Posted on 02/17/2021 4:25:52 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
AUSTIN, Texas - Anger over Texas’ power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted Tuesday as millions of residents in the energy capital of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat — out for 36 hours or longer in many homes — would return soon or stay on once it finally does.
“I know people are angry and frustrated,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who woke up to more than 1 million people still without power in his city. “So am I.”
Making matters worse, expectations that the outages would be a shared sacrifice by the state’s 30 million residents quickly gave way to a cold reality, as pockets in some of America’s largest cities, including San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, were left to shoulder the lasting brunt of a catastrophic power failure, and in subfreezing conditions that Texas’ grid operators had known was coming.
The breakdown sparked growing outrage and demands for answers over how Texas — whose Republican leaders as recently as last year taunted California over the Democratic-led state’s rolling blackouts — failed such a massive test of a major point of state pride: energy independence. And it cut through politics, as fuming Texans froze in the dark Monday night, downtown skylines glowed despite desperate calls to conserve energy.
“We are very angry. I was checking on my neighbor, she’s angry, too,” said Amber Nichols, whose north Austin home has had no power since early Monday. “We’re all angry because there is no reason to leave entire neighborhoods freezing to death.”
She crunched through ice wearing a parka and galoshes, while her neighbors dug out their driveways from six inches of snow to move their cars.
“This is a complete bungle,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
He won’t make heads roll. He is one of the architects of t he wild and solar farm energy and shutting down coal. T Boone Pickens bought him and Perry and every Bush to be found.
You have to remember, Biden will shut all this down.
Certainly NOT Abbott. I'm a Texan. I live near Austin, though not so near that I share any of the craziness of the Lefties there. I'm angry, too, though certainly not at Abbott. I'm angry at the loony Global Warming kooks that are forcing this insanity on us.
Note, that they are not even calling it "Global Warming" anymore. That's only because they can blame every single instance of weather on "Climate Change". The earth's climate has been changing for 4 and a half billion years, and no amount of windmills and solar panels are going to stop it. But their stupid inoperable windmills are right now forcing me to stay locked up in a cold house.(It's too icy to drive on the roads, even though I have 4WD. The stores haven't replenished any of their stock anyway, and the gas stations are out of gas.)
I grew up in Northern Minnesota in the late '50s and early '60s. I walked to school many times when it was -40 degrees and colder. One cold morning after I got home, my parents told me the radio reported it was -52F during my walk. THE POWER NEVER WENT OUT! Our house and schools were always warm. It's only the craziness of the Global Warming kooks that is causing power outages now.
There’s going to be a lot of unravelling going on after the fact, and some entities are going to have some serious issues
‐———————————
The only entities will be the lawyers and their only issues will be where to stash all the money they’re going to make
The Texas electrical systems get hit at times from both ends of the
weather spectrum. Hurricanes/tornadoes in the summer and freezing
in the winter. I don’t think the power companies are happy with
either one as they aren’t selling power when the systems are down.
Texans are getting more liberal by far, in stealth form. Texas law is becoming a Byzantine labyrinth of regulations. The gun carry code is just one example. It is about 20 times as wordy, detailed and regulated as it should be. Exceptions for this and refer back to “as defined in subsection 4, paragraph c” etc etc.
The Vehicle “safety inspections” are another. Just a way to harass and milk money out of people for no true discernible benefit.
Texas “liberalism” is the idea that everything must be heavily and rigidly codified and structured in idiotic detail. That moves them away from freedom. Texas is becoming as top heavy with commissions, working groups, and committees that do nothing except generate more self serving law and ensure their own employment.
Texans have a hard time seeing that bureaucracy as liberalism, but that is what it is.
And it is starting to show. Libraries in Texas having pervert trannies read stories to kids, the idiotic covid rules, the power going out, it’s popping up everywhere.
