Posted on 02/03/2011 6:28:53 AM PST by detective
As was discussed on the February 2nd edition of Pratt on Texas, the ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) rolling blackouts across the state could have been prevented with better planning and policy.
Electrical engineer, Ross Aten, joined Robert Pratt to talk about how too many coal and natural gas power plants within ERCOT were taken offline for maintenance. Ross also explained that if you, ‘ran the numbers’, the only way ERCOT could have met peak winter demand usage is if wind energy across the state was producing at significant totals. However, because of the ice storm and lack of wind, windmills weren’t producing any energy.
That is scary to think about. ERCOT without any public proclamation or policy announcement, put all of its proverbial eggs into the ‘wind energy basket’. Or, think about it this way, because of bureaucratic policy and bad planning, millions of Texans had to deal with rolling blackouts during deathly cold conditions.
We heard some horrible stories on the show from people in Abilene that had electronics damaged, and destroyed, because of the electricity popping on and off during the rolling blackouts.
A quick aside, I know the term ‘rolling blackout’ has become accepted because it’s a temporary blackout that is supposed to ‘spread the pain’, but in reality a blackout is a blackout. It doesn’t matter how your home or business doesn’t have power. If you don’t have power, you can’t work and in many conditions, can’t live.
Luckilly (for today), the Lubbock Power & Light and Xcel Energy grids in the South Plains and Panhandle is not connected to ERCOT. I’d imagine that if those two companies systems were connected to ERCOT, the rolling blackouts would have encompassed an even larger portion of the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at kfyo.com ...
Yes. Texas has often sold power to Mexico, often through the junction/connection at El Paso.
Canada, the US and Mexico are connected by power lines and pipe lines. We buy a large volume Canadian and Mexican crude oil and quite a bit of Canadian hydro power.
In some parts of the border, we ship US petroleum products into Mexico and Canada while we’re receiving petroleum products from these countries.
It is a hard lesson to learn the hard way, but wind energy builds in a structural requirement to burn more fossil fuels, to make up for the unreliability of the primary energy source. It does not displace generating capacity, because you need to maintain that capacity as backup for the primary energy source. So the costs become outrageous. You're basically duplicating capacity. Better, from a reliability and economic viewpoint, to stick with the reliable source and avoid the added costs of laying on a duplicate set of generators that are unreliable.
That's a plus to the "elites" who run the death-cult that is the Democratic Party and their globalist allies. Population has to be "controlled", as in reduced. See also here.
For 15 minutes? Give me a break, unless you are a hospital. Besides, it aint’t that cold where the blackouts are occuring.
Maybe the Mexicans stole some really long jumper cables.
Actually it was up to an hour and stores could not sell their goods, gas stations could not pump gas, traffic signals did not work, computer modems were off. So it was more than missing 15 minutes of some tv show.
Get a legal pad and put your laptop up. I believe I know a wee, tiny bit more about energy than you jackwagon as I am the moron who fills the pipeline with it, so show a little respect.
Oh well, I guess am just misinformed. The only blackouts I heard of lasted for fifteen minutes. My electricity never flickered and I am in the ONCOR grid.
My daughter lives in San Antonio, her husband is in the Guard and gone this week. She lives in her husband’s childhood house, which has no heat, because someone decided, Hey! It’s Texas, who needs a heater? So one of her in-laws pulled the furnace out.
She has 5 small children. They woke yesterday to frozen pipes. The high today is supposed to be 32. Yesterday the forecast high was 34, but she said it didn’t get that warm, so her pipes are still frozen. With the rolling black outs her space heater didn’t have a chance to warm up the front room which is the only room she was allowing the children to be in. Would you be able to sit in an unheated house with 5 kids wanting water and hot food and just say to them ‘man up’? Oh and did I mention her car won’t start so she can’t even go to the mall to warm everyone up?
I think the main reason you can’t get a well (assuming you are in Dallas or Tarrant County) is that it is difficult to get a pipeline connection to the well. Too much infrastructure. That is why you see most of the drillsites around railroads, highways, parks, golf courses, etc...
“Our forefathers — not that long ago — rode out these events by chopping wood and huddling together.”
Wind energy is far more expensive than the energy it replaces and totally unreliable. Do you really want America to be turned into a backward, third world country where people have to go out and chop down trees every time windmills don’t perform?
The only reason things aren’t worse is because we have an electricity infrastructure in place, the same infrastructure that liberals want to undermine and replace.
Rush read an article on his show Monday written by a DC resident who was trapped in his car for 6 hours so had time to think about the repercussions of driving a electric car in such bad weather. Things I hadn’t even considered.
Texas has never had a supply related blackout,,,, ever. That is until the government started with their windmill and green bs. Its utterly inexcusable for that to happen in Texas. That’s like running out of wheat in Kansas.
I say if our current crop of leadership can’t keep the power on (and of course this is all coming down from the political leadership) then either elect some better leaders or keep shoveling coal.
I feel your pain... no, rally, I do
Gotta agree.
And it's not the fault of "wind power," nor is it the fault of "liberals and environmentalists" that the utility folks made poor decisions on taking plants down for maintenance.
'course, it's always easier to blame the scapegoats, than to use one's brain.
Have them read Little House on the Prairie in their spare time and see what winter was like over 100 years ago. We have all grown to comfortable (myself included) and don’t know true suffering. I do have sympathy for the businesses whose livelihoods were disrupted. Some of my family’s fondest memories where from an ice storm north of Houston back in the 90’s and our power (including the well for water) was out for four days. We slept in sleeping bags by the fire and no one got frostbite. Our pipes froze and we thawed them with a hair dryer (when the electricity came back on) and we repaired them.
I think yours classifies as a true power outage and not a rolling blackout. Were there any lines down from icing? From what I saw on the news, they were only supposed to last fifteen minutes.
“I read elsewhere people are p*ssed because the stadium wasn’t having the same problems...”
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That’s right. They (Oncor) were very forthright in saying that there were “too many” people preparing at Jerry World
to cut its power.
It was like saying “up yours” to all the other residential and commercial customers. Big money has big stroke.
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