Also their is another large motive behind this and that is the GOP's largest backers are the fossil fuel industry. Any moment where they can bash renewables, these companies will take every advantage of it. The GOP are their spokespeople.
again, I wasn't trying to convey the impression that "wind power is singled out" (for blame), but rather to address the question about wind's place in the entire roster of causes. Failure to winterize e.g., was another factor, but not the "main" factor--again, as far as I've seen in the things I've read.Here is one of the better things I've read trying to put together ALL the pieces and get beyond the "frozen infrastructure" narrative as well. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/po...-main-cause-of-ercot-outages-but-syst/595255/
100% guarantee that the way they all responded and were armed with the same meme facebook disinformation tells me that the Koch people probably coordinated talking points early in the situation. It was like within an Hour of power going out that everyone on the right just all the sudden had the exact same meme and talking point. Another example of how Facebook is weaponized as a tool for propaganda. It's so fast and efficient. Best ROI the Koch brothers and other GOP backers could ever get in pushing their agenda.
Sure.... but we all know why renewable energy was first blamed by GOP. There were dire weather predictions last week. We underestimated and underprepared for the demand. We don't have our electrical grid winterized to deal with the events that happen every few decades. If we are going to have an "isolated grid" then it makes even less we haven't spent more money over the decades.
The truth about the Pandemic finished off Trump Maybe the truth about the GOP failures in the Big Freeze will effect State politics. They deregulated to a point that endangered the people to serve the Oil and Gas industries that pay for their campaigns. And then told laughable lies about it as an insult to injury. Dems should all campaign on 'responsible government that works for the people" all day, every day.
not debating your overall post here, but just wanted to point out that the first freeze didnt come till thursday the 11th. it was mid 70's on the 8th and i was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. and the s*** really didnt hit the fan till sunday the 14th.
@Os Trigonum I respect a lot about you as a poster, as a level headed Republican. That being said there is no defending the initial attacks on renewables. We all know the motivation. I one of the biggest proponents of natural gas on the board. I'm Texan and I think gas is practical can be burned more cleanly and renewables have a long way to go. However there is no reason to attack what renewable infrastructure we have now and that's what happened and it wasn't based in fact. Period
It was cover your ass political theater that played to their base, as usual. The first claims get huge publicity on the channels the Trumplicans watch, and the truth and rebuttals get played down and ignored. The lasting impression for the cult will be "The Green New Deal did this". It will be on all their Facebook pages and cut and pasted by all their Grammas.
again, I hope nothing I have said or written here is taken as a statement in support of "defending the initial attacks on renewables." I'm merely trying to understand what Peter Taylor refers to as "unruly complexity" of a really messed up chain or web of events. I am not attacking renewables, but rather simply repeating the empirical observation that wind had just the week before provided something on the order of 44% (don't quote me) of Texas's total share of electricity generation; and then when the cold hit that number sank to something on the order of 9% (again don't quote me). Concurrently the demand on coal plants rose and I think I saw a figure that coal output was on the order of 500% higher than the week before (again don't quote me). This strained the system quite apart the winterization issues and equipment failures and subsequent decisions to shut plants off. It's not the "renewable infrastructure" but rather the grid design that relies so heavily on wind that needs reexamining. To me it looks like a system that works adequately for fair weather purposes, but which does not seem to hold up under a black swan-type of cold weather event--for a whole variety of reasons.
In the winter, wind only supplies 11% of our energy (it's 23% in the summer). Fossil fuels supply 82% in the winter (I believe it's around 70% in the summer.) The gas companies didn't go down because of increased pressure to produce more. They literally began producing 1/2 of their normal capacity because their equipment got too cold to operate properly. We even lost at least 1 nuclear reactor (that I know of) due to the cold weather.
The biggest disappointment IMO was the total collapse of geothermal energy production -- you just can't count on renewables.
The entire texas energy grid had a low factor of safety when it came to temperature ranges at the low end. There are hundreds of cold weather regions that have windmills operating in below 0F temperatures. It's a product of a low factor of safety. Again, windmills existing has nothing to do with heat exchanger pipes freezing up and ceasing. They didn't properly winterize the windmills like they didn't winterize ccgt plants, coal plants and nuclear plants.
From the article you posted: Okay, so I read through the article and they seem to claim that only "part of the issue" was lack of winterization, but how is that only part of the issue, when the equipment would have functioned correctly EVEN THOUGH the peak projections for winter were way off. This article doesn't necessarily dispute that lack winterization was not the main factor. Sure, projections done were incorrect, thus they were not prepared for the actual peak that was needed, but ultimately, if equipment would of been winterized, we would not have been at the brink of catastrophic failure as the grid operator stated in a news conference. So it boils down to money. That's it. Perhaps, if the equipment was winterized, we still would have failed to meet the demand, however, we wouldn't have been at the brink of catastrophe and rather we would of had rolling black outs at the projected 45 minutes to 1 hour range that officials had previously told us. Nobody would be mad about that. So I disagree that winterization was part of the problem, it was actually THE PROBLEM. I get it, I am a drainage engineer and I understand the over engineering and the money that is tied to constructing systems to withstand extreme events. It costs a **** load of money and in our case, the government does not do a good enough job funding several billions worth of projects, which is what is actually needed. The issue at hand is the climate is changing. For whatever reason, half of the country appears to be in denial of what is happening and rather than prepare, society is reactive about issues. How about we find a ****ing way to make these assholes pay for winterization? Or maybe, Texas needs to swallow their damn ego and ****ing connect to the rest of the country's grid and be regulated, but at least, we can have power from the rest of the country when we sorely needed. It's not as if winterization is some new topic that is only being brought up during this winter storm event. Apparently this was brought to the state's attention in 2011. We need to spend the money to make sure the equipment does not fail during another event like this. Personally, this event was an inconvenience to myself and my wife, but for others that depend on electricity (like those with medical equipment that needs to be hooked up) this was nearly a catastrophe for them. We have water treatment plans, wastewater treatment plants, hospitals, etc etc that need to have electricity at all times, otherwise, **** will really hit the fan. Our systems, need to be better prepared to handle extreme conditions.
Josh Blackman, a Houston law professor, makes the point that it probably would not be cost-effective to winterize Texas power plants to say Minnesota- or Manitoba-specs: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/02/18/a-final-weather-update-from-houston/ He cites a number of experts quote in the Texas Tribune: Second, in my first post on this topic, I observed that it may not be worth the cost to winterize Texas, because cold weather is so rare. The Texas Tribune quotes several experts who flag this precise issue: ERCOT officials have said that some power generators implemented new winter practices after the freeze a decade ago, but they were voluntary. Woodfin has said that during subsequent storms, such as in 2018, it appeared that those efforts worked. But he said this storm was even more extreme than regulators anticipated based on models developed after the 2011 storm. He acknowledged that any changes made were "not sufficient to keep these generators online" during this storm. It's unclear how much winterizing power sources would cost power plants or the state, but experts and industry leaders say it won't be cheap. "If you wanted to over engineer the ERCOT grid so this could never happen, the cost would be astronomical," said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin. Peter Hartley, an energy expert at Rice University, echoed that sentiment. "Canada runs power systems with weather colder than this all the time," he said. "A lot of these problems you can fix by spending money. There is a question: If you have low probability of an extreme event, do you want to spend the money?" I don't know what the correct path is going forward. And I join him in saying I don't have a clue what the correct path is going forward either.
