Texas' outage had a lot more preventable things happen then what was mentioned here. The regulators complete negligence with the natural gas operators was the real problem. They've known for years they needed to winterize their valves and they never did.
Truth. I was amazed at how off the mark this video was about what happened in TX in Feb. I'm in Austin, and the info coming out here is completely different.
Yep. The Texas natural gas gathering, processing and distribution system lacks very simple, old-tech winterization upgrades that are standard in other places with similar climate. Plus, Texas actually had this exact same type of failure over 10 years ago, and ignored these exact types of upgrade recommendations from the commission back then, with predictable results later on. So Texans ended up paying more than 10 times as much in economic damage as the upgrades would have cost in the first place. And the preventable deaths. And still have no upgrades today, I bet. Same thing with wind turbines. Automatic lube oil heaters (and other tech) are commonly used to keep them moving in cold weather everywhere else, even Alaska. Just needs somebody in charge who can make a rational decision about critical infrastructure spending.
The power company in my town in Texas knew that the equipment would fail but did nothing, right after all the bs passed, all the higher ups for the company reassigned because I guess they didn't want to deal with all the dead bodies.
To clarify : in Sweden it's also cold -15F and the turbines have no problems, WY ? Because they are upgraded with heating elements in the blades so if they are iced upp the heating element warm up the blades for a short while and the ice is gone and starting up again
This entire video is just deflection from the fundamental root of the problem in the first place. America has crumbling infrastructure, and an abject refusal to invest on it as the state has failed.
Yeah I live in the Midwest part of the USA where it gets down to -50F. We too have a lot of wind turbines that thaw themselves off. I've never experienced a power outage due to it being cold. Most of the time my power goes out (maybe once every few years) is due to a tornado coming through and taking out a power line. Texas however rarely ever gets to 32F (0C). They took a risk and didn't prepare it for cold temperatures because it was likely deemed a risk they were willing to take.
@@HashtagBirdyy They’ve had hordes of inspectors and experts telling them flat out that they must start winterizing their power infrastructure, and hardening it against other extreme weather events. Thing is, there’s a ton of power companies in TX (competition you see), and they’re all loosely regulated by design. TX govt ignored all evidence presented to them that showed climate change = harsher storms of all kinds and rapidly expanding populations + unregulated power companies + refusal to invest = massive disasters one after another. They say their hands are tied (leaving out that they did that themselves), and have no way to force power companies to provide better and more reliable service. TX power companies are squeezing more and more people onto old infrastructure in pursuit of money - when it causes deaths and fails at critical moments…they have no reason to care. They already have their money, and they have zero incentive to correct issues with their equipment because there are no consequences for leaving the situation as-is. TX had major winter storms twice in the last decade iirc, and they’ve been made aware that this will become more common, which anyone born down south in that area can confirm. North Louisiana used to get the occasional ice storm when I was little, but it was 5 or 6 years between them. That ain’t the case these days. Tl;dr Don’t make excuses for TX. They’re perfectly aware that without grid infrastructure upgrades, the grid will fail more and more often, and will lead to ever increasing death tolls in both the winter and summer. (Fun fact: TX lost a pretty big chunk of power…because the water in the cooling pipes feeding 2 nuclear stations froze. So yeah - this situation was far more forked than it first seemed.)
@@Hanyousan1661 lol I'm not making any sort of excuse... I literally say they took a risk and didn't prepare.... Meaning they knew there was the risk of this happening. Obviously money speaks and that's why they decided to take the risk. Idk how you read my post and thought I was sticking up for the power companies in Texas.
I lived in Germany for a few years and was surprised to find that power outages were an unknown concept. Rolling blackouts were just part of life growing up in California. (much of what I remember turned out to be caused by illegal market manipulation which was eventually criminally prosecuted, but there's also still the infrastructure problems mentioned in this video.)
Well, I wouldn't say it's an unknown concept. But usually it's just a neighbourhood that looses power because something went bang in the local substation or an excavator tore through the cable. And very rarely do we have large-scale longer duration outages like after the Münsterländer Schneechaos in 2005, when several old high voltage masts, that had been due for replacement, gave in and just flopped over.
It was never "too cold for windmills", he was too cold for the fun winterized windmills. Even though 10 years ago the same sort of frost happened, the power providers refused to put heaters on their fuel supplies and their windmills. They simply refused to winterize any part of their grid . Meanwhile there are windmills working in Antarctica where it's much colder than it got in Texas. Windmills do great in the cold. It's just poorly designed systems always lead towards failure.
Windmills are used for grinding wheat into flour. Wind Turbines are used to produce electricity. Trump was too dumb to understand this. Please don't go down the same route.
@@gerardflynn3899 :: wind turbine is a subclass of windmill. English is a living language and no one cares about this difference. Except apparently you I guess?
to clarify: it was too cold for wind turbines to function because they cheaped out when purchasing them. cold-climate turbines are very much a thing. same with all the other failures in Texas: they were all easily preventable
It's not "cheaping out" by not buying cold climate turbines for a location that is usually never very cold. It was preventable with hindsight yes, but spending a lot of extra money would not have been a smart decision at the time.
@@steelybojangles Texas has plenty of historic cold snaps, as does everywhere. the private firms involved in the Texas grid decided they'd rather save a few pennies than protect against the inevitable "100 year storm". corporations will do anything to save a few bucks as long as the decision makers think they won't still be on the payroll by the time things go sideways
@@steelybojangles actually youre really wrong here so dont get too defensive, texas was warned multiple times that if they faced another blizzard like the light one they experienced in 2010, it would be catastrophic and preventable. texas said nah, thats government overreach, the free market will decide if texas needs to winterize. thats texan for "no we are going to cheap out on purpose."
@@SeanLinsley As far as I know the main problem in Texas was not with the turbines. In very cold conditions ice builds up on the turbine blades, causing the efficiency to drop and also creating hazards if the ice flies off the blades. Normally they just turn the turbines "off" during the cold snap or storm until the conditions improve. The main problem was that the natural gas in the old uninsulated gas pipework froze, meaning the gas power plants that would normally have taken up the slack when the turbines were off could not operate, plus wind and snow damage to to power lines, plus extra demand from AC, plus no out if state connections ect. ect. all contributed to the huge cluster f**k that resulted in people freezing to death. I feel like blaming it on the wind turbines was mis-direction to make it a political issue rather than a multi-layered, multi-decade mis-management problem.
Growing up in Pennsylvania in the 90's I remember constantly seeing power poles with ceramic insulation caps all the time. Those poles were probably close to 100 years old at the time.
And the solar panels should have been fitted with emergency heaters that would have melted the snow, or particularly kept it from accumulating in the first place . The text is blackout was holy foreseeable but human life was cheaper than corporate profits at the various power providers.
I feel part of the high cost of upgrading the grid is due to the decades of general neglect, politicians 'borrowing' funding for other projects, and now the sticker shock is making a lot of politicians balk, while either not realizing or not wanting to admit that their actions and the actions of their predecessors led up to this.
No the problem is the electric companies that own and maintain the lines are private companies and of course they will cheap out on upgrading lines if they can afford to put it off for 10-20 or more years when they still function. There is no government involved with the power lines.
@@SilvaDreams it was a deliberate model change. The old system was a regulated Monopoly where the cost of electricity was whatever costs they could justify (fuel, construction, administration, extra transmission lines that weren't actually needed) plus a guaranteed x% profit (15% comes to mind but not sure). They had several market failures in the ideal of cheapest possible electricity the only one i can name off the top of my head is "gold plating" where the monopoly is incentivized to plate the lines in gold to drive up costs to make more profit. Around the 80's and 90's a move to liberalize or deregulate the industry was made, now the lines are owned separate from generation, so that the generators can sell electricity at a competitive market/auction process (the all inform the ISO [independent system operator] of their cost to produce the next MW of power and the ISO then dispatches requests to change production to the various generation plants). The company that owns the lines is now paid a fee for usage of their lines as the middleman between the generation and the distribution utility who then sells to you. Trust me, the fact that everything is owned by private companies means that things are actually efficient, go to the DMV and tell me thats how you want your electricity managed. But the government is still highly involved with setting all the rules and regulations about stuff, they just aren't setting the price of electricity now, the laws of economics are. One of the rules of economics is that you don't want to overbuild as that is wasteful, but eventually you have to build another 400mile transmission line or upgrade some lines in a right of way which is very expensive but can then make money. Also you know what companies don't do when there is a black out, Make Money, its literally the worst thing that can happen to a power company because it means something expensive just broke, and they can't sell their only product, and suddenly everyone is paying attention to them because the modern world needs electricity to function. Source: I'm an Electrical Engineer
Truth. The United States is just a third world country with (still) a lot of spending power relatively speaking. Of course every year most Americans are only getting poorer so it's a matter of time we join with the rest of Central and South America in their league of failing states. It's as corrupt as anywhere else in the Americas, sans Canada, where all these problems only compound over time thanks to a government being continually paralyzed to do anything about it. A lot of it due to greedy and short-sighted politicians who only want to keep creating drama and collect checks from wealthy donors by balking at anything that would improve everyone's lives because it's the only thing giving them a career. Try living in Texas for a while, it's nothing but a giant freaking dump and too many people there seem to enjoy wallowing in it.
The cost is always high. However, America is the wealthiest country on the face of the planet. More importantly, the cost to the economy from blackouts (and associated effects) is even higher.
It wasn't too cold for wind turbines; it was too cold for the wind turbines that Texas hadn't bothered to winterize. Wind power works fine, year around, in extremely cold states e.g. Minnesota.
They pulled the punches hard here, to the point where I would say they basically misrepresented the Texas situation altogether in favor of the power companies. It also seems like they didn't quite explain just how much less reliable the u.s. grid is compared to European grid in ways humans really understand (15 minutes per year vs. 5 hours per year may be true but most people just don't really understand the lived experience there). I'm not saying the video was terrible or anything, this was great actually (aside from the Texas coverage but I've seen worse from more professional outlets). I just feel like it could have been a bit better.
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat I don't know .. if you read the other comments; people got exactly that from this video. US grid is not only less reliable, it's less well maintained, not future planned, politicised, and segregated. The rich get their power, the others have to live with it. The comparrison should have been with the war machine though. Cut some of that and put it into infrastructure and you'd cure all these problems.
I live in Austria. Depending on the region, parts of my country are very prone to floods and snow. However I can't remember if we ever had a major blackout. It is possible that a blackout happens due to extreme weather but that's not really common. The last real blackout I remember was around 10 years ago and I don't know if more places were affected other my hometown. It lasted around an hour, nothing too special.
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People? Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy, and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
@@ClickLikeAndSubscribe Canadian here, and we're probably more variable than the US (-20*C winter to 40*C summer). And our grid is comparable to Europe, and 99% of our outages are extreme weather, or squirrels taking out a neighbourhood for an hour or two. We definitely NEED to be weatherproofed or else our grid would die every winter. But if we can build our side of the North American grid so well what's stopping the US?
Too cold for wind turbines to function? Then how do countries like Sweden and Denmark get so much of their power from wind? It's colder for longer there. No, it wasn't too cold for wind-- they just didn't winterize the equipment. And in shutting off power to homes, they lost access to solar as well.
I used to live near wind turbines in northern Germany. 13 of them eventually. I haven't seen any dead birds near the turbines on my daily walk with the dogs. Could be that there were some but I didn't see any (other than near streets and in the village). AND they ran as much in the winter as they did in summer. They only stood still in harsh storms and when there was already enough voltage in the grid, for 20 years with little maintenance downtime.
Your description of the European grid doesn't quite describe the reliability. Let's put it like this. In my 33 year long life I remember all 6 times we had a power outage. Because they are so rare and I can't remember ever having a brown-out
Another German here. I can definitely remember some black outs, most have been a few minutes, two or three an hour and I think one a few hours but that was caused by lightning strike in the neighborhood. But per year I would say it was about one or two.
