The 5 Whys of Texas
Why it's always a good idea to design an airplane engine or an electrical grid for the possibility of failure.
Quality control is the boring but indispensable science of creating systems that work consistently and reliably. It is the reason— for example, a Boeing 777 airliner can lose one of its two engines after takeoff, as happened in Denver on Saturday, and still make it back to the airport and land with all 241 passengers and crew unhurt. On a more mundane note, it is the reason the last Starbucks latte you had tasted pretty much like the first one you ever had.
All those people in Denver are alive today because back in 1990 when the plane was being designed, someone at Pratt & Whitney, the engine maker, and Boeing asked a series of simple questions:
What happens if the aircraft loses an engine or the engine simply stops working? The obvious answer is we need to create an aircraft that can stay aloft for a period of time with only one operating engine.
How long does it need to stay aloft with one engine? Well, it’s going to be flying across oceans so it needs to be able to stay in the air long enough to reach land somewhere. Say, it goes out in the middle of the Atlantic, we need to design engines that individually can keep the aircraft flying for more than 3 hours after power loss.
Wow, that’s going to be expensive. Most flights are not fully loaded. Can we assume that the weight will be less than the maximum and save a little money? Don’t be a dumbass. Next question.
Flying a big plane with one engine is like steering a boat with one oar while the other is dragging, can a human pilot handle it? Yes. No one can fly this aircraft and be certified to do so without specific training, and annual retraining, on what to do about engine failure.
What can we do to assist the pilot? Ideas? How about a system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls with an electronic interface that converts flight controls to electronic signals transmitted by wires to computers that determine how to move the actuators at each control surface to provide the expected response. Of course, you’ll still be able to use mechanical flight control backup systems. We’ll call it Fly-by-Wire and charge a lot extra.
You get the idea. The 5 whys technique was conceived by Sakichi Toyoda, the Japanese industrialist, inventor, and founder of Toyota Industries in the 1930s. It is one part of the revolutionary quality control initiative that allowed Japanese manufacturing to overtake and surpass America in the 1970s and 80s.
The 5 whys is designed to get to the root causes of problems quickly and is remarkably simple. When bad things happen or might happen, you drill down to their root causes by asking "Why?" five times.
So what do the 5 whys have to do with the Texas climate disaster? I thought it might be fun to apply the technique and see what it reveals.
Why did the Texas power grid fail?
Texas has one of the largest reserves of energy sources in the world, including oil, gas, coal, and even some renewables like wind. The system failed when temperatures dipped below freezing and the pipelines and other equipment froze and power plants were unable to generate electricity for more than 2 million customers for several days.
Why did the pipelines and equipment freeze?
There are no state regulations that require even minimum standards of reliability and performance. Since Texas has a moderate climate most of the time and there are no requirements or incentives for power operators to spend money to winterize their powerlines and equipment, they don’t. That’s how free markets work. (Imagine the consequences if the engineers at Pratt & Whitney had been operating on the profits over safety mandate when they built the 777 engine.)
Why didn’t they simply “borrow” some power from utilities in other states?
The Texas energy grid is deliberately not connected to America’s eastern and western grids and therefore free of Federal regulations. It’s a money and politics thing combined with a certain “Let the Yankee bastards freeze in the dark” attitude.
Why is the Texas grid so completely unregulated?
Texas politics has been dominated for decades by Republican legislators and Governors who all too frequently are deeply in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. The result is an open contempt for even minimal regulations or anything that would hinder extractors of oil and gas or electricity operators in their unfettered pursuit of profits.
Why can’t these obvious problems with obvious solutions ever be fixed?
Because politics has become so toxic that the possibility of reaching agreement on what we need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change, or even to agree that there is such a thing, raises questions about our future survival. If we can’t stipulate that at least 500,000 Americans are dead today because of the Covid pandemic, how can agree on what caused a snowstorm in Texas? I used to say, as a joke, that I prefer government by an enlightened aristocracy which, of course, is what our Founding Fathers were. I’m not sure I’m joking anymore. It’s going to take a lot of collaboration between enlightened citizens, business leaders, and honest technologists to keep this planet aloft for another century. We can start by reviving the number one rule of quality improvement—fix the problem, not the blame.
Note:
For those of you who have been itching to read more about quality control, I researched and wrote all of Fortune magazine’s annual American quality improvement supplements in the 70s and 80s so I’m old enough to have met many of the heroes of the quality revolution, including W. Edwards Deming, the best-known of the Americans who taught the Japanese how to beat us at our own game. Click on the link for an obituary of Deming that I wrote several years back.
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