I disagree. These republicans said government doesn’t work. They come in and competently set policies and actions to prove that government indeed doesn’t work.
While growing Texas' economy is important that needed to be balanced with doing so responsibly. While this freeze and Harvey are natural events these are very much human created disasters. If Texas had built and improved infrastructure the same time the state has been booming much of these problems could've been prevented.
my understanding is that the narrative of turbines freezing etc is basically false. What happened is that turbines (which supply 22% of Texas/ERCOT electricity) (and don't quote me, I'm not an expert, I don't live in Texas, this is just what I've gathered from reading) ceased to produce that electricity because the wind inconveniently decided to stop blowing somewhere around February 8th. This I gather was the point of one of the graphs in the WSJ followup piece. This cessation of the wind occurred precisely at the same time that the outside temps started plummeting and Texas residents turned their thermostats way up to warm their homes. This put additional stress on coal, gas, and nuclear plants, some of which came close to their breaking points and were forced to shut down. Those generating plants' safety shutdowns put increased pressure on remaining plants to generate power, and in turn there was a cascading chain of events where plant after plant reached its no-return breaking point and was forced to shut down. Once this happened system-wide, it was game over. So while there is a non-trivial sense in which "wind power" was something of a "causal force" in initiating this unfortunate cascading chain of events, it was not necessarily the technology of "wind power" (i.e., frozen turbines) that failed: it was the wind itself that failed Texas at the worst possible time. That and the way Texas has its grid set up to depend upon a 22% contribution from wind during "normal" times. This was not a "normal" event. anyway. that's my understanding. Not my area, I'm not an expert, but that's the explanation I've seen that seems to make the most sense to me.
At first, I thought this is satire. Then... Anyhow, normally, when a cold front, one as powerful as the polar express, come through, there is a lot of wind. Then it die down. The point that wind is not a reliable continuing source of energy is absolutely correct. Storage technology is needed to close that gap. This is known and thus there is no grid that depends only on wind or solar for power. That wasn’t the problem here. The problem here is pretty well understood. Equipment failures due to lack of wintering was the root cause. And that was a conscious choice point by the government of Texas to not require winterizing.
Definitely not quickly. Trying to improve channels for flood conveyance that are determined to be waters of the US takes a minimum of 18 ****ing months to even get a permit.
Just a quick physics-and-engineering history point of potential interest: To a shocking degree, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants rely centrally on generating steam. It's all the same 18th century model of using something hot to boil water and then using the steam to turn turbines. (In this case, the turbines aren't turning paddlewheels on a steamboat but are spinning magnets past big coils of wire to generate electricity.) So anything that relies so crucially on water, I'd assume, takes a lot of money to robustly winterize. It's not just taping some newspaper around your outdoor faucets. What I've been reading points not to overloaded plants but some equipment failure related to the very cold temperatures. Will be interesting to get the nerdy details at some point.
those are good points, I was not trying to downplay the equipment failures necessarily but more to address NeRF's question about wind power's role in all of it. Again, the WSJ piece made a simple empirical claim I haven't seen anyone deny: wind productivity dropped something like 90% at the exact same time demand on coal and gas plants skyrocketed. that's all.
It’s selective data that distort and confuse ... wind, without storage tech, doesn’t have “surge” capacity. Gas does.
I like to see the cost. El Paso winterize after the 2011 cold snap power outage that last a mere 5 minutes! They did fine through this. Also, cost almost doesn’t matter given not just the suffering but how close we were (seconds to minutes) to total blackout for months.
I have a feeling catastrophic failure should motivate conservatives. You leave it to chance next time and there goes the Texas economy with it. I'm not holding my breath though.
Wind doesn't play a big enough role on the grid to blame it is the point. Republicans immediately started blaming this whole thing on wind turbine failure is what's disingenuous
Abbot is already asking for winterizing requirement. Of course, the buck doesn’t stop at him. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...lls-for-winterization-of-texas-energy-system/
I think the biggest issue with Texas is we have such a great communal response to hard times that it has allowed the grifter "Conservatives" to use that to take advantage of the communal good nature of Texans to prop themselves up. They either just shift our money around to make themselves sound like "F- the Feds" Conservatives (see swapping fed Gas Tax for Toll Roads everywhere), or they literally just do nothing under any situation and claim that as a virtue of Texan Independence. Hurricane Harvey was the greatest example of this where the infrastructure failed under Conservative leadership, but the greatness of people like JJ Watt, and many in the community like the Cajun Navy etc. let the government off the hook. You even had hacks like Rafael Cruz jumping on Fox News with people like the Cajun Navy in the background actually doing the hard work while Cruz got great TV moments for his campaign ads the following year. Texan Independence is no longer a virtue of Conservative Politics. Texan Independence is a necessity of corrupt Republican politicians who use our goodwill to prop themselves up to get rich, and do basically nothing for those Texans who take care of our own.