Gas availability has been tight outside of Texas as well. SPP (Southwest Power Pool) had entered the EEA-3 level with rolling blackouts twice since this event started, but nowhere near the extent that ERCOT has. I think SPP learned from the last polar vortex some 4 or so years ago - I know we did. We winterized all of our CC and CT plants.
Note that SPP is part of the Eastern Interconnection but there is still a finite limit as to how much power can be moved from one area to another. The transmission lines and substation equipment all have a limited capacity.
I’m looking at ERCOT’s numbers today. Wind is down to just over 1000 MW, wheels it was around 4000 yesterday. Both nowhere near the nameplate capacity of over 21,000 MW, but keep in mind that the wind isn’t always blowing at the optimum level. In fact, it is more often NOT blowing at the optimum level.
One large utility in Kentucky has a plan whereby they will start a lot of their gas turbines ahead of the cold weather and run them at minimum load to avoid any freezing issues. Of course, they also have an abundance of coal generation.
And I busted out coal rings in a giant kiln. What you did was rough work. But you kept things going. Nobody can make those windmills run.
Rotating blackout plans are federally mandated. NERC says you must have a plan. Seems that some utilities aren't doing the rotating part. I mean, unless there's another compelling reason that people in some areas are not being restored, the burden is supposed to be shifting from one distribution feeder line to another.
they aren’t answering many questions this week, instead pointing fingers.
Yes, indeed. A former Democrat judge recently asked me when “we” will start winning statewide elections because of the “demographic changes.” (She assumed I was a Democrat because I am a plaintiff’s lawyer and because of the firm where I used to work.) I held my tongue rather than tell her that if she is waiting for demographics to be destiny, she will be sorely disappointed.
Democrats lump all nonwhites together with blacks, assume they all vote monolithically Democrat like blacks do, and then assume they will win every election in the future when nonwhites are a majority. But non-black minorities don’t vote like blacks, and the black population isn’t growing at all. The smart ones know that the natural growth of Hispanics won’t help them, which is why they push for immigration. Hispanics intermarry with white Anglos at high rates, and Hispanics more than a generation or two removed from immigration tend to vote like whites.
Thanks for your post #79. It has the most insight (along with your linked article) into this event as any post in days. A few responses to your post (like Meyer’s 167) help as well.
Money spent promoting wind and solar did not give independence in sudden severe cold. Instead those non-maturely engineered sources gave false confidence. The real workhorse meeting extreme demand should have been Gas fired plants which were unable to respond because the abundant gas wells, plants and pump stations sending gas to the Natural Gas fired power plants did not have sufficient money spent on them to winterize them to the level this storm required,
While the gas does not freeze, of course, there is high mineral content water accompanying it that is usually not a problem due to heat that comes with it and mineral slats, but the length and depth of the cold caused freezing components to wells, pumps and pressure plants.
>>Wind only accounts for 10% of Texas power generation during the winter,<<
Kinda hard to tell what the real story is due to the number of contradicting reports out online. I was not able to find anything that speaks to wind being only 10% during winter...not that that is wrong. Just didn’t find that.
What I did find was that the states wind energy is 23-25% (depending on who’s reporting) of Texas grid and half went down during the storm.
It’s a mess no matter how ya look at it and just goes to show how vulnerable citizens truly are, either from weather or other causes.
The Entergy “Willis” plant is to come online mid-2021. 993 Mega watt station. Fact is, if Texas doesn’t have the capacity currently...we need to get on the ball and build more generation stations.
I just keep thinking about all the elderly, handicapped, super poor folks all over having to go without power for hours/days at a time. Pretty messed up in one of the wealthiest states.
Also on the news when there were calls for residents of Houston to begin conserving power...pictures of the Houston skyline lit like a Christmas tree. Really poor optics for folks struggling.
A week ago Texas was all about “We need to secede”. A few inches of snow and some cold temperatures later Texas is shivering in the dark and calling for federal disaster assistance. I can’t be the only one who finds that amusing.