It's important to remember that averages are being described. I'm sure that most Germans lose power for 0 minutes per year but the long tail includes an eighth of the country with 2 hours in a year or something extreme like that.
@@o76923 Right like my suburb in the US almost never a power loss but then you have hurricanes in the south east, "tornado alley" and California fire zones where people may lose power for days or even weeks. Which of course skews the average. Thinking about it is there any part of Germany that has regular extreme weather events like parts of the US. I really wouldn't want to live in the South East hurricane zones and unless climate change messes it up we don't get the worst tornadic storms. We did have 100km/h winds last night near me and some areas of the mid-west saw 120+ last night which is hurricane force. Also 20 tornados reported. An observation site in Colorado recorded a 172 km/h gust. Kansas saw 160km/h (100 MPH) winds. 400K homes without power as of latest report. So I don't think we're talking apples to apples here in comparisons.
It's genuinely depressing that we know what we need to do but no one is going to do it because updating the power grid won't make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful. I live in an area that loses power for what must be a total of a quarter of the year. We just got our power back on today, actually, after 30 hours. And that's a relatively short power outage for us.
But we totally need that money for the military! I mean, if we don't spend more than the next three countries _combined,_ do we really have enough money for the military? I mean, it's not like we can take some of the money being dumped into research and expensive machinery and use that to pay our soldiers. /s
Military is typically a federal investment. Electrical infrastructure is mostly handled through a combination of municipal, state, and regional agencies. The federal government does throw some money at it and technically oversees multi-state regional regulatory agencies but it's really not in their wheelhouse anymore. I mean, I'm not a fan of our military budget either but that's not really connected to the problem here. More local governments opting for privatization then deregulation is a much better explanation.
I was actually born during the 2003 massive blackout, my mother always told me about how right before I was "free", all the lights had just shut off before coming back on from a back up generator and I had also been quiet and looked to be asleep still. They eventually got me to start bawling and reacting but my mom has an actual picture where you can see, in the window behind her, the whole area just completely black and only able too see far off lights from people using generators.
I’m curious how Canada’s blackouts per hour compares to the US amount. Since we’re the same grid, but don’t seem to be struggling with rolling blackouts as much.
I’ve worked in every corner of the industry (generation, transmission, and distribution) and currently serve as the control room supervisor for one of the largest electric utilities in the US/world. Whenever I see a video trying to explain the grid (or more specifically, its failures), I cringe. So it was a very pleasant surprise that this video was remarkably accurate - albeit intentionally simplistic. Well done to the team that put this together.
@@dimmudimmu8512 In terms of knife switches those are manual but they are connected to relays which watch the line current and voltage and when something goes out of its set parameters it trip a breaker then trys closing in 1-3 times then will remain open till a technician goes and fixes the issue and resets the trip
@@JoyGoodchild I did, but it was on behalf of America. I worked on reactor plants in Japan from 08-13 and was there during the meltdown (though not at the actual meltdown site, obviously).
I’m disagreeing with you there. I find that a show like this needs to be very precise on their words because the misinformation will be spread. I kept saying “wrong” throughout the first half of the video.
I live in a part of the U.S. where now due to the wild fires, which several have been because of the powerlines, they will shut off power to our area for a minimum of 12 hour or the longest so far being 4 days. So yes I would really like for them to bit the damn bullet and start upgrading everything. Like half my town burnt down 6 years ago and they just put back the same old stuff 🙃.
I used to live in France before moving to the US, never had a blackout in 20 years living there. Got minimum 2 each year in the US. France uses reliable nuclear power generation and buried lines.
I live in France, I don't think I've ever experienced a blackout here in my 24 years of life and my house has a buried powerline. But not all the country is the same, there are still aerial powerlines (my grandparents have one for example, and they live about 5 kms away from me) and they can still fail. But usually they fail when extreme weather is here, like floods, big storms or heavy snow falls down, weighing the cables and breaking them
Yeah, you French people are smart for using nuclear power. Here in Germany the tides may be slightly turning, partly because of videos of Kurzgesagt and because of the high energy prices, but politicians and a lot of other people as well still cling to the nuclear phase out next year. We have 6 plants still running, but in a few weeks we'll shut off the 3 smaller ones, and then the rest in summer 2022.
Swede here, i've experienced maybe 4 blackouts in my life? But that's not power being down for days on end, merely power cutting out for a few hours or *at most* a day, before they fix whatever broke. And it mostly happens on the countryside where there are power lines that can be blown down, in the city a power outage is extremely rare.
I believe 70% of France's electricity is generated by Nuclear and the remainder is generated by Hydro. France can generate more electricity than they need so they sell and distribute the excess electricity to other parts of Europe. It's rather ironic that here in Australia we are one of the largest producers and exporters of Uranium, and yet we have no Nuclear electricity generators due to political pressure from Environmentalists. I must say though that I wouldn't want to be any where near one of those Nuclear generators when they melt down.
@@BLKwong 70% is about right, I think it's between 70 and 75%. And tbh, I live about 50 kms away from a nuclear power plant and I'm not really worried about it, I even visited it once
2:03 Major factual error here. While the US historically was dependent on coal, today it represents only 20% of generation nationally. Natural gas is the primary source at the moment, and depending on the time of year, nuclear or coal are second.
Frustrating that many people blame "green" energy like wind and solar power generation for part of the failure, since it was too cold and ice covered to work. But I live in Canada where our wind and solar work just fine in the winter. The U.S. grid was just so poorly managed and its managers ignored warnings that they didn't account for this inevitability. It wasn't wind and solar's fault, those failures were preventable.
Canada has a higher fraction of reliable hydropower than the USA. Realistically, solar is so ineffective in Canada and has such a small penetration relative to hydropower, you'd never notice if it wasn't working or not. But you are right that the U.S. grid is poorly managed. The regulatory framework combined with anti-nuclear and anti-power line interests and pro wind activists has resulted in a fragile system.
I realize as a science communication channel you need to pick and choose how much detail to go into, and avoid political issues. However that being said, 'it was to cold for the wind turbines' is the bs put forward by the Texas government. Wind turbines can and do run in much harsher conditions. The failure was solely because they didn't see the need to winterize their equipment, and so didn't spend the money to do it.
Its a shame there are absolutely no wind farms in canada and alaska because its just too cold for things to spin up there (this is derisive sarcasm, there are tons of wind farms in the cold north, texas is just run by jokerfied idiots.)
Texas faught tooth and nail in the courts to not winterize their equipment. The massive blackouts where not a problom they were literally the desired result. They decided a couple million was far to high a price to pay and billions from massive blackouts was a far cheaper and more desirable outcome.
Texans like myself don’t have any more involvement with the electrical grid than you do with the word FOUGHT. We normally have 2 months of “cold” weather, why is everyone being such assholes?
@@Hanyousan1661 since Texas lost power ND and SD was sending all the power they could possibly make and we were running our system on 52hz normal operating is 60hz if it went down 1hz we would have lost all power and been in worse shape than Texas. Everything is way more complicated than everyone thinks and this video did a decent job at it but not perfect.
Just a reminder that there's Wind Turbines in use in Antarctica. When properly winterized they have no problem functioning in the coldest climates on this planet.
Great point. Why did the political-economic system present in Texas result in the decision not to winterize the turbines in Texas and not provide redundancy and resilience to make a reliable design for a not-that-extraordinary storm?
No mention of energy storage? Batteries can stabilize the grid, thereby preventing rolling blackouts. And when a blackout occurs, they can jump in within milliseconds to cover the demand seamlessly for a few hours. They are easier distributable than gas peaker plants, are much more ecologically friendly (even after accounting for their production), don't impede local air quality, are less prone to failure since they don't have any moving parts, react much faster, and require less maintenance. Nowadays they are even becoming cheaper to build.
My power went out three times last Summer, all overnight for 6-12 hours. It was the worst, had to throw out everything in the freezer every time, couldn't sleep due to the heat. Really disappointed in how little America cares about improving its infrastructure.
Wow, 6 hours and you are throwing away food? Over here in Ghana, power cuts are an almost daily occurrence and we don't just throw away frozen food because it thawed out "slightly". Maybe your freezers don't operate at the coldest possible temps or something. I'm just really struggling to understand why food gets thrown out so quickly.
@@Grauenwolf My freezer is really awful, anything I buy is already freezer burnt within two weeks or so, so I've no doubt something is wrong with that freezer.
"The largest machine on Earth", no, ma'am, that's not the three US grids but the one European grid that serves well over two times the amount of people than these three combined: from North Africa to Scandinavia and from Portugal to Anatolia - and it serves us better, by the way.
I just did a fact check, Ricky: Europe isn't on Mars. Ergo, a claim to the largest "on Earth" means we must consider Europe in that claim... So we made this video concern them after all.
“The average customer loses power about once or twice a year” unless you’re me (: I had my power go out something like 11-15 times in a single day because all of the transformers kept blowing up shortly after they were replaced. My whole neighborhood had to essentially be re-wired
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People? Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy, and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
This video came out at a funny time for me in that my town has been going through a pretty bad storm and multiple of my friends have told they’ve lost power just recently
As a Canadian, watching the Texas power outage, yall really need to fix your infrastructure. I live in a place that gets just as hot as Texsa in the summer and about -20c in the winter, if we can design our grid to handle more then 100c in temperature change throughout the year you guys sure can. Plus BTW our windmills run at -20c just fine. No excuses Mr. Abott
PBS Weathered just did a video on this, too. I commented on theirs, too, but I was "lucky" enough to experience both the 2003 Northeast Blackout and the Winter Storm in Central Texas. Both felt apocalyptic - I clearly remember the headline photos from 2003 of NYC in gridlock and people walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge. And I have no reason to believe that Texas is ready for the winter storm to happen again, which it will, because climate change. We've done nothing to fix or update our grid, and there's more weight on it now with new crypto mining operations and a new Samsung factory. It's really frustrating.
These storms aren't caused by "climate change" they're a regular occurrence happening around 1 every two decades sometimes more like they in the 70s and 80s and this past 20 years with the outage in 2011 and 2021. It's nothing new for Texas. Even the tornadoes I expected this year weren't as bad as expected yes I anticipated storms to be a talking point this year and I was right, but they were less extreme than they could've been. They're usually more extreme during colder than normal fall and winter seasons in the west with warmer tropical water along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico keeping air in the South and East coasts warmer driving more severe tornadoes. La Niña oceanic patterns (which are colder) help make these storms worse. We're experiencing the typical weather events driven by a weak La Niña oceanic pattern.
There was a huge reform to the NE grid regulation after the blackout. After that, the same company couldn't own transmission as well as generation. The generation company has to sell it's electricity on the market to the transmission company to make everything transparent. Texas is Texas.
maybe only using profit as a motive and worrying about how much it costs, instead of doing it because it needs to be done, is the real issue and what's really holding it back. The US has the money to address these issues. Those in power simply keep choosing not to do it.
That is spot on the real issue, why spend the money now when they can just wait 30 years or so till they are forced to replace failed lines. That is 30 years of profit without cost for the power companies.
It's mind boggling to me that the "new world" has far more antiquated electrical systems and procedures and bureaucracy than we do in the "old world"...
Yet your Germany shut down safe nuclear reactors abruptly to get Greens to support Merkel. France did great in the last generation of nuclear reactors, but is stumbling now...
Nulear waste will outlive us all and we have no idea how to deal with it. Were to put it? Nothing currently can neutralize its radioactivity but time. Those barrels will not hold for tens of thousand of yeara. Neither will any communication equipment to even warn from the danger. Uranium itselfe is not safe to mine and handle for the people and enviornment, its not renewable and a potential weapon. The focus must lay on reneables, and hydrogen. We burn to much coal as of now, we will fix that!
