So you’re saying they’re too stormy.
Comment on California Grid Breezes Through Heat Wave due to Renewables, Batteries
PunnyName@lemmy.world 5 months agoJust know, hurricanes aren’t just stormy, they have what’s known as a storm surge. The lower pressure effectively sucks the water up multiple feet, causing a rise in sea level. So you now how a body of water with a whole new height moving toward and over everything.
Kind of how a tsunami isn’t just a little extra water moving inland, it’s a whole section of the ocean being displaced…and with the path of least resistance being over land, you’re gonna have a bad time.
pennomi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I was here for it - Beryl took out the whole city, even the parts far, far away from the effects of the storm surge. One would expect chaos on the coast, but not inland. 70-90mph gusts are common enough (multiple times per year) that the grid should be resilient to them, but it simply isn’t. Blatant infrastructure mismanagement.
protist@mander.xyz 5 months ago
My family’s there too, and I grew up there, and I couldn’t disagree more. “70-90mph gusts” cause serious damage to trees, homes, and power lines, but they’re highly localized, and so the damage is easy to repair. Houston just experienced 60-70mph sustained winds with gusts up to 90 and a number of tornadoes across the entire metro for like 2+ hours, which caused destruction several orders of magnitude greater than what you’re comparing it to. All that is to say Centerpoint Energy definitely got caught with their pants down, which had the outage dragging on for a lot of their customers
pennomi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No doubt it should be considered extreme weather. But since things like this happen with regularity, the infrastructure should be engineered to handle it.
It’s likely cheaper for them to ignore the problem, however.
Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There is not place on the planet that is hurricane proof. They’re the most power thing on planet earth. Texas is infrastructurally in the dark ages but California would be left in the dark too if a catogory 1 or 2 made direct landfall. And I say this as someone who’s lived in the mid Atlantic