If you overlook that people died, I find it amusing, a few snow flakes and Texas shuts down and everyone is in panic and need federal assistance.
Texas isn’t as tough as they claim
New Jersey got hit with a Hurricane and a snow storm three days later, no power because the lines were done from the hurricane. And nobody froze to death. I remember Texans were saying NJ shouldn’t get any federal funding for whatever stupid reason for the hurricane. But Texas is now demanding federal funding for a few snowflakes....
Hypocrites
Wimps
Nancy boys
Jersey is tough
Texas is all talk
Interestingly, the situation with Tropical Storm Sandy in 2012 kind of reinforces my point. It got far more media coverage than it warranted, mainly because it primarily affected New York City. The coastal flooding made it worse than most hurricanes that make landfall in that area.
Hurricane Irene was another major storm that affected the area the prior year, but it didn't get as much attention because it was a very different type of storm. Irene didn't have the strong winds and storm surge of Sandy, but it brought tons of rainfall in the interior of the Northeast that caused major flooding far from the coastal cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.
Interestingly, the most disruptive storm I faced in that area during that time wasn't a hurricane and didn't even get one of those stupid names they're now assigning to any kind of inclement weather. It was the storm that moved across the Northeast right around Halloween in 2011 -- almost two months after Hurricane Irene. To the north it was simply an unusual heavy snowfall early in the season, and to the south it was just heavy rain. But for a wide swath that extended from eastern Pennsylvania across northern New Jersey and downstate New York up into southern New England, it brought a very destructive combination of conditions: heavy, wet snow falling in a region where most of the trees still had leaves on them.
The power outages resulting from this storm lasted for days. Half of the folks who work in my office had no power for five days or more. The longest was out for 11-12 days. I had no power for six days, and by Day 5 I was the only one left in my apartment complex. It was actually quite relaxing, since there was no traffic on the road and I could get into the office every day. The only downside was the cold showers, and I couldn't do laundry until the power was restored. If that wasn't an option, I planned to simply pack my camping gear into my truck and head west until I found a state with open campgrounds where I could hole up for days or even weeks if necessary.
This is a once in a generation storm. Regardless of what happened in the 80s two large coal plants went down Monday due to cold issues they were part of the 42000 megawatts of thermal power capacity that went down monday night that triggered the stage 3 whole scale load shedding. The numbers poured in in real.time.for those.who had access to the feeds. Grid frequency dropped to 59.2hz and load was shed to save the whole grid. Texas has 125,000 total capacity wind is only 31,000 of that peak demand was 69,000 set a record.Monday night. Had none of the thermal capacity dropped out every last turbine could have gone down and nothing would have happened. Wind at least added 5600 megawatts while the thermals collapsed the gas grid also very nearly went down the gas plants were the first to go off line after large industrial. Residential is always.last to.curtail with the gas grid.
A great synapsis. I didn’t have access to the more granular details (which plants were on/off line) since I’m on the ERCOT web site only, but I did see the frequency drop. That was a close call, and a system operator would have had some seriously tightened sphincters Sunday night!
I wish they could start getting some of that capacity back on. I guess it’s a matter of needing warmer weather to begin the thawing process in many cases.
mainly because it primarily affected New York City
That is true, if NYC didn’t get the winds and the localized flooding, nobody would care if a bunch of Pineys in South Jersey got blown away.
And NYC didn’t suffer anywhere near the damage as NJ did, however NYC got all the news coverage and all the sympathy from the national media. Honestly, most of NYC wasn’t even effected. And the areas that flooded, flood anytime when too many flush their toilets at once anyways. So it was no surprise to anyone. But the media milked it for all it was worth.
I still have no idea what the money raised for Sandy was ever used for.
Also New Jersey got struck with a snow storm after Sandy as well
So we had a hurricane and a snow storm
And yet Texas can’t handle a few snow flakes without needed federal assistance
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