Fox/WSJ Pure Evil - Frozen Wind Turbine Lies

[genxlib]

10. It is a fundamental of Engineering Design

That we only design for the conditions we are likely to experience. All code requirements are essentially statistical representations of what an object might experience in its lifetime. They could have been designed with the same features as wind turbines installed further north but the people making that decision didn't expect to see those temperatures in Texas. Perhaps they were wrong to make that assumption but this seems pretty damn out of the ordinary to me.

Sometimes Mother Nature surprises us.

We have the ability to anticipate potential extremes in all cases but you can quickly overdesign to the point of pricing yourself out of viability. Especially since cold isn't the only potential extreme. To be truly resilient, an object would have to be designed for extremes of all kinds including heat, wind, flood, earthquake, etc.