The overwhelming sentiment is still negative towards Texas and it's energy management decisions from many people who you'd assume cared the most about efficient energy generation and it's effects on the earth. It turns out Texas is ahead in a lot of trends that are related to efficient energy usage, but for mostly practical reasons in combination with a willingness to try something new -- and people seem to have a very "not like that???" attitude.
That said, investing more in the infrastructure is something that seems to have been put on hold/not addressed appropriately in the past in Texas so the Houston Chronicle running a story to bring this to the forefront doesn't rub me the wrong way either.
> Ryan Quint, a former NERC engineer who was the primary author on nearly all of the organization’s reports on the issue, is now a consultant working with Clearway Energy, one of the developers. In comments to ERCOT, Quint wrote that nearly 90% of the resources can address their issues with commercially reasonable fixes such as software upgrades, including the vast majority of solar issues in both of the Odessa events.
So just a little software is holding Texas back? Well that's gotta be inexpensive! What could software cost these days -- surely a couple 100k engineers and a month or two?
(the above line is a joke)
In all seriousness though, I do wonder if the unreasonable distribution of talented engineers to... trivial (but profitable) pursuits negatively effects some more nuts-and-bolts industries like this.
To your last point, Bentley software is standard for most DOTs for highway design. All their offerings are rife with quality issues to the point that I have never run their software without some spooky behavior requiring a reset or flushing the ProjectWise cache.
For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.
That said, investing more in the infrastructure is something that seems to have been put on hold/not addressed appropriately in the past in Texas so the Houston Chronicle running a story to bring this to the forefront doesn't rub me the wrong way either.
> Ryan Quint, a former NERC engineer who was the primary author on nearly all of the organization’s reports on the issue, is now a consultant working with Clearway Energy, one of the developers. In comments to ERCOT, Quint wrote that nearly 90% of the resources can address their issues with commercially reasonable fixes such as software upgrades, including the vast majority of solar issues in both of the Odessa events.
So just a little software is holding Texas back? Well that's gotta be inexpensive! What could software cost these days -- surely a couple 100k engineers and a month or two?
(the above line is a joke)
In all seriousness though, I do wonder if the unreasonable distribution of talented engineers to... trivial (but profitable) pursuits negatively effects some more nuts-and-bolts industries like this.