@@kleinshui9082 We actually have several obvious strategies on how to deal with nuclear waste: Underground isolation, disposal into subduction zones, fast breeder reactors, and molten salt reactors using thorium cycles. Disposal is primarily a problem of ignorance and failure to be quantitative in risk assessment.
@@richdobbs6595 yeah whenever people say nuclear is unsafe because [lists issues that affect very old reactors, and ones that exploded due to negligence], I say "don't drive cars! The first cars ever made were very dangerous, and even today you could die if you make no attempt at avoiding obstacles!" Also often the same people promoting guns, like do they forget that they just said "it's only dangerous if you misuse it"
On top of the fact that, including nuclear meltdowns, nuclear has been shown to be significantly less deadly than any fossil fuel, each fossil fuel having over 100 times as many deaths per kilowatt hour.
Subjects like this that analyze multiple factors and how they interact are super interesting, especially when the subject is about something so practical.
The whole US grid is an anomaly, not just the Texan one. At least for a developed country. Money is the main reason. No redundancy, at its limits even during normal operation, old age. Of course over a long period this costs a lot. But why should the energy company care? It's mostly not their loss. Also quarterly profits are more important. No manager could convince the shareholders to invest trillions that might pay off in decades. Why should they care? They want their profit now! So nothing will change unless the government dictates. But that's not how the US works. The only thing that will come will be smart grids. Because this way you can exploit the crumbling grid to the limit a while longer without having to spend much. In continental Europe you can't just look at one country alone since they're all interconnected. More than the US grid is. 15 minutes of black out for Germany seems a lot though. I'm living there and I remember every single blackout since childhood. The last one was over 10 years ago. Since then the power wasn't gone for even a few seconds (which is usually the duration for a blackout, since the power is redistributed pretty fast - unless of course the reason is a cable being dug out by accident in front of your house). Never experienced a brown out at all. Also - except for the main interurban lines - the cables are underground. Especially in cities. And there are no problems with floods. Except if the whole ground is swept away (like happened this year in an area) - but in this case pylons would be gone too. And it's not like you have to dig them out regularly. Why would you?
This is the problem with the US in general... It's poisoning itself with its fanatic capitalism so much harder than other countries because it has next to *no* ancestors who were looking out for its well being. ...And that isn't just applying to ancient history, I really mean altogether. It's nuts how there's like no wisdom or foresight in this country anymore except among groups that the ruling elite always get to casually ignore because "oh why would the people who spent their entire lives studying this problem know anything better about it than me the corporate genius who makes ALL THIS MONEY look at HOW MUCH MONEY I HAVE WOOOOOO" I swear it's like watching a grossly zoomed-out frat party sometimes.
@@LordTelperion European power grids are multinational, which is much harder to coordinate than in America, which is all one country and tho different state laws exist it is not as dramatic a change as between countries. In fact Texas has its own specific grid separate from other grids in America, while Europe has one that spans nearly all countries except the Baltic and Eastern Europe and even extends to turkey and Algeria and Morocco.
@@LordTelperion Yeah, it's easy to forget how stupidly huge the US is, it really is like an entire continent and it's almost impressive it's still barely holding together and hasn't just fractured into dozens of different countries already...
@@bobettethedestroyerthebuil1034 *nods* I would also add that Europe has existed under the US defense umbrella since WWII, so all that money they might have had to spend on maintaining colossal militaries was redirected into themselves instead, into infrastructure and social services.
Twice a year for more than five hours is a lot!! Here in the Netherlands I’ve NEVER had a power outage! I thought that was the standard for the developed world
@@brawler1972 Germany here, never had an outage in my 35 years on this earth. I think I speak for all Europe (500 million people) this is not normal. I am always shocked how backwards the US is.
Part of the issue is the size of the US. Where I live (Outside Portland Oregon, on the west coast) we rarely get power outages. The ones we do get are almost exclusively caused by trees taking out the lines. (And generally fixed as soon as possible.) In the last 5 years I've had less than an hour cumulative time of blackout.
Oh so this is why american tech channels all seem to mention what happens with devices during a blackout hahahah I've lived for 11 years in the Netherlands now and while there have been several blackouts (if I believe Wikipedia, 6 big ones from 1984 up until now), they mainly affect small parts of a city, so far I've never been through one. We certainly are spoiled by taking electricity for granted!
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People? Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy, and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
@@slevinchannel7589 The problems are way older, but these channels certainly help to answer some questions. As long as the viewers are willing to think.
@@slevinchannel7589 Probably the political incentive to keep people stupid. It's easier then to divide them and distract them from the problems the government and financial class cause. Not to mention when education is considered in the US it's always about scores, ratings, and getting people into jobs. Less interest is given to the quality of the education, and whether or not it's hurting people by so focused on making workers instead of people.
I used to live near a transformer that toasted many a squirrel (the transformer was between my yard and my neighbor). We would lose power for about 1/2 hr. or less each time. We didn't lose power any longer than that because the power company knew where it was and what the problem was, so got there quickly and had exactly what was needed.
Five hours per person and year? Wow, that really does sound like quite a lot. Also, I finally found out what brown-out means, I wasn't familiar with the term. Or the phenomenon, for that matter.
I had no idea what a brownout was until i moved to the Philippines, now i experience them every month even in perfect weather. 5 hours or more a month is common for where i live.
I think it differs for where you live. For myself that would not be an accurate number. Growing we lost power a bunch during a year. My folks still live in the same place and lose power a lot (not as much as when I was young). They now own a jenny since they are getting older
25 year old Dutch person here. In my life I think we've only ever had like 2 or 3 short blackouts. Never brownouts and always just the neighborhood an not the entire small town I live in.
I live in the UK near London- we buy power frequently from your country (along with France and even Norway!) at peak times- the 1hr time difference means that our peaks don't usually coincide!
@@jesseharrell80 That's very true. But our water company still had electricity and a lot of people were out of water during that storm here anyway. They said that so many pipes broke from freezing (they're not insulated here) that there wasn't enough water in the water towers for them to function with proper pressure to keep everything stable. They had to shut down several water towers, so the people near those had no water. Plus, they said that their filtration system functions more slowly during very cold weather. So, they weren't able to clean enough water fast enough for everyone. They sent out notices to everyone saying to stop showering or washing dishes or laundry until the storm passed and things thawed. That way as many people as possible would still have at least a little water for necessities. Even then, the water pressure was very low. Any many people around here weren't as lucky. Hundreds of people were completely out and were standing in line to get water from the national guard. Of course everyone with a private well who did loose electricity was completely out of water, too. It was kind of scary, actually. I hoard water now just in case that happens again.
The solution is quite simple. Politicians need to help power grid operators with financial help to modernize and then regulate how much they can charge. In Denmark(Guess the rest of Europe as well) how much you can charge per kilowatt-hour is determined by the up-time of the power grid you operate. And what you can charge goes down quite fast
How do you think grid operators get paid? Those upgrades are approved by your local regulators and passed on to you, after which the utility gets a profit margin. Texas has a weird system, but most utilities actively incentivize upgrades. They just don’t so much incentivize maintenance. What they should do is allow (or increase the allowable amount of) maintenance to be included in a rate case. That will increase power bills, though, so it will be less popular than just letting there be blackouts sometimes in the long run. They should also be heavily subsidizing sustainable base load power and storage technologies while punitively taxing carbon emitting power in increasing steps. This would also make bills go up, but it would reduce significantly the incalculable amount of suffering each additional gram of CO2 will cause in humanity, non-human animals, and any of humanity’s speculated future descendants. Climate change will be making minds suffer for millions of years. You can pay an extra $10 a month for a few trillion people to be a little more comfortable.
One thing missed in the video about replacing our ancient grid is efficiency. We lose a significant amount of electricity as heat over the distances that electricity has to flow. That is usable electricity that just doesn't come out the other end. While the use of semiconductors is ideal, we're not there yet. But improving the grid will pay for itself in a few decades. But those who profit from the grid would never make that huge of an investment.
I work with renewables and microgrids every day and I am absolutely shocked at how well researched this video is and the insights they are able to explain so simply. Thank you SciShow, for making science so accessible and fun.
I'm shocked that they didn't include grid scale batteries, like Tesla is selling to Texas, as well as many other places around the US and world! Also, distributes generation was glossed over. With more and more houses/communities having rooftop solar and batteries to store the energy, this evens out the energy needs of the neighborhood. The future of vehicle to grid (V2G), or battery to grid (B2G) is promising, although still in the future.
This year, the power went out in my area like five times, for an hour or two most of the time. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Texas of course, but that is ridiculous.
I am an electrical field service engineer in the USA and I work on the projects to actually try to fix the USA’s aging power grid. I have never really been able to explain it to anybody even my wife and none of my coworkers do either. Because it takes this long to actually explain what the problem is, we are trying to fix but everyone is under the illusion that our electricity will never go away. That’s for peasants in the dark ages Now we at least have a video we can show them and say: I fix that. Thank you guys
I live in South Africa and due to corruption in our government and their control of the grid with state owned enterprises, we have a severely failing electric grid, old infrastructure that isn’t replaced, constant cable theft to sell the wired for money and failing power stations and substations. We implement what’s called “load shedding”, which is a scheduled turn off of grids and areas for specified amounts of time (usually between 2 and 4 hours at a time) throughout the day to alleviate the load on our power grid as we do not produce enough to supply the whole country. I think the corruption is being worked on, but I’ve experienced load shedding since I was a child and I suspect I’ll experience it for a few years from now (I’m 20 now and have experienced it since I was 10 or so)
Why not use batteries to stabilize the grid or store overages? Aren't we having those battery revolutions all these youtube vids have been going on about for 4, 5 years now?
Grid scale batteries by Tesla are being sold to Texas and many. other places in the US and around the world. This helps even out the grid, but it couldn't cover a multi-day outage (yet).
Wind and solar are fine in winter. Texas utilities just didn't listen to recommendations, instead buying cheaper turbines that weren't winter-proofed. Even so, natural gas was >95% of what failed in Texas
We live in N.W. Ohio and our power is wind turbine. Would love to see a show on our area, the benefits and effects. We do get a plethora of storms and wind. Thanks and appreciation for your work and channel, be well and safe.
I grew up in rural Missouri on an industrial scale chicken farm in the early ninety's. We were dealing with livestock that could live or die depending on power flow so we actually had a massive diesel generator on sight. I remember times when quiver electric (our power company at the time) actually paid us to run it in order to help out the grid during times of high stress on the power.
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People? Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy, and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
holy god. Wind Turbines function JUST FINE in Antarctica, Scandinavia...anywhere that is cold and has wind is fine. Texas was not because the providers refused to winterize the system. My solar panels generated panel JUST. FINE. the *entire time* they were covered with ice. Jeez...I expected better from SciShow than just repeating Abbott's hysterical redirection.
You guys are so non-political and I love it. Anytime I have heard people talk about electricity, it’s either the Democrats fault or the Republicans fault depending who you ask. Y’all just like talking about how things work and want people to know how it works. Thank you for your work. You guys are so amazing!
Not me watching this during our huge power outage in Colorado 😂 Our problem today is the first thing you talked about - crumbling infrastructure. Old trees next to old power lines with hurricane-level gusts = "You're gonna have a bad time".
Same I've had flickers. I live 20 minutes from Philly. There is one street across my house gets Black Outs. Never unstand why my house has powers while others don't. There was a flash like four days ago and I was like WTF. Thought it was a gunshot till a utility truck came by. We didn't lose power. Comcast WiFi on the other hand... You'd think it would be good as Philli is their HQ but NOPE! Haha Anyway America is massive and people don't understand that. 3rd most populated, richest, and massive.