I'm really curious what the actual cost of weatherization would be. Obviously, this would be passed down to the consumer anyways, so the question is, how much more expensive would our electricity bill be in regards of $/kw-hr? As a consumer, I'm starting to think about installing solar power on my roof and maybe thinking about buying at least a portable generator. Here is a quote from the article. It is a fair statement to make that we may be over-engineering our way to an issue that doesn't happen very often. However, Mr. Johnson is basing his statement based on prior events. Based on the change to our weather patterns due to climate change, this past century is not the status quo to design our systems to. It's no different than our drainage infrastructure here in Houston. A 100-year rain event a few years ago meant 12.4-inches over a 24-hour period, but then the NOAA put out a study that this number had increased to 17+ inches in the past few years, which was the equivalent of a 500-year rain event over a 24-hour period prior to this study being released. Now, the county and City, plus surrounding jurisdictions have updated their design standards to reflect the higher rain fall data, which does make it more pricy to develop in the City or improve our drainage infrastructure. My point, as consumers and tax payers, we deserve transparency in this process. Whether the government of Texas elects to enforce more regulation or they sell out to these companies, we need to be made aware of the cost to make educated decisions. Ultimately, I think it will be wise to install solar in my house and a battery back-up, plus have a portable generator on board to not deal with this again, but that's just me. I also wonder, how will the local governments react to this? We have water treatment plants, wastewater treatments plants, and other infrastructure that is critical to have at all times. We also have hospitals that we need to keep in power at all costs. I would hope that this triggers a review to our engineering standards and also to modify the international codes we rely on to design our commercial and residential structures. At the end, is always about ****ing money. As a consumer, I'm willing to spend more money if the government stops being scums and just talk to us with the truth.
We are nowhere as cold as Minnesota and so I think you can say winterizing itself is not going to be astronomical. The cost of our infrastructure improvements in the whole US to deal with climate change is probably going to be astronomical.
All forms of energy went down including thermal energy production because all aspects of the Texas grid were not winterized. I don't know why wind power is singled out. There are windmills that still run in extreme cold conditions. They are winterized with de-icing equipment just like their other forms of energy. The issue here is a energy grid that has a low factor of safety when it comes to temperature ranges. All the thermal forms of energy from ng, coal to nuclear fission all require water heat exchangers and none of those heat exchangers weren't winterized therefore you had frozen pipes therefore they had to signficantly ramp down energy production because the heat exchangers were not working anywhere near full capacity.
You really don't know why??? Have you ever known a moment to pass when a Texas Republican or any Republican in the Trump era missed an opportunity to blame Democrats for any and everything?? They'll make any and everything a partisan issue. Caring about the environment is partisan. Caring about pandemics is partisan. I'm sure next it'll be water. We have boil notices going on until at least Tuesday here in my city. If that issue doesn't get solved I'm sure the need for water will be a Liberal issue if they can spin it in any way. They saw an opportunity to bash Green Energy. They took it without a thought because that's their muscle memory reflex for EVERYTHING.
Let's be honest about something here too. The Republican propaganda narratives around Texas they spewed out with little thought has little to do with Texas Republicans. It's more about Republican voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than it is about Texas Republicans. Why do you think Don Jr. is going on twitter bashing the DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR OF TEXAS??? Never let a good disaster go to waste. This is a national political reflex brought on by 5 years of Trumpism making EVERYTHING a rile the base up propaganda war of lies and disinformation so the billionaires that fund hacks like Ted Cruz and Gregg Abbott can continue to keep Republican controlled government so their pockets can continue to grow while the American working class rapidly is falling into debt, poorer quality of life, and depression.
The sad thing is even easily debunkable claims are still going to believes by a wide range of people because the news media they consume will never air the debunking. The media bubble trap will be the end of us.
