Posted on 02/03/2011 7:14:31 PM PST by dragnet2
It’s admittedly more fun when someone on the left gets their ox gored than when it happens to a normal person.
We in New Mexico would send em something but we are out of natural gas
Hang this right around the necks of the democrats and environmentalists...we could have been drilling and constructing nuclear plants YEARS ago, but the cowards in Washington wouldn’t act...
Ya got people here hoping for death and destruction every time some small quake happens in CA...When we had rolling blackouts years ago, we were a doomed, 3rd world cesspool, with chants of die, die....lol
But all of a sudden, Texas has rolling blackouts, hospitals going dark, and no one is supposed to say a word.....I've heard every excuse in the book as to why all these rolling blackouts occurred, (including it's no ones fault). Those poking fun at this were called inappropriate and insensitive!
Pretty amazing to watch....
Yup. Oh and the roads are clean from the airport to the Stadium in Arlington!!!
Thanks for your response and insight into how the systems work. I suspect there will added emphasis on winterizing the equipment to a higher level once the outage causes have been evaluated.
El Paso Electric had rolling blackouts impacting customers in both west Texas and southern New Mexico.
Info on the coal units are mentioned in this article:
http://www.awea.org/rn_release_02-04-11.cfm
Over the last few days we’ve learned more about the events that led to the rolling blackouts that occurred Wednesday morning in Texas. Wind energy played a critical role in limiting the severity of the blackouts, providing enough electricity to keep the power on for about three million typical households. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, has confirmed that wind energy was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW of electricity (about 7% of ERCOT demand at that time), roughly what it was forecast and scheduled to provide, during the critical 5-7 AM window on Wednesday when the grid needed power the most. In an interview with the Texas Tribune, ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett put it this way: “I’m not aware of any nuclear plant problems, and I’m not aware of any specific issues with wind turbines having to shut down due to icing. I would highlight that we put out a special word of thanks to the wind community because they did contribute significantly through this timeframe. Wind was blowing, and we had often 3,500 megawatts of wind generation during that morning peak, which certainly helped us in this situation.”
We’ve also learned what did cause the rolling blackouts: a large number of fossil-fired power plants broke down and failed to provide the amount of electricity they were scheduled to provide. The grid operator and others have confirmed that 50 power plants totaling 7,000 MW of power capacity experienced outages and went offline due to the cold weather. At least two of these were large coal power plants that went offline due to pipes freezing or breaking at the plants. Some gas-fired plants also experienced outages due to the cold, and some gas-fired plants were unable to produce as scheduled due to inadequate pressure in natural gas pipelines due to high demand. In addition, an estimated 12,000 MW of coal and gas-fired power plants were offline and undergoing maintenance during this time period, making them unavailable to provide electricity. While there are scattered reports that a few of Texas’s roughly 7,000 wind turbines experienced reduced output due to the weather, the vast majority of the fleet was unaffected and continued producing electricity on schedule.
end snip
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.