@@WIckedOmenOfThunder I believe the southern region that was affected by floods had (intentional) local blackouts past summer. Not the whole country of course. I also recall a bigger problem that affected the whole train network due to Utrecht CS being down. There was also a similar incident in 2017 around Amsterdam with 360.000 homes affected plus public transport. I don't think the latter two lasted longer than a few hours though.
It's very rare to get blackouts in Sweden too but it happens, maybe once every few years. I should note that most of the blackouts I've experienced happens when it's night time(work for the last 17 years). Very rarely does it happen during the morning/afternoon/evening. I can't even remember the last time such a thing happened must be well over 10 years.
You’ve got most of the concepts correct…..I would spend a little time researching the relationship of frequency to load and gen….and contingency reserves
Whenever the government frowns and says that creating jobs is hard... I often wonder why they don't look at the utilities they gave to private entities. The infrastructure needs upgrades and repairs, but gets horribly underfunded.
you are making the assumption teh government has the money to spend on that infrastructure. or that those jobs would be longterm enough where that counts as "creating jobs".....its not
@@007kingifrit and yet we massively subsidize oil and the pipeline that was canceled this year was being advertised as a "jobs creator" (even though it would make a few dozen jobs after initial construction and poison the soil for decades.
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat only difference is that oil is an essential resource that everyone in the country needs... a few power outages every couple weeks pales in comparison.
It's amazing to see how advanced the electrical grids are in Europe and America. In South Africa we experience about five hours per day, a few times a week. We might go a month or so without an outage, but it never lasts long. Private solar systems are becoming increasingly popular here because of this.
Burying transmission lines is not the answer in cold climates. Up here near the Canadian border, many of our electrical lines were buried back in the 70s. The freeze/thaw cycle was hell for those lines and most went back to overhead lines within 10-15 years. There are still some buried lines but it is not a feasible alternative in areas where 20-30 degrees below zero is a given every winter
From a purely economic perspective: 1) Replace a little under half of the power grid during the last 20 years or 2) Lose a 20ish year long war on terror which cost around $2 trillion Which is the better investment? What do the American people get more from? If you're reading this, please just focus on the economic aspect of it.
7:21 Here in Denmark the security of supply is 99.996. But we also have most of the grid in the ground. At this moment our wind turbines alone produces the equivalent of the nation's total use of electricity. Last time I experienced a power outage is more than twenty years ago.
The US needs more funding in infrastructure and science based projects. We need technology and innovation to lead the way Especially in places such as Texas as our climate continues to change and the Arctic rapidly heats up, a weaker polar vortex could cause more extreme cold snaps in Texas in the future. And northern locations must adjust for hotter summers with their technologies. But the biggest problem in America will be the lack of attention on things like our power grid. I doubt Texas has fixed their problem and haven’t heard anything about it since the Spring.
I’m in Houston and luckily I was staying with my grandparents who live near MD Anderson downtown during the storm, so I had power the entire time. We lost water almost immediately though.
I remember a very slow brownout that happened in the mid-late 90s. It was like someone *very* slowly turning down a dial. The incandescent lights took a full minute to go out.
Honestly 5 trillion doesn't sound too bad, considering we spent something like 6.5-8 trillion on war in the middle east since 2001, Trump's tax cuts cost about 2.5 trillion dollars, and the military budget moving forward is almost 1 trillion dollars per year... Not one of those things benefited americans, whereas upgrading the grid will tangibly improve our lives.
People REALLY need to stop saying that wind turbines don't work in the cold. Much of rural Alaska and Antarctica are powered by wind turbines. You do touch on "cold hardening" turbines later in the grid, but that is well after you say "wind turbines don't work in the cold" which is simply false. Texas's shoddy wind turbines weren't designed to work in the cold, but it isn't a wind-turbine issue, it is a matter of texas power cheaping out on their infra. No surprise there.
Alaska is mostly powered by diesel fuel. And she mentioned there are ways to help turbines function in the cold. Gud jerb 👍 Also, I don't know if you're aware of the typical weather Texas experiences. Not one person would have ever said, "Hey! Don't you think we should prepare these turbines for the bitter cold of Texas?" before last winter.
My backyard has a canopy of wires overhead. In old neighborhoods like mine, thousands of people have aboveground services. I have had all services go out for more than 12 hours.
You’re far too polite. The problem here in the United States is simply greed, and nothing else. It’s about cost effectiveness ONLY as it relates to the absolutely gargantuan bonuses that the board members of the utility companies pay themselves, and the corrupt politicians that make it all possible 🤬
@@stingcool9455 Natural gas failed and it provided more energy than wind turbines. Beside the fact that the real problem was that the wind turbines and the natural gas both weren't winterized. The other types of energy weren't winterized either.
You guys should go more in depth about this topic. Discussing what power factor is, the rising demand on the grid, and the amount of reliable and consistent power generated by different sources. I encourage you to contact a generation company and some of their members (utility companies) to fill in the blanks. A lot of people don’t understand how the grid really works. Im worried that some day the demand could be sky high with available power being too low, causing rolling brown outs and black outs, all while the power bills get higher and higher. I build substations for a generation company and have received dozens of classes on these topics. Im all for green energy, I just hope we don’t move too fast for the grid to keep up.
We have so many brown outs and black outs where I live in California. PG&E is notorious for its unreliability and how its essentially a monopoly, so they don't change, even when prosecuted for the fires their faulty wiring has caused. I'm sure there's more to it of course, but still.
@@dansands8140 I do have to agree. But I still don't like the fact that they ARE a monopoly. AND that there had been plenty times, prior to the massive and deadly fires that rolled through California, where they could've fixed and altered their many old and defunct electrical wires. The steps they're taking now, while annoying, are great strides towards a safer California. I just wish they'd done it sooner.
How an electricity grid can fail is already known by engineers and policy makers. The real question is why more isn't invested in resilience and redundancy. The US, after all, is wealthy with a huge industrial base.
I grew up in Germany and have lived in several countries in Europe and I can only remember 2 blackouts in my whole life. Both of these blackouts lasted less than an hour. The concept of having to worry about blackouts just does not exist here.
Our power transmission system was really designed for a world that (mostly) does not exist anymore. It is the biggest impediment to Renewable Energy. We need to focus less on building new power source and invest more on how to transition the grid to work with distributed energy sources.
The transmission system works fine for renewables. The big problem with renewable gen is that no one wants a wind farm or solar farm in their back yard. Also, distributed gen is a lot of the time diesel or propane. Micro grids can be a good thing, but can cause more outages than they are worth.
Living in germany, i cant even remember when we had the last blackout here. Must have been years ago. And i think most of it comes from management and burying cables. Broken cables are not really a thing here. It is much more likely to not have water for a few hours if a line ruptures than ever having something similar with electricity.
The investment of putting the power wire underground almost always pays out because there is usually way less maintenance to be done. Only the big lines between cities are above ground in most of Europe.
Texas' outage had a lot more preventable things happen then what was mentioned here. The regulators complete negligence with the natural gas operators was the real problem. They've known for years they needed to winterize their valves and they never did.
Truth. I was amazed at how off the mark this video was about what happened in TX in Feb. I'm in Austin, and the info coming out here is completely different.
No they’d rather rake in the profits then try to make sure the system works
Yep. The Texas natural gas gathering, processing and distribution system lacks very simple, old-tech winterization upgrades that are standard in other places with similar climate. Plus, Texas actually had this exact same type of failure over 10 years ago, and ignored these exact types of upgrade recommendations from the commission back then, with predictable results later on. So Texans ended up paying more than 10 times as much in economic damage as the upgrades would have cost in the first place. And the preventable deaths. And still have no upgrades today, I bet.
Same thing with wind turbines. Automatic lube oil heaters (and other tech) are commonly used to keep them moving in cold weather everywhere else, even Alaska. Just needs somebody in charge who can make a rational decision about critical infrastructure spending.
The power company in my town in Texas knew that the equipment would fail but did nothing, right after all the bs passed, all the higher ups for the company reassigned because I guess they didn't want to deal with all the dead bodies.
the current gov of texas when AG actually sued in courts to stop winterization that would of been half paid for by the federal government.
To clarify : in Sweden it's also cold -15F and the turbines have no problems, WY ? Because they are upgraded with heating elements in the blades so if they are iced upp the heating element warm up the blades for a short while and the ice is gone and starting up again
Do you think I should buy a snowplow just in case here in Louisiana and a couple of snowmobiles?
This entire video is just deflection from the fundamental root of the problem in the first place. America has crumbling infrastructure, and an abject refusal to invest on it as the state has failed.
Yeah I live in the Midwest part of the USA where it gets down to -50F. We too have a lot of wind turbines that thaw themselves off. I've never experienced a power outage due to it being cold. Most of the time my power goes out (maybe once every few years) is due to a tornado coming through and taking out a power line. Texas however rarely ever gets to 32F (0C). They took a risk and didn't prepare it for cold temperatures because it was likely deemed a risk they were willing to take.
@@HashtagBirdyy They’ve had hordes of inspectors and experts telling them flat out that they must start winterizing their power infrastructure, and hardening it against other extreme weather events. Thing is, there’s a ton of power companies in TX (competition you see), and they’re all loosely regulated by design.
TX govt ignored all evidence presented to them that showed climate change = harsher storms of all kinds and rapidly expanding populations + unregulated power companies + refusal to invest = massive disasters one after another. They say their hands are tied (leaving out that they did that themselves), and have no way to force power companies to provide better and more reliable service.
TX power companies are squeezing more and more people onto old infrastructure in pursuit of money - when it causes deaths and fails at critical moments…they have no reason to care. They already have their money, and they have zero incentive to correct issues with their equipment because there are no consequences for leaving the situation as-is.
TX had major winter storms twice in the last decade iirc, and they’ve been made aware that this will become more common, which anyone born down south in that area can confirm. North Louisiana used to get the occasional ice storm when I was little, but it was 5 or 6 years between them. That ain’t the case these days.
Tl;dr
Don’t make excuses for TX. They’re perfectly aware that without grid infrastructure upgrades, the grid will fail more and more often, and will lead to ever increasing death tolls in both the winter and summer.
(Fun fact: TX lost a pretty big chunk of power…because the water in the cooling pipes feeding 2 nuclear stations froze. So yeah - this situation was far more forked than it first seemed.)
@@Hanyousan1661 lol I'm not making any sort of excuse... I literally say they took a risk and didn't prepare.... Meaning they knew there was the risk of this happening. Obviously money speaks and that's why they decided to take the risk. Idk how you read my post and thought I was sticking up for the power companies in Texas.
10:09 _”Updating the grid would cost about $5 trillion dollars and take decades”_
Sooooo … about 10 to 15% of the US military budget then?
I lived in Germany for a few years and was surprised to find that power outages were an unknown concept. Rolling blackouts were just part of life growing up in California. (much of what I remember turned out to be caused by illegal market manipulation which was eventually criminally prosecuted, but there's also still the infrastructure problems mentioned in this video.)
Well, I wouldn't say it's an unknown concept. But usually it's just a neighbourhood that looses power because something went bang in the local substation or an excavator tore through the cable. And very rarely do we have large-scale longer duration outages like after the Münsterländer Schneechaos in 2005, when several old high voltage masts, that had been due for replacement, gave in and just flopped over.
@@rolfs2165 Agreed. We used to have like one or two outages per year, and usually only seconds or minutes.
@Gustav Gnöttgen The same in Sweden.
@@gustavgnoettgen Same in Czechia. Power outages, even short ones (a couple seconds), are very rare and usualy caused by some maintenance.
