Abbott is a joke, will again not vote for him

Abbot made up his mind. The non existence CRT for k-12 is on the agenda for the special session while electricity is not. Priority.

 

That whole energy grid meltdown we had (btw, it was solar and wind energy fault, doncha know)... not important, but CRT and trans kids? That tops the list of important issues facing Texas.

 

Corrupt mother****er who has zero problems bending over for anyone who will flip him a dime.

 

He gets a pass because he is in a wheel chair, but he is a horrible governor.

Greg Abutt - needs to go.

DD

 

I hate that the electric grid has gotten political. Good decisions are harder to come by when things get partisan. But, I'll try to decode a bit.

I am for a renewable revolution in power generation. But, I think progressives tend to underestimate the enormity of the challenge of completely decarbonizing. Wind and solar are intermittent, so if we're going to rely heavily on those technologies we will need a lot of battery storage, a lot of surplus capacity, and/or backup fossil fuel plants to bridge those times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. It's hugely expensive. In general terms, he's right that the most reliable grid is built on fossil fuels. It's only decarbonization that throws a wrench in the works.

So when Abbott says renewables should buy when they can't generate, he's talking about requiring a financial instrument that covers over this intermittency weakness that the technology has. Renewable generators could solve this requirement by pairing with batteries, which honestly would be great. Though it could also be solved with some clever hedging. It sounds like a poison pill, but I don't think it would be. And in any case, there are powerful corporate actors in the Texas wind industry that I doubt will allow anything too adverse to their interests to happen. I don't see how you do this in practice though, with the way the market is built to be energy-only. Other markets solve this problem with a capacity auction. If Texas had one, they could make requirements like this, but they are allergic to building one.

 

Hundreds of people dying from an event that could have been prevented tends to make that issue political.

 

I get that.... but isn't the larger issue being our generation isn't winterized to withstand temperatures below "X"?

 

Ehh, they passed a law requiring it now. I don't think a law will make a lick of difference, but I also don't think it makes sense to focus just on preventing the last disaster instead predicting the next. I think the core issue for Texas is how do we decarbonize our generation fleet without (a) costing a fortune, (b) scaring off investors, and/or (c) decreasing reliability. We can double-down on gas like Abbott wants to, build bigger capacity reserves, require winterization, etc, and have reliability but we can't decarbonize that way. Abbott thinks or at least will say climate change isn't real or important, but it's clear to me that even if we keep burning natural gas the rest of my life we need to at least be working on the transition away from it.

 

I mean winters are an annual thing.

I do agree with your overall point, but it just seems a bit shortsighted to not put more emphasis on getting infrastructure weatherized/wintered as well as making sure renewables' intermittency is addressed. I lean towards more "lets move away from coal first, and use gas and renewables." Personally, I still view gas as a pragmatic bridge in spite of climate change as we humans use a lot of energy.

 

I love him

 

Sure, and 9 winters in 10 there's no problem. Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I'll go a little way. There were these 2011 recommendations for winterization. The papers seize on them not being requirements and let readers assume generators weren't implementing them so they could "save money." I've yet to see any report to explain why each plant failed and whether they had winterized (there is such a report for the 2011 event), so I don't know if winterization was relevant or not. In my (perhaps distorted) industry view, big generation companies did winterize per the 2011 recommendations (in reality, it's cheaper to winterize than to have a plant fail in bad weather) and I'm aware of plants that failed despite taking all winterization steps. So I don't think requiring winterization by law will make any difference. Uri was very cold for a very long time. Even plants in northern states failed during Uri and/or the 2014 polar vortex. It is inevitable. The solution is not to try to harden them further so they don't fail, but to build resiliency so that when they do fail it won't be a complete disaster. We needs things like better capability to roll blackouts, more diversity in fuel source, more ability to import, backup generators in key buildings, alternate sources of heating, and insulate the utility industry from the gas commodity market.

But, back to Abbott being a joke, the joke is that he will be able to easily achieve greater grid reliability by doubling down on gas generation. It'll take a few years so he might not get full credit. But he's going to sell us out on decarbonization to do it. So more sweltering heat waves, arctic blasts, hurricanes, and forest fires to make the job of reliability that much harder.

 

Build that Texas wall Abbott

 

Well maybe the 2011 standards aren't taking into account increased variability in weather? We just had one of the coldest fronts sweep down the plains and into gulf before having a historic heat wave envelope the NW/W. You are more knowledgeable about the industry than me but when we do have that 1 out of 10 winters (or 1 out whatever) it could be another one of the most costly state disasters in history.

 

Meh.... he has out lived his usefulness. I would love to see him thrown off a bridge or a cliff... listening to him scream and watching his wheel spokes spin as he falls.

 

You’re starting to sound like me around here

 

Probably the requirements still need to be written by the PUCT, so we will have to wait and see if they differ from 2011. But yeah I expect more disasters regardless. It might be a freeze, but it might be a heat wave or wildfire or drought or flood or terrorism or industrial accident. There are a lot of ways to fail.

For Abbott, I think he unfortunately has to do something with the grid to avoid being accused of doing nothing by his competitors. Hopefully he feels he's done enough because he'll only do the wrong things anyway. Not so lucky on the misogyny and racism agenda. He's going to have to keep feeding the Trumpers on those through the primaries.

That was grim.

 

I don't know enough about Abbott to say whether ideology has blinded him, is just venal that he feels he can only survive pandering to the ideologues, or if he power hungry so that pandering to ideologues is path to further his career.

 

What else do you need to know?