Comment on California Grid Breezes Through Heat Wave due to Renewables, Batteries
pennomi@lemmy.world 5 months agoI 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
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Many places on Earth are hurricane proof. They’re mostly in the South Pacific where the US military built most of the infrastructure.
Have you ever heard of Guam being fucked up by a hurricane? No, because all the buildings are concrete blocks. They just close the storm shutters. Here’s a Cat 4 that directly hit the island with no deaths and no significant injuries:
www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/weather/…/index.html
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Climate change could change things, but California’s history of hurricanes is pretty okay. Better than Texas, anyway.
…m.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_California_hurricanes