That's because there isn't much infrastructure in Europe older than 1945. The continent was burned to the ground and rebuilt
It was never "too cold for windmills", he was too cold for the fun winterized windmills. Even though 10 years ago the same sort of frost happened, the power providers refused to put heaters on their fuel supplies and their windmills. They simply refused to winterize any part of their grid .
Meanwhile there are windmills working in Antarctica where it's much colder than it got in Texas. Windmills do great in the cold. It's just poorly designed systems always lead towards failure.
I mean, just look at countries like Scotland, Norway and Sweden... Their wind turbines are doing just fine.
Windmills are used for grinding wheat into flour.
Wind Turbines are used to produce electricity.
Trump was too dumb to understand this.
Please don't go down the same route.
@Gerard Flynn 🤣 Well... we also have windmills in Sweden that are working just fine🤣
@@gerardflynn3899 :: wind turbine is a subclass of windmill. English is a living language and no one cares about this difference. Except apparently you I guess?
I was going to call that out too. I have seen windmills working at -40 degrees. If they are prepared right, they can handle the cold.
to clarify: it was too cold for wind turbines to function because they cheaped out when purchasing them. cold-climate turbines are very much a thing. same with all the other failures in Texas: they were all easily preventable
It's not "cheaping out" by not buying cold climate turbines for a location that is usually never very cold. It was preventable with hindsight yes, but spending a lot of extra money would not have been a smart decision at the time.
@@steelybojangles Texas has plenty of historic cold snaps, as does everywhere. the private firms involved in the Texas grid decided they'd rather save a few pennies than protect against the inevitable "100 year storm". corporations will do anything to save a few bucks as long as the decision makers think they won't still be on the payroll by the time things go sideways
@@steelybojangles actually youre really wrong here so dont get too defensive, texas was warned multiple times that if they faced another blizzard like the light one they experienced in 2010, it would be catastrophic and preventable. texas said nah, thats government overreach, the free market will decide if texas needs to winterize. thats texan for "no we are going to cheap out on purpose."
@@SeanLinsley As far as I know the main problem in Texas was not with the turbines. In very cold conditions ice builds up on the turbine blades, causing the efficiency to drop and also creating hazards if the ice flies off the blades. Normally they just turn the turbines "off" during the cold snap or storm until the conditions improve. The main problem was that the natural gas in the old uninsulated gas pipework froze, meaning the gas power plants that would normally have taken up the slack when the turbines were off could not operate, plus wind and snow damage to to power lines, plus extra demand from AC, plus no out if state connections ect. ect. all contributed to the huge cluster f**k that resulted in people freezing to death. I feel like blaming it on the wind turbines was mis-direction to make it a political issue rather than a multi-layered, multi-decade mis-management problem.
@@steelybojangles The Turbines were a example. For all the cheap, decades old winter proofing. The prooving that Texas *sued* to not have!
Growing up in Pennsylvania in the 90's I remember constantly seeing power poles with ceramic insulation caps all the time. Those poles were probably close to 100 years old at the time.
Simple machines last long
And I bet you got charged the same or more . After all, this is government profit.
We have some of these in Germany but only for like single villages, blocks or houses
And the solar panels should have been fitted with emergency heaters that would have melted the snow, or particularly kept it from accumulating in the first place .
The text is blackout was holy foreseeable but human life was cheaper than corporate profits at the various power providers.
@@terracotta6294 Try private profit sparky. All of Pennsylvanias power providers are private for profit companies.
I feel part of the high cost of upgrading the grid is due to the decades of general neglect, politicians 'borrowing' funding for other projects, and now the sticker shock is making a lot of politicians balk, while either not realizing or not wanting to admit that their actions and the actions of their predecessors led up to this.
No the problem is the electric companies that own and maintain the lines are private companies and of course they will cheap out on upgrading lines if they can afford to put it off for 10-20 or more years when they still function. There is no government involved with the power lines.
@@SilvaDreams it was a deliberate model change.
The old system was a regulated Monopoly where the cost of electricity was whatever costs they could justify (fuel, construction, administration, extra transmission lines that weren't actually needed) plus a guaranteed x% profit (15% comes to mind but not sure). They had several market failures in the ideal of cheapest possible electricity the only one i can name off the top of my head is "gold plating" where the monopoly is incentivized to plate the lines in gold to drive up costs to make more profit.
Around the 80's and 90's a move to liberalize or deregulate the industry was made, now the lines are owned separate from generation, so that the generators can sell electricity at a competitive market/auction process (the all inform the ISO [independent system operator] of their cost to produce the next MW of power and the ISO then dispatches requests to change production to the various generation plants). The company that owns the lines is now paid a fee for usage of their lines as the middleman between the generation and the distribution utility who then sells to you.
Trust me, the fact that everything is owned by private companies means that things are actually efficient, go to the DMV and tell me thats how you want your electricity managed. But the government is still highly involved with setting all the rules and regulations about stuff, they just aren't setting the price of electricity now, the laws of economics are. One of the rules of economics is that you don't want to overbuild as that is wasteful, but eventually you have to build another 400mile transmission line or upgrade some lines in a right of way which is very expensive but can then make money.
Also you know what companies don't do when there is a black out, Make Money, its literally the worst thing that can happen to a power company because it means something expensive just broke, and they can't sell their only product, and suddenly everyone is paying attention to them because the modern world needs electricity to function.
Source: I'm an Electrical Engineer
Truth. The United States is just a third world country with (still) a lot of spending power relatively speaking. Of course every year most Americans are only getting poorer so it's a matter of time we join with the rest of Central and South America in their league of failing states. It's as corrupt as anywhere else in the Americas, sans Canada, where all these problems only compound over time thanks to a government being continually paralyzed to do anything about it. A lot of it due to greedy and short-sighted politicians who only want to keep creating drama and collect checks from wealthy donors by balking at anything that would improve everyone's lives because it's the only thing giving them a career.
Try living in Texas for a while, it's nothing but a giant freaking dump and too many people there seem to enjoy wallowing in it.
The cost is always high. However, America is the wealthiest country on the face of the planet. More importantly, the cost to the economy from blackouts (and associated effects) is even higher.
It wasn't too cold for wind turbines; it was too cold for the wind turbines that Texas hadn't bothered to winterize. Wind power works fine, year around, in extremely cold states e.g. Minnesota.
And northern Sweden
northern michigan
That was a dumb thing to say by the video. It would have been easy for them to say what you did.
Technology Connections had a video about stoplights that discussed the issue of "but sometimes!".
@@JWooden271 that was the first video of his I saw. Highly approve.
Scishow is not pulling punches anymore 'depending on how comfortable we are with our neighbors freezing'
I love this channel
They pulled the punches hard here, to the point where I would say they basically misrepresented the Texas situation altogether in favor of the power companies. It also seems like they didn't quite explain just how much less reliable the u.s. grid is compared to European grid in ways humans really understand (15 minutes per year vs. 5 hours per year may be true but most people just don't really understand the lived experience there).
I'm not saying the video was terrible or anything, this was great actually (aside from the Texas coverage but I've seen worse from more professional outlets). I just feel like it could have been a bit better.
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat I don't know .. if you read the other comments; people got exactly that from this video. US grid is not only less reliable, it's less well maintained, not future planned, politicised, and segregated. The rich get their power, the others have to live with it. The comparrison should have been with the war machine though. Cut some of that and put it into infrastructure and you'd cure all these problems.
I live in Austria. Depending on the region, parts of my country are very prone to floods and snow. However I can't remember if we ever had a major blackout. It is possible that a blackout happens due to extreme weather but that's not really common. The last real blackout I remember was around 10 years ago and I don't know if more places were affected other my hometown. It lasted around an hour, nothing too special.
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People?
Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy,
and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
Europe does not have as severe fluctuations in weather as the USA.
@@ClickLikeAndSubscribe That's just poor excuse and with few notable exceptions not even holds true.
@@ClickLikeAndSubscribe Canadian here, and we're probably more variable than the US (-20*C winter to 40*C summer). And our grid is comparable to Europe, and 99% of our outages are extreme weather, or squirrels taking out a neighbourhood for an hour or two.
We definitely NEED to be weatherproofed or else our grid would die every winter. But if we can build our side of the North American grid so well what's stopping the US?
@@pancake_crab4457 greed and idiocy is the reason
Too cold for wind turbines to function?
Then how do countries like Sweden and Denmark get so much of their power from wind? It's colder for longer there.
No, it wasn't too cold for wind-- they just didn't winterize the equipment. And in shutting off power to homes, they lost access to solar as well.
Thats what the repbulicans keep saying. Wind power didnt fail nearly as much as they said it did. Natural gas failed the most due to pipes freezing.
I used to live near wind turbines in northern Germany. 13 of them eventually.
I haven't seen any dead birds near the turbines on my daily walk with the dogs. Could be that there were some but I didn't see any (other than near streets and in the village).
AND they ran as much in the winter as they did in summer. They only stood still in harsh storms and when there was already enough voltage in the grid, for 20 years with little maintenance downtime.
Your description of the European grid doesn't quite describe the reliability. Let's put it like this. In my 33 year long life I remember all 6 times we had a power outage. Because they are so rare and I can't remember ever having a brown-out
Same here. I am from Germany and I am not able to remember 1 instance of a power outage.
Another German here.
I can definitely remember some black outs, most have been a few minutes, two or three an hour and I think one a few hours
but that was caused by lightning strike in the neighborhood.
But per year I would say it was about one or two.
Used to live in Portugal and now on Ireland and power outages are very rare
It's important to remember that averages are being described. I'm sure that most Germans lose power for 0 minutes per year but the long tail includes an eighth of the country with 2 hours in a year or something extreme like that.
@@o76923 Right like my suburb in the US almost never a power loss but then you have hurricanes in the south east, "tornado alley" and California fire zones where people may lose power for days or even weeks. Which of course skews the average. Thinking about it is there any part of Germany that has regular extreme weather events like parts of the US. I really wouldn't want to live in the South East hurricane zones and unless climate change messes it up we don't get the worst tornadic storms. We did have 100km/h winds last night near me and some areas of the mid-west saw 120+ last night which is hurricane force. Also 20 tornados reported. An observation site in Colorado recorded a 172 km/h gust. Kansas saw 160km/h (100 MPH) winds. 400K homes without power as of latest report. So I don't think we're talking apples to apples here in comparisons.
It's genuinely depressing that we know what we need to do but no one is going to do it because updating the power grid won't make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful. I live in an area that loses power for what must be a total of a quarter of the year. We just got our power back on today, actually, after 30 hours. And that's a relatively short power outage for us.
+++
Where the hell do you live?
@@LunaTulpa I live in California, on a campgrounds I work at. So very rural.
Arkansas has a lot of power outages, too. Not as bad as that, though. That sounds rough.
Very true , I feel bad for Californians here from Delaware.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we spend 500% more on military than on infrastructure?
But we totally need that money for the military! I mean, if we don't spend more than the next three countries _combined,_ do we really have enough money for the military? I mean, it's not like we can take some of the money being dumped into research and expensive machinery and use that to pay our soldiers. /s
Military is typically a federal investment. Electrical infrastructure is mostly handled through a combination of municipal, state, and regional agencies. The federal government does throw some money at it and technically oversees multi-state regional regulatory agencies but it's really not in their wheelhouse anymore.
I mean, I'm not a fan of our military budget either but that's not really connected to the problem here. More local governments opting for privatization then deregulation is a much better explanation.
Very strongly agree.
@@tygerion4404 Isn't it the next 20 countries combined? your point stands though xD
@@Tinky1rs IIRC, doesn't the USA make up 39% of all _global_ military spending?
Yet we still keep increasing it...
It's quite frankly absurd.
