects...
...in the other news people literally denying existence of viruses, people living in houses with single-glazed windows, no electricity because libertarianism...
Such disparities never end well in long term.
@kravietz wait, how is libertarianism causing power outages?
@kravietz right... So the federal rules would have made this winter storm not take out all the infrastructure? Or it would have allowed other grids to maybe supply some power when Texas' plants went down? Is libertarianism also to blame for California's rolling blackouts?
Sure, if you have deficit of power form your local sources, then you pull it from the other regions - that's the very point of the grid, isn't it?
Isolating a grid so that "feds don't mess with us" is just as dumb as calling for "totally decentralised power" as proposed by some fans of renewable energy.
> California's rolling blackouts
That's called "whataboutism".
@kravietz I'm just saying you have no evidence that libertarianism has anything to do with the blackouts. You have no evidence that connecting to a greater grid would have reduced the blackouts or their duration. It's complete speculation.
Do those other regions actually have excess capacity to share with Texas given the historic cold weather? Are the local transmission lines still operational enough to distribute it? Would fed messing with it prevented any of this?
Blackout happened because Texas grid made assumptions about max demand that came out to be too low, plus supply was reduced by power plant failures.
For a closed system, that was game over. This is due to the law of conservation of energy.
But since the law is valid for an *isolated system* the only way to game it is to expand the boundary of the system. This is precisely why all countries in the world are now expanding their grids.
Except for Texas, that is.
@kravietz every system is isolated on a big enough scale. On the wider grid scale there was also more demand than supply and power plant issues. Texas itself is larger than most countries of the world.
The problem as you state is that the assumptions the grid was based on was completely eclipsed by the conditions over the last week. Not much you can do about that on this large of a scale. Do you have any sources saying an outside connection would have been able to pick up the slack?
The larger grid, the more *chances* you have to pull some energy from someone who has surplus at given moment. By isolating itself Texas basically *guaranteed* its failure in case of unexpected demand peak.
And I have absolutely no sources for that, I'm watching Perseverence with a bottle of cider and I'm not doing any more free research today.
@kravietz I also watched Perseverance land and I'm all about science. But you attacking libertarians as anti science with the conjecture you are making is just as anti science as you condemn.
Maybe the chances are higher, maybe Texas could have fared better. But you also don't weigh any benefits of lower regulation and if on the whole less regulation is worse for the people of Texas. That's not a very scientific method.
Enjoy your evening.
> don't weigh any benefits of lower regulation
I currently live in a country that allows home owners to legally have fuse boards from 1942 and single-glazed windows in 2021, and I find this "lower regulation" harmful and dumb on so many levels that it hurts.
You have a distorted view of what a "free market economy" is. Price-supply-demand only works under certain assumptions.
So if you do have to heat your house *at all* and you still have to choose between cardboard and energy efficient walls/windows in 2021, and the latter is considered a "luxury", then it certainly *is* a systemic problem, aka a "government one".
Because if you live in a house of energy efficiency of camping tent, 90% of your heating actually heats the air above, and this is hurting everyone. This is the classic concept of "externality".
Market economy doesn't deal with externalities, because it's an idealised model. You deal with externalities specifically with regulation and taxes, which is bringing the external cost back into the market equilibrium.
@kravietz depends on what the expected life of the home is and what climate it's in... In the USA we don't build anything to last more than 30 years or so anymore so the payback of better insulation isn't there for a lot of climates. Also, people pay for square footage and neighborhood more than energy efficiency and that's a social problem, not a government one. I'd love to improve the air sealing and insulation on my house, but in my climate it won't pay off and it won't affect the value.