No it's not true and it adds no context to anything. Its using this incident to push a narrative the narrative that you and yours want to push.
Its fair to point out that ERCOT isn't really a regulator as it functions as the operator of the grid. But ERCOT also didn't exactly try and push for winterizing the grid. Their mandate is ensuring a competitive marketplace so something like weatherization which is deemed to be expensive and onerous tends to get ignored as a priority. Basically ERCOT didn't try to push for winterizing the grid. ERCOT has a mandate to operate the grid to maximize reliability. If they cared about that part of the mandate, they'd have made a strong push in 2011 to winterize the grid. I mean really the PUC is most at fault as they issue the actual regulations but ERCOT leadership should be the ones pushing for change as it is their job to ensure grid reliability. The thing that irks me is that ERCOT keeps making excuses for why this happened. And they keep talking about how it was impossible for them to know that this would happen even though this happened on a smaller scale in 2011. They and the government were told then to mandate improvements to ensure that the grid could operate in cold weather. Instead, ERCOT leadership didn't take any of that seriously and continued to tout that they were ready. So they can't have it both ways. They (like the rest of the government) were told to make changes to the grid to protect against cold weather in 2011. And ERCOT and the government didn't heed any of those warnings. If ERCOT had actually demonstrated any effort to take this seriously, I'd probably be less hard on them. But they knew this could happen and instead assured Texans that they were ready for this.
Agreed. Aside from infrastructure and regulation issues, the late communication and lack of foresight is maddening. ERCOT has stated that they just tell the distributors how much to cut, not how to cut it. I wonder what the varying procedures are in where and how to cut power. They may not be diabolic, but transparency or at least education could help here. And freakin early communication would help those prep for days without power.
This is exactly how I feel about the idea of more shutdowns during the pandemic after one ****ing year plus of it. Government officials know the answer and $$$$ needed but they don't wanna do it because it takes a long time and hey... It might magically go away soon. Meanwhile it doesn't go away soon enough and people on the ground suffer
Ok, what part THAT I POSTED isn't true. Please provide links to show WHAT I POSTED isn't true. Not what you THINK it means...what I actually posted.
The entire post is built on an untruth. Texas grid does not rely on renewables. Not gonna continue this dumb debate you go ahead and continue pushing your narrative.
This is what I though. My ire is now properly directed from the top down: Governor, legislature, PUC, then others... ERCOT seems to be a toothless tiger being set up as a fall guy.
I will be curious to know how that impacts his home owners insurance. Adding 100K roof would lead me to believe there is an exclusion so the roof isn't covered or that his homeowner costs will go way up.
I will be speaking to him more in depth when we get back to Florida. It's one of my questions as well. Supposedly they are fairly indestructible in as much as hail should not be a problem.
I dont think they get off the hook. There was no alarm in any of their statements before this. On February 14 (Sunday), ERCOT issued a press release that simply called for energy conservation by consumers to prevent any form of blackout On February 15 (Monday) ERCOT issued a press release that stated that "rotating outages" which any normal person assumed meant temporary rolling outages (not 24+ hour outages). You can call ERCOT toothless but their press releases clearly made it sound like things were never going to be this bad. So either they lied or they're absolutely incompetent. There is both a regulatory issue here and an operational one. In the days leading up to this, ERCOT simply released press releases that stated that there was going to be increased usage because of the cold without ever indicating that blackouts were remotely possible. The government failed us with a lack of mandates around reliability but ERCOT did itself no favors by acting like all would be fine. So I have zero sympathy for them.
So, even with a number of gas, coal generator going down, they were still able to increase output, just not enough to keep up with increased demand? If these generators didn't go down, we wouldn't have a problem. It keeps coming back to that - the root cause is there was a lack of requirement for reliability (winterizing). This source vs that source miss the point. All the sources weren't required to be reliable, at least not to fed standard.
One of ERCOT's failures is that even though they knew the risk was possible, they just didn't think it would happen. I think they geniunely thought everything would be relatively fine (like some rolling blackouts if needed), thus they said all would be fine. This seems to be more of an imcompentance issue than a values issue. The values problem is with the PUC, regulation, Governor, Legislature, Don't put safety standards on Texas! mentality. They're incompetant too, but you add the layer of the likes of Perry saying "this is better than being regulated." But back to ERCOT - they really were surprised by how much power was in demand and surprised by how many power plants went offline at the same time.
Absolutely not. But a group with no real authority other than issuing "voluntary guidelines" is lower on my totem pole than the groups that pull their strings.
It sounds like ERCOT failed with bad forecasting, for not warning everyone to be better prepared (based on bad forecasting, which might be based on bad weather forecast - not sure). They did act fast enough to avoid the worst-case scenario, so credit to them for that. But fore warning would have gone a good way toward better preparedness, maybe even better balancing and actual timely brownout instead of days out of power (not sure). But however good the forecast, they couldn't prevent equipment from failing rapidly since winterizing seems to be an infrastructure investment, not a thing you can just turn on within a few days. And perhaps part of that bad forecasting is their (and the power plant operators) inability to realize the cold temp would bring their plants down. You would think the industry knows at what point their equipment would start to fail... still so many questions.