I was actually born during the 2003 massive blackout, my mother always told me about how right before I was "free", all the lights had just shut off before coming back on from a back up generator and I had also been quiet and looked to be asleep still. They eventually got me to start bawling and reacting but my mom has an actual picture where you can see, in the window behind her, the whole area just completely black and only able too see far off lights from people using generators.
You started bawling when they pulled the spoon out yo mouth
Now that your old enough, you'll probably blame Republicans for your problems .
@@rizdalegend hail trump
@@rizdalegend unnecessary comment. Seriously, get a life.
@@rizdalegend you must live a miserable life if that's the first thing you go to
I’m curious how Canada’s blackouts per hour compares to the US amount. Since we’re the same grid, but don’t seem to be struggling with rolling blackouts as much.
Texas is on it's own power grid.
@@Catlily5 Yes, but they mentioned US power outage frequencies as a whole country.
@@fernbedek6302 True.
We sell you excess power.
I'm wondering how much black out time per person is with California removed from the equation
I’ve worked in every corner of the industry (generation, transmission, and distribution) and currently serve as the control room supervisor for one of the largest electric utilities in the US/world. Whenever I see a video trying to explain the grid (or more specifically, its failures), I cringe. So it was a very pleasant surprise that this video was remarkably accurate - albeit intentionally simplistic. Well done to the team that put this together.
I wonder if distribution operations in the **kv/400 is done by any engineers or ai software?
Are knives manually operated or automated ?
eh you never left america in regards to your industry I take?
@@dimmudimmu8512 In terms of knife switches those are manual but they are connected to relays which watch the line current and voltage and when something goes out of its set parameters it trip a breaker then trys closing in 1-3 times then will remain open till a technician goes and fixes the issue and resets the trip
@@JoyGoodchild I did, but it was on behalf of America. I worked on reactor plants in Japan from 08-13 and was there during the meltdown (though not at the actual meltdown site, obviously).
I’m disagreeing with you there. I find that a show like this needs to be very precise on their words because the misinformation will be spread. I kept saying “wrong” throughout the first half of the video.
"Texas itself is an anomaly."
Ain't that the truth.
I live in a part of the U.S. where now due to the wild fires, which several have been because of the powerlines, they will shut off power to our area for a minimum of 12 hour or the longest so far being 4 days. So yes I would really like for them to bit the damn bullet and start upgrading everything. Like half my town burnt down 6 years ago and they just put back the same old stuff 🙃.
I used to live in France before moving to the US, never had a blackout in 20 years living there. Got minimum 2 each year in the US. France uses reliable nuclear power generation and buried lines.
I live in France, I don't think I've ever experienced a blackout here in my 24 years of life and my house has a buried powerline. But not all the country is the same, there are still aerial powerlines (my grandparents have one for example, and they live about 5 kms away from me) and they can still fail. But usually they fail when extreme weather is here, like floods, big storms or heavy snow falls down, weighing the cables and breaking them
Yeah, you French people are smart for using nuclear power. Here in Germany the tides may be slightly turning, partly because of videos of Kurzgesagt and because of the high energy prices, but politicians and a lot of other people as well still cling to the nuclear phase out next year. We have 6 plants still running, but in a few weeks we'll shut off the 3 smaller ones, and then the rest in summer 2022.
Swede here, i've experienced maybe 4 blackouts in my life? But that's not power being down for days on end, merely power cutting out for a few hours or *at most* a day, before they fix whatever broke. And it mostly happens on the countryside where there are power lines that can be blown down, in the city a power outage is extremely rare.
I believe 70% of France's electricity is generated by Nuclear and the remainder is generated by Hydro. France can generate more electricity than they need so they sell and distribute the excess electricity to other parts of Europe.
It's rather ironic that here in Australia we are one of the largest producers and exporters of Uranium, and yet we have no Nuclear electricity generators due to political pressure from Environmentalists. I must say though that I wouldn't want to be any where near one of those Nuclear generators when they melt down.
@@BLKwong 70% is about right, I think it's between 70 and 75%. And tbh, I live about 50 kms away from a nuclear power plant and I'm not really worried about it, I even visited it once
Bitcoin is the future, investing in it now will be the wisest thing to do especially with the current rise in bitcoin
@Dion Prince You are absolutely right but we also have lots of expert, real ones out there waiting for investors
@KPENU KINGSELEY You're right I think stock and Crypto are the best to invest right now
@willam kate That won't bother you if you trade with a professional like Dulahi jeroen
Mr Dulahi is obviously the best,
His success story.... in everywhere.
2:03 Major factual error here. While the US historically was dependent on coal, today it represents only 20% of generation nationally. Natural gas is the primary source at the moment, and depending on the time of year, nuclear or coal are second.
Frustrating that many people blame "green" energy like wind and solar power generation for part of the failure, since it was too cold and ice covered to work. But I live in Canada where our wind and solar work just fine in the winter. The U.S. grid was just so poorly managed and its managers ignored warnings that they didn't account for this inevitability. It wasn't wind and solar's fault, those failures were preventable.
Fox News likes to say the solution is always drilling for more oil and more guns.
Canada has a higher fraction of reliable hydropower than the USA. Realistically, solar is so ineffective in Canada and has such a small penetration relative to hydropower, you'd never notice if it wasn't working or not. But you are right that the U.S. grid is poorly managed. The regulatory framework combined with anti-nuclear and anti-power line interests and pro wind activists has resulted in a fragile system.
I work in the Utility industry and this is pretty spot on a really good video.
I realize as a science communication channel you need to pick and choose how much detail to go into, and avoid political issues. However that being said, 'it was to cold for the wind turbines' is the bs put forward by the Texas government. Wind turbines can and do run in much harsher conditions. The failure was solely because they didn't see the need to winterize their equipment, and so didn't spend the money to do it.
Its a shame there are absolutely no wind farms in canada and alaska because its just too cold for things to spin up there (this is derisive sarcasm, there are tons of wind farms in the cold north, texas is just run by jokerfied idiots.)
Texas faught tooth and nail in the courts to not winterize their equipment. The massive blackouts where not a problom they were literally the desired result. They decided a couple million was far to high a price to pay and billions from massive blackouts was a far cheaper and more desirable outcome.
Texans like myself don’t have any more involvement with the electrical grid than you do with the word FOUGHT. We normally have 2 months of “cold” weather, why is everyone being such assholes?
@@geigercourtier Because *children* froze to death due to a preventable disaster. You'd best get involved - could be you next time.
@@Hanyousan1661 since Texas lost power ND and SD was sending all the power they could possibly make and we were running our system on 52hz normal operating is 60hz if it went down 1hz we would have lost all power and been in worse shape than Texas. Everything is way more complicated than everyone thinks and this video did a decent job at it but not perfect.
Just a reminder that there's Wind Turbines in use in Antarctica. When properly winterized they have no problem functioning in the coldest climates on this planet.
Great point. Why did the political-economic system present in Texas result in the decision not to winterize the turbines in Texas and not provide redundancy and resilience to make a reliable design for a not-that-extraordinary storm?
No mention of energy storage? Batteries can stabilize the grid, thereby preventing rolling blackouts. And when a blackout occurs, they can jump in within milliseconds to cover the demand seamlessly for a few hours. They are easier distributable than gas peaker plants, are much more ecologically friendly (even after accounting for their production), don't impede local air quality, are less prone to failure since they don't have any moving parts, react much faster, and require less maintenance. Nowadays they are even becoming cheaper to build.
My power went out three times last Summer, all overnight for 6-12 hours. It was the worst, had to throw out everything in the freezer every time, couldn't sleep due to the heat. Really disappointed in how little America cares about improving its infrastructure.
how little the ruling capitalist class cares about improving its infrastructure*
Wow, 6 hours and you are throwing away food? Over here in Ghana, power cuts are an almost daily occurrence and we don't just throw away frozen food because it thawed out "slightly". Maybe your freezers don't operate at the coldest possible temps or something. I'm just really struggling to understand why food gets thrown out so quickly.
Sleep nude...but if your a dude wear underwear at least
Damage why lol
@@Grauenwolf My freezer is really awful, anything I buy is already freezer burnt within two weeks or so, so I've no doubt something is wrong with that freezer.
"The largest machine on Earth", no, ma'am, that's not the three US grids but the one European grid that serves well over two times the amount of people than these three combined: from North Africa to Scandinavia and from Portugal to Anatolia - and it serves us better, by the way.
"WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH"
~European on a video that doesn't concern them
But is it actually larger though? I doubt it.
Oh it does concern us. You show us how to not do things and we can learn from it and remind us to stay on our path that served us well.
I just did a fact check, Ricky: Europe isn't on Mars. Ergo, a claim to the largest "on Earth" means we must consider Europe in that claim... So we made this video concern them after all.
@@4R8YnTH3CH33F In terms of number of users and produced, distributed and spent power, it definitely is.
“The average customer loses power about once or twice a year” unless you’re me (:
I had my power go out something like 11-15 times in a single day because all of the transformers kept blowing up shortly after they were replaced. My whole neighborhood had to essentially be re-wired
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People?
Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy,
and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
This video came out at a funny time for me in that my town has been going through a pretty bad storm and multiple of my friends have told they’ve lost power just recently
We had one short outage and several flickers during our latest string of storms. We bought a powerpack in case we get an extended blackout.
Same..
I had a brown out literally as I was watching this video. There's a bad windstorm going on where I am right now.
Midwestern here, power just went out as I speak because of 80 mph wind
As a Canadian, watching the Texas power outage, yall really need to fix your infrastructure. I live in a place that gets just as hot as Texsa in the summer and about -20c in the winter, if we can design our grid to handle more then 100c in temperature change throughout the year you guys sure can. Plus BTW our windmills run at -20c just fine. No excuses Mr. Abott
When it comes to preventing outages, I think the utility companies are powerless.
angry upvote
Watt are you talking about?
Dadum Tzzzz
👏😁
Groan
PBS Weathered just did a video on this, too. I commented on theirs, too, but I was "lucky" enough to experience both the 2003 Northeast Blackout and the Winter Storm in Central Texas. Both felt apocalyptic - I clearly remember the headline photos from 2003 of NYC in gridlock and people walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge. And I have no reason to believe that Texas is ready for the winter storm to happen again, which it will, because climate change. We've done nothing to fix or update our grid, and there's more weight on it now with new crypto mining operations and a new Samsung factory. It's really frustrating.
These storms aren't caused by "climate change" they're a regular occurrence happening around 1 every two decades sometimes more like they in the 70s and 80s and this past 20 years with the outage in 2011 and 2021. It's nothing new for Texas.
Even the tornadoes I expected this year weren't as bad as expected yes I anticipated storms to be a talking point this year and I was right, but they were less extreme than they could've been. They're usually more extreme during colder than normal fall and winter seasons in the west with warmer tropical water along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico keeping air in the South and East coasts warmer driving more severe tornadoes.
La Niña oceanic patterns (which are colder) help make these storms worse. We're experiencing the typical weather events driven by a weak La Niña oceanic pattern.
I lived in Texas and everyone I knew had a wood or pellet stove if that tells you anything honestly. It also snowed...
There was a huge reform to the NE grid regulation after the blackout. After that, the same company couldn't own transmission as well as generation. The generation company has to sell it's electricity on the market to the transmission company to make everything transparent. Texas is Texas.
Thankfully texas only gets a major storm like that every 20-30 years
Because we are better than everyone else! USA! USA! USA!
Sarcasm?
maybe only using profit as a motive and worrying about how much it costs, instead of doing it because it needs to be done, is the real issue and what's really holding it back.
The US has the money to address these issues. Those in power simply keep choosing not to do it.
That is spot on the real issue, why spend the money now when they can just wait 30 years or so till they are forced to replace failed lines. That is 30 years of profit without cost for the power companies.
