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Original Title: Overseas Online Review: “Texas Crisis” Warns, America’s Infrastructure Problems Still Hard to Solve
Affected by the blackout, a Texas resident received bottled water at a rescue station. (Photo / Reuters)The wave of criticism and reflection that the blackout unleashed in Texas continues to ferment in the United States. “We can successfully land on Mars, but we can’t power homes in Texas. It’s really speechless.” A Texas doctor’s complaint pointed to a “big problem” in the United States: As the world’s number one developed country, why the United States? Don’t spend money on infrastructure?
Underinvestment is the main problem facing Texas and even the United States in infrastructure construction. Taking Texas as an example, The Economist noted that the Texas Electric Reliability Commission (ERCOT) did not require utilities to reserve “generation capacity redundancy,” resulting in power providers not being able to supply enough power. to the grid when the demand for electricity To ensure the safety of the power grid, you must implement power outages. The US political news website Politico also noted that the Texas Department of Energy plan is “more of a response to heat waves than ice storms.” Today, there are more than 3,000 electric companies in the United States, including private companies, federal public companies, municipal companies and energy cooperatives, and most of them fight separately. In the case of the search for profit, private companies seek to maximize their profits, since they do not have the power to maintain electrical installations and increase available capacity, which has caused a serious aging of power supply equipment in the States United. According to statistics from the United States Department of Energy, 70% of transmission lines and transformers in the United States have been in operation for more than 25 years, and 60% of circuit breakers have been in operation for more 30 years.
Will the “Texas Crisis” Really Become an Opportunity for America to Solve Old Electric Infrastructure Problems? Even the American media itself is not confident on this issue. The local Politico article on February 21 stated that for decades, energy experts have been calling for the construction of large-scale electrical grids to compensate California and Texas for obtaining power from other regions of the United States, including Canada and Mexico. . Shutting down the power plant solves the power supply problem they are facing. This is an approach the Biden administration is likely to try, but they must come up with a plan to promote the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in spending.
In fact, all infrastructure in the United States faces a “lack of money.” A recent report issued by the American Civil Engineering Society (ASCE) noted that by 2029, the cumulative investment gap between expected demand and potential investment for critical infrastructure systems in the United States will exceed $ 2.6 trillion, and by 2039 exceed US $ 5.6 trillion. The report also warned that if these gaps are not filled, by 2039 aging and infrastructure damage will cause US GDP losses of more than US $ 10.3 trillion. From this point of view, whether it is the Trump administration’s $ 200 billion infrastructure investment plan to leverage $ 1 trillion, or the Biden administration’s 10-year investment plan of $ 2 trillion in total, it is difficult offset the huge investment gap in America’s infrastructure sector.
Inadequate investment in American infrastructure is closely related to the increasingly fierce struggle of political parties in the United States. Since 1998, ASCE has consistently rated the overall rating for US infrastructure as Level D; In the World Economic Forum’s “Global Competitiveness Report 2019,” an indicator for measuring infrastructure quality, the United States ranked 13th, down from fifth in 2002. However, given that government debt In the US is high and the debt burden continues to mount, Congress, which controls America’s “money bag,” has long been caught in a partisan view on issues like how to raise money and how to invest. The US construction news website “For Construction Pros” stated that although the Biden administration may propose a more ambitious infrastructure plan, the plan may still repeat the same mistakes due to differences within Congress.
At the same time, the increasingly rigid bureaucracy in the United States can also interfere with the infrastructure-building process. For many years, it is not uncommon for the US large-scale infrastructure plan to be aborted due to a number of cumbersome procedural issues such as planning, approval, and hearings. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the abandonment of the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed train that has been promoted since 2008. One of the important reasons is that the continued extension of the project’s construction period in various disputes It has caused budgets and costs have skyrocketed. The government surrendered.
Sudden extreme cold weather exposed weaknesses and problems in America’s infrastructure. However, in the face of years of accumulated illnesses, increasingly intensified partisanship and veto policies, the United States wants to jump out of the trap of the old infrastructure, I am afraid it is not singing a few words “make historic investments” and “seize opportunities to generations. ”Such a motto can come true.
After all, ten years ago, Texas suffered a cold winter that destroyed its electrical grid and a cold current caused more than 3.2 million Texas homes to lose power. The US federal government also wrote a 350-page report suggesting a rectification, but it was not implemented. If Texas really learned the lessons of ten years ago, the current crisis could be completely avoided. The key question is, can the United States avoid the next “Texas crisis”? (Nie Shuyi)
