I think the lack of cold weather prep is a upfront cost thing which hurts all renewables (nuclear most so) and the reductions of those costs in Texas helped us get to have the most wind capacity in the state. Those tradeoffs made our wind not reliable so I can change my statement to "texas wind"
frozen cooling ponds with no heaters and insulation tape were direct quote he had sources for amirite? He definitely didn't make that up.
It hurt all energy period, natural gas most so. And who's at fault for the lack of cold weather prep? Texas
Wsj editorial board in lockstep w/ the rest of News Corp...Coal gud. Wind bad. Politicians bad, but coal still gud. The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage How bad energy policy led to rolling blackouts in the freezing Lone Star State. Saying it twice in different OP/EDs makes it twice as true. A Deep Green Freeze Power shortages show the folly of eliminating natural gas—and coal.
My thing is? Why should we have to choose? There is so much cost that’s already being saved here because the lack of regulation so how can I believe that they didnt have enough money to make these wind turbines(and natural gas and coal plants) winter proof.
Different tune from WSJ's news desk. Or at least one with enough math for people to figure out wind wasn't the elephant in the room. I remember when it snowed the previous two times when I lived in Texas. Didn't face blackouts then, but people and planners involved obviously knew freezing cold wasn't good for all power generators then...just didn't give a **** to do something about it or "cold proofing" future investments. Because if there's no law to account for it... **** You. You're not the boss of me. Why Is Texas Experiencing Power Outages? How many people have been affected? On Wednesday morning, grid officials said it had restored power to 600,000 households overnight but that 2.7 million homes still were without power. At the peak, about 45 gigawatts of power were offline due to the cold. Two-thirds of this generation was from gas- and coal-burning power plants and one nuclear power plant. The other third came from wind turbines that iced up and were taken out of service. Local utilities kept power on to neighborhoods with hospitals, fire stations and water-treatment plants. Most other areas were blacked out. There was so little extra power that utilities couldn’t rotate the blackouts among neighborhoods that didn’t have critical infrastructure, leaving some homes without power for more than 24 hours. Has this happened before? Yes, Texas experienced winter rolling blackouts in February 2011 and January 2014, although these lasted for a much shorter amount of time. In those emergencies, several coal and natural gas units tripped offline due to extreme cold conditions. Plants reported frozen equipment and natural-gas restrictions, according to a report on the 2014 incident. Ercot’s head of system operations, Dan Woodfin, said this week’s ongoing “weather event is really unprecedented.” He added that Texas hasn’t seen this combination of Arctic temperatures and wind chills since the 1940s. What types of electricity are generated in Texas? Natural-gas-fired power plants generated 40% of Texas’s electricity in 2020, according to Ercot, the largest single source. Wind turbines were second at 23%, followed by coal at 18% and nuclear at 11%. In recent years, coal has been declining on the Texas grid, and renewable sources such as wind and solar have been increasing.
I feel like this is karma for what the Enron (and other Texas-based) traders did to California back in 2000. Somewhere, Gray Davis is smiling.
Im not sure why renewables have anything to do with this conversation. These are emerging solutions that still need a lot of bugs worked out. Coal and natural gas have been around for decades. There are no reasons why these should have failed. And given how sensitive nuclear is, it also should not have failed.
No, I mean I concede sir. Getting blades to reliably turn in cold wind is an emerging technology. Not like nuclear or something. Cavemen had fission reactors.
What does it have to do with coal and natural gas failing? Oh I know, if I built a windmill for my farm and its dependent on my livelyhood, Im going to build it to the best of my ability. When you have politicians and rich conservative business leaders making decisions that have no impact on them, this is what one should expect. If they were forced to live in freezing weather for a week straight, no power and no water, Im pretty sure the circumstances would be very different. If it gets the least bit intolerable for them, they just hop off to sunny FL for the week.