It's mind boggling to me that the "new world" has far more antiquated electrical systems and procedures and bureaucracy than we do in the "old world"...
Yet your Germany shut down safe nuclear reactors abruptly to get Greens to support Merkel. France did great in the last generation of nuclear reactors, but is stumbling now...
Nulear waste will outlive us all and we have no idea how to deal with it. Were to put it? Nothing currently can neutralize its radioactivity but time. Those barrels will not hold for tens of thousand of yeara. Neither will any communication equipment to even warn from the danger. Uranium itselfe is not safe to mine and handle for the people and enviornment, its not renewable and a potential weapon. The focus must lay on reneables, and hydrogen. We burn to much coal as of now, we will fix that!
@@kleinshui9082 We actually have several obvious strategies on how to deal with nuclear waste: Underground isolation, disposal into subduction zones, fast breeder reactors, and molten salt reactors using thorium cycles. Disposal is primarily a problem of ignorance and failure to be quantitative in risk assessment.
@@richdobbs6595 yeah whenever people say nuclear is unsafe because [lists issues that affect very old reactors, and ones that exploded due to negligence], I say "don't drive cars! The first cars ever made were very dangerous, and even today you could die if you make no attempt at avoiding obstacles!"
Also often the same people promoting guns, like do they forget that they just said "it's only dangerous if you misuse it"
On top of the fact that, including nuclear meltdowns, nuclear has been shown to be significantly less deadly than any fossil fuel, each fossil fuel having over 100 times as many deaths per kilowatt hour.
Subjects like this that analyze multiple factors and how they interact are super interesting, especially when the subject is about something so practical.
The whole US grid is an anomaly, not just the Texan one. At least for a developed country. Money is the main reason. No redundancy, at its limits even during normal operation, old age. Of course over a long period this costs a lot. But why should the energy company care? It's mostly not their loss. Also quarterly profits are more important. No manager could convince the shareholders to invest trillions that might pay off in decades. Why should they care? They want their profit now! So nothing will change unless the government dictates. But that's not how the US works. The only thing that will come will be smart grids. Because this way you can exploit the crumbling grid to the limit a while longer without having to spend much.
In continental Europe you can't just look at one country alone since they're all interconnected. More than the US grid is. 15 minutes of black out for Germany seems a lot though. I'm living there and I remember every single blackout since childhood. The last one was over 10 years ago. Since then the power wasn't gone for even a few seconds (which is usually the duration for a blackout, since the power is redistributed pretty fast - unless of course the reason is a cable being dug out by accident in front of your house). Never experienced a brown out at all. Also - except for the main interurban lines - the cables are underground. Especially in cities. And there are no problems with floods. Except if the whole ground is swept away (like happened this year in an area) - but in this case pylons would be gone too. And it's not like you have to dig them out regularly. Why would you?
This is the problem with the US in general...
It's poisoning itself with its fanatic capitalism so much harder than other countries because it has next to *no* ancestors who were looking out for its well being. ...And that isn't just applying to ancient history, I really mean altogether. It's nuts how there's like no wisdom or foresight in this country anymore except among groups that the ruling elite always get to casually ignore because "oh why would the people who spent their entire lives studying this problem know anything better about it than me the corporate genius who makes ALL THIS MONEY look at HOW MUCH MONEY I HAVE WOOOOOO"
I swear it's like watching a grossly zoomed-out frat party sometimes.
We're also titanic in size compared to European countries. A little harder to coordinate. France is about the size of Texas for example, etc.
@@LordTelperion European power grids are multinational, which is much harder to coordinate than in America, which is all one country and tho different state laws exist it is not as dramatic a change as between countries. In fact Texas has its own specific grid separate from other grids in America, while Europe has one that spans nearly all countries except the Baltic and Eastern Europe and even extends to turkey and Algeria and Morocco.
@@LordTelperion Yeah, it's easy to forget how stupidly huge the US is, it really is like an entire continent and it's almost impressive it's still barely holding together and hasn't just fractured into dozens of different countries already...
@@bobettethedestroyerthebuil1034 *nods* I would also add that Europe has existed under the US defense umbrella since WWII, so all that money they might have had to spend on maintaining colossal militaries was redirected into themselves instead, into infrastructure and social services.
"East, west and Texas" probably applies to more than just the power grid.
Texas has a saying "where the east meets the west". I kind of feel like there was something about the south in there too but I can't remember.
Twice a year for more than five hours is a lot!! Here in the Netherlands I’ve NEVER had a power outage! I thought that was the standard for the developed world
I thought the same and I live in Spain.
Of course its easier to maintain constant power when you live in a country with less people than California vs The north American continent
@@brawler1972 Germany here, never had an outage in my 35 years on this earth. I think I speak for all Europe (500 million people) this is not normal. I am always shocked how backwards the US is.
@@brawler1972 ehhhmm... More people in Europe then in the USA?!
Part of the issue is the size of the US. Where I live (Outside Portland Oregon, on the west coast) we rarely get power outages. The ones we do get are almost exclusively caused by trees taking out the lines. (And generally fixed as soon as possible.) In the last 5 years I've had less than an hour cumulative time of blackout.
Oh so this is why american tech channels all seem to mention what happens with devices during a blackout hahahah I've lived for 11 years in the Netherlands now and while there have been several blackouts (if I believe Wikipedia, 6 big ones from 1984 up until now), they mainly affect small parts of a city, so far I've never been through one. We certainly are spoiled by taking electricity for granted!
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People?
Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy,
and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
@@slevinchannel7589 The problems are way older, but these channels certainly help to answer some questions. As long as the viewers are willing to think.
@@gustavgnoettgen Yeah.
Theres many who really give it their best, trying to help with this or that.
@@slevinchannel7589 Probably the political incentive to keep people stupid. It's easier then to divide them and distract them from the problems the government and financial class cause.
Not to mention when education is considered in the US it's always about scores, ratings, and getting people into jobs. Less interest is given to the quality of the education, and whether or not it's hurting people by so focused on making workers instead of people.
I used to live near a transformer that toasted many a squirrel (the transformer was between my yard and my neighbor). We would lose power for about 1/2 hr. or less each time. We didn't lose power any longer than that because the power company knew where it was and what the problem was, so got there quickly and had exactly what was needed.
Five hours per person and year? Wow, that really does sound like quite a lot. Also, I finally found out what brown-out means, I wasn't familiar with the term. Or the phenomenon, for that matter.
I had no idea what a brownout was until i moved to the Philippines, now i experience them every month even in perfect weather.
5 hours or more a month is common for where i live.
I think it differs for where you live. For myself that would not be an accurate number. Growing we lost power a bunch during a year. My folks still live in the same place and lose power a lot (not as much as when I was young). They now own a jenny since they are getting older
I've never felt so helpless and worried as I did during that storm in central Texas. I don't ever want to do that again!
You and I both Libby, lost quite a few people in Abilene
Great video guys. Important stuff
25 year old Dutch person here. In my life I think we've only ever had like 2 or 3 short blackouts. Never brownouts and always just the neighborhood an not the entire small town I live in.
I live in the UK near London- we buy power frequently from your country (along with France and even Norway!) at peak times- the 1hr time difference means that our peaks don't usually coincide!
The most comprehensive video on the subject in the whole on UA-cam and I watched a lot of these.
Much of the South in the US lost water because of that storm, too. Just saying, that's a pretty serious and related issue, too.
Water pumps are powered by electricity. So unless you have an open well with a bucket, you’re going to be out of luck.
@@jesseharrell80 That's very true. But our water company still had electricity and a lot of people were out of water during that storm here anyway. They said that so many pipes broke from freezing (they're not insulated here) that there wasn't enough water in the water towers for them to function with proper pressure to keep everything stable. They had to shut down several water towers, so the people near those had no water.
Plus, they said that their filtration system functions more slowly during very cold weather. So, they weren't able to clean enough water fast enough for everyone.
They sent out notices to everyone saying to stop showering or washing dishes or laundry until the storm passed and things thawed. That way as many people as possible would still have at least a little water for necessities. Even then, the water pressure was very low.
Any many people around here weren't as lucky. Hundreds of people were completely out and were standing in line to get water from the national guard.
Of course everyone with a private well who did loose electricity was completely out of water, too.
It was kind of scary, actually. I hoard water now just in case that happens again.
The solution is quite simple. Politicians need to help power grid operators with financial help to modernize and then regulate how much they can charge.
In Denmark(Guess the rest of Europe as well) how much you can charge per kilowatt-hour is determined by the up-time of the power grid you operate. And what you can charge goes down quite fast
How do you think grid operators get paid? Those upgrades are approved by your local regulators and passed on to you, after which the utility gets a profit margin. Texas has a weird system, but most utilities actively incentivize upgrades. They just don’t so much incentivize maintenance. What they should do is allow (or increase the allowable amount of) maintenance to be included in a rate case. That will increase power bills, though, so it will be less popular than just letting there be blackouts sometimes in the long run. They should also be heavily subsidizing sustainable base load power and storage technologies while punitively taxing carbon emitting power in increasing steps. This would also make bills go up, but it would reduce significantly the incalculable amount of suffering each additional gram of CO2 will cause in humanity, non-human animals, and any of humanity’s speculated future descendants.
Climate change will be making minds suffer for millions of years. You can pay an extra $10 a month for a few trillion people to be a little more comfortable.
@@dROUDebateMeCowards or maybe stop deregulating and start mandating maintenance time
Oh, lookie: a commie!
Whatever happened to your Berlin wall, commie?
Sigh...where's a Pinochet when you need him?
This would make too much sense and therefore be opposed by Republicans. They don't like anything that doesn't allow them to be as greedy as possible.
@@bcubed72 gusano
The real problem is that Megatron keeps stealing your power and converting it to energon.
good bluff starscream i know its you.
One thing missed in the video about replacing our ancient grid is efficiency. We lose a significant amount of electricity as heat over the distances that electricity has to flow. That is usable electricity that just doesn't come out the other end. While the use of semiconductors is ideal, we're not there yet. But improving the grid will pay for itself in a few decades. But those who profit from the grid would never make that huge of an investment.
I work with renewables and microgrids every day and I am absolutely shocked at how well researched this video is and the insights they are able to explain so simply. Thank you SciShow, for making science so accessible and fun.
me too!
I'm shocked that they didn't include grid scale batteries, like Tesla is selling to Texas, as well as many other places around the US and world! Also, distributes generation was glossed over. With more and more houses/communities having rooftop solar and batteries to store the energy, this evens out the energy needs of the neighborhood. The future of vehicle to grid (V2G), or battery to grid (B2G) is promising, although still in the future.
probably the best program on north american power operation I have ever seen or heard; Bravo!!!! SciShow!!!!
This year, the power went out in my area like five times, for an hour or two most of the time. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Texas of course, but that is ridiculous.
"East, west, and Texas." Killed me for some reason.
I am an electrical field service engineer in the USA and I work on the projects to actually try to fix the USA’s aging power grid. I have never really been able to explain it to anybody even my wife and none of my coworkers do either. Because it takes this long to actually explain what the problem is, we are trying to fix but everyone is under the illusion that our electricity will never go away. That’s for peasants in the dark ages
Now we at least have a video we can show them and say: I fix that.
Thank you guys
I live in South Africa and due to corruption in our government and their control of the grid with state owned enterprises, we have a severely failing electric grid, old infrastructure that isn’t replaced, constant cable theft to sell the wired for money and failing power stations and substations. We implement what’s called “load shedding”, which is a scheduled turn off of grids and areas for specified amounts of time (usually between 2 and 4 hours at a time) throughout the day to alleviate the load on our power grid as we do not produce enough to supply the whole country. I think the corruption is being worked on, but I’ve experienced load shedding since I was a child and I suspect I’ll experience it for a few years from now (I’m 20 now and have experienced it since I was 10 or so)
Why not use batteries to stabilize the grid or store overages? Aren't we having those battery revolutions all these youtube vids have been going on about for 4, 5 years now?
Grid scale batteries by Tesla are being sold to Texas and many. other places in the US and around the world. This helps even out the grid, but it couldn't cover a multi-day outage (yet).
Wind and solar are fine in winter. Texas utilities just didn't listen to recommendations, instead buying cheaper turbines that weren't winter-proofed.
Even so, natural gas was >95% of what failed in Texas
We live in N.W. Ohio and our power is wind turbine. Would love to see a show on our area, the benefits and effects. We do get a plethora of storms and wind. Thanks and appreciation for your work and channel, be well and safe.
I grew up in rural Missouri on an industrial scale chicken farm in the early ninety's. We were dealing with livestock that could live or die depending on power flow so we actually had a massive diesel generator on sight. I remember times when quiver electric (our power company at the time) actually paid us to run it in order to help out the grid during times of high stress on the power.
Why does America have so many Flat-Earthers and Uneducated People?
Maybe because not enough sub to Sci Man Dan, Fight the Flat Earth, HBomberguy,
and other sci-youtubers and/or edu-channel?
@@slevinchannel7589...not exactly sure what this has to do with my comment?
@@mathieumartin9344 I was just talking in General.
holy god.
Wind Turbines function JUST FINE in Antarctica, Scandinavia...anywhere that is cold and has wind is fine. Texas was not because the providers refused to winterize the system.
My solar panels generated panel JUST. FINE. the *entire time* they were covered with ice.
Jeez...I expected better from SciShow than just repeating Abbott's hysterical redirection.
"Texas itself is an anomaly" is the most diplomatic way to put it I've ever heard...
You guys are so non-political and I love it. Anytime I have heard people talk about electricity, it’s either the Democrats fault or the Republicans fault depending who you ask. Y’all just like talking about how things work and want people to know how it works. Thank you for your work. You guys are so amazing!
Not me watching this during our huge power outage in Colorado 😂
Our problem today is the first thing you talked about - crumbling infrastructure. Old trees next to old power lines with hurricane-level gusts = "You're gonna have a bad time".
I've only had one full blackout in the last 5 years, and a few brownouts, but other than that...
Holland here, no blackout in the last 5 years, no brown out. When there is a blackout , even if its for just one town, its national news.
Good for you lol
Oh sorry, I forgot my passive aggressive dots...
Same I've had flickers. I live 20 minutes from Philly.
There is one street across my house gets Black Outs. Never unstand why my house has powers while others don't.
There was a flash like four days ago and I was like WTF. Thought it was a gunshot till a utility truck came by. We didn't lose power.
Comcast WiFi on the other hand... You'd think it would be good as Philli is their HQ but NOPE! Haha
Anyway America is massive and people don't understand that. 3rd most populated, richest, and massive.
@@WIckedOmenOfThunder I believe the southern region that was affected by floods had (intentional) local blackouts past summer. Not the whole country of course.
I also recall a bigger problem that affected the whole train network due to Utrecht CS being down. There was also a similar incident in 2017 around Amsterdam with 360.000 homes affected plus public transport.
I don't think the latter two lasted longer than a few hours though.
watching this from my bed at home after coming home over a day early from college due to a power outage and the cancelation of the last day of finals
It's very rare to get blackouts in Sweden too but it happens, maybe once every few years. I should note that most of the blackouts I've experienced happens when it's night time(work for the last 17 years). Very rarely does it happen during the morning/afternoon/evening. I can't even remember the last time such a thing happened must be well over 10 years.
You’ve got most of the concepts correct…..I would spend a little time researching the relationship of frequency to load and gen….and contingency reserves
Whenever the government frowns and says that creating jobs is hard... I often wonder why they don't look at the utilities they gave to private entities. The infrastructure needs upgrades and repairs, but gets horribly underfunded.
you are making the assumption teh government has the money to spend on that infrastructure. or that those jobs would be longterm enough where that counts as "creating jobs".....its not
@@007kingifrit and yet we massively subsidize oil and the pipeline that was canceled this year was being advertised as a "jobs creator" (even though it would make a few dozen jobs after initial construction and poison the soil for decades.
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat only difference is that oil is an essential resource that everyone in the country needs... a few power outages every couple weeks pales in comparison.
Just wondering - instead of comparing to the UK or Germany, what about Canada? Same weather and some of the same issues.
Funny enough I'm watching this during a blackout in Kansas..... Weird
Lol, hi fellow Kansan. Yeah, this is definitely weird.
So how the hell youre watching?
@@tauceti8060 mobile device on cell data.
@@tauceti8060 there are still some places with power. Also, yeah, mobile with data.
@@up2nobodhi Oh Ok
Scishow: Why has the US had so many power outages?
Me who lives in the 3rd world: First time?
It's amazing to see how advanced the electrical grids are in Europe and America. In South Africa we experience about five hours per day, a few times a week. We might go a month or so without an outage, but it never lasts long. Private solar systems are becoming increasingly popular here because of this.
Burying transmission lines is not the answer in cold climates. Up here near the Canadian border, many of our electrical lines were buried back in the 70s. The freeze/thaw cycle was hell for those lines and most went back to overhead lines within 10-15 years. There are still some buried lines but it is not a feasible alternative in areas where 20-30 degrees below zero is a given every winter
From a purely economic perspective:
1) Replace a little under half of the power grid during the last 20 years
or
2) Lose a 20ish year long war on terror which cost around $2 trillion
Which is the better investment? What do the American people get more from?
If you're reading this, please just focus on the economic aspect of it.
7:21 Here in Denmark the security of supply is 99.996.
But we also have most of the grid in the ground.
At this moment our wind turbines alone produces the equivalent of the nation's total use of electricity.
Last time I experienced a power outage is more than twenty years ago.
The US needs more funding in infrastructure and science based projects. We need technology and innovation to lead the way
Especially in places such as Texas as our climate continues to change and the Arctic rapidly heats up, a weaker polar vortex could cause more extreme cold snaps in Texas in the future. And northern locations must adjust for hotter summers with their technologies.
But the biggest problem in America will be the lack of attention on things like our power grid. I doubt Texas has fixed their problem and haven’t heard anything about it since the Spring.
Maybe the government plans to put all those new nuclear subs to use making power for the country.
@@user-pd8mi7ng7s the US Government is more focused on war than helping its own people
I’m in Houston and luckily I was staying with my grandparents who live near MD Anderson downtown during the storm, so I had power the entire time. We lost water almost immediately though.
Here in the uk most power lines are underground i'm always shocked the USA have above ground electric lines considering there weather
I remember a very slow brownout that happened in the mid-late 90s.
It was like someone *very* slowly turning down a dial. The incandescent lights took a full minute to go out.
Honestly 5 trillion doesn't sound too bad, considering we spent something like 6.5-8 trillion on war in the middle east since 2001, Trump's tax cuts cost about 2.5 trillion dollars, and the military budget moving forward is almost 1 trillion dollars per year...
Not one of those things benefited americans, whereas upgrading the grid will tangibly improve our lives.
Trump was all for "blackouts"..until the racist found out what it meant.
I’ve lived in Japan for almost 20 years and never experienced a single blackout.
People REALLY need to stop saying that wind turbines don't work in the cold. Much of rural Alaska and Antarctica are powered by wind turbines. You do touch on "cold hardening" turbines later in the grid, but that is well after you say "wind turbines don't work in the cold" which is simply false.
Texas's shoddy wind turbines weren't designed to work in the cold, but it isn't a wind-turbine issue, it is a matter of texas power cheaping out on their infra. No surprise there.
Alaska is mostly powered by diesel fuel. And she mentioned there are ways to help turbines function in the cold.
Gud jerb 👍
Also, I don't know if you're aware of the typical weather Texas experiences. Not one person would have ever said, "Hey! Don't you think we should prepare these turbines for the bitter cold of Texas?" before last winter.
@@bleh329 The federal government suggested that Texas winterize it's electrical infrastructure years ago. They chose not to.
@@Catlily5 Well. I suppose that tracks, all things considered.
My backyard has a canopy of wires overhead. In old neighborhoods like mine, thousands of people have aboveground services. I have had all services go out for more than 12 hours.
You’re far too polite. The problem here in the United States is simply greed, and nothing else. It’s about cost effectiveness ONLY as it relates to the absolutely gargantuan bonuses that the board members of the utility companies pay themselves, and the corrupt politicians that make it all possible 🤬
@@stingcool9455 Too bad about the 700 who did not make it.
Just put your aluminum hat back on
@@stingcool9455 Natural gas failed and it provided more energy than wind turbines.
Beside the fact that the real problem was that the wind turbines and the natural gas both weren't winterized. The other types of energy weren't winterized either.
Plus many people had huge electrical bills that month.
@@stingcool9455 Sure, I will listen to my friend in Texas before you.
You guys should go more in depth about this topic. Discussing what power factor is, the rising demand on the grid, and the amount of reliable and consistent power generated by different sources. I encourage you to contact a generation company and some of their members (utility companies) to fill in the blanks. A lot of people don’t understand how the grid really works. Im worried that some day the demand could be sky high with available power being too low, causing rolling brown outs and black outs, all while the power bills get higher and higher. I build substations for a generation company and have received dozens of classes on these topics. Im all for green energy, I just hope we don’t move too fast for the grid to keep up.
We have so many brown outs and black outs where I live in California. PG&E is notorious for its unreliability and how its essentially a monopoly, so they don't change, even when prosecuted for the fires their faulty wiring has caused. I'm sure there's more to it of course, but still.
@@dansands8140 I do have to agree. But I still don't like the fact that they ARE a monopoly. AND that there had been plenty times, prior to the massive and deadly fires that rolled through California, where they could've fixed and altered their many old and defunct electrical wires. The steps they're taking now, while annoying, are great strides towards a safer California. I just wish they'd done it sooner.
I’m from Europe. I have never heard about brownout before. Blackouts happen for no longer then 1 hour every few years due to lightning strike near by.
How an electricity grid can fail is already known by engineers and policy makers. The real question is why more isn't invested in resilience and redundancy. The US, after all, is wealthy with a huge industrial base.
What industrial base? Most things are made overseas now.
I grew up in Germany and have lived in several countries in Europe and I can only remember 2 blackouts in my whole life. Both of these blackouts lasted less than an hour. The concept of having to worry about blackouts just does not exist here.
You could have just said "capitalism and underinvestment in our infrastructure" as the cause and it would get the message across quicker
Considering how many tools there are in this comment section... you should know better than to suggest that.
Well, to be honest, you would have to say "regulated capitalism with government sanctioned monopolies".
@@bleh329 meh. Chuds will be chuds and I can't worry about them
Thank you this is questions I’ve asked for a while
Our power transmission system was really designed for a world that (mostly) does not exist anymore. It is the biggest impediment to Renewable Energy. We need to focus less on building new power source and invest more on how to transition the grid to work with distributed energy sources.
The transmission system works fine for renewables. The big problem with renewable gen is that no one wants a wind farm or solar farm in their back yard. Also, distributed gen is a lot of the time diesel or propane. Micro grids can be a good thing, but can cause more outages than they are worth.
holy heck, this was so informative-i had no idea about almost all of this. thank you for the hard work!
Living in germany, i cant even remember when we had the last blackout here. Must have been years ago. And i think most of it comes from management and burying cables. Broken cables are not really a thing here. It is much more likely to not have water for a few hours if a line ruptures than ever having something similar with electricity.
The investment of putting the power wire underground almost always pays out because there is usually way less maintenance to be done. Only the big lines between cities are above ground in most of Europe.