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 ...
It isn't contradictory. The 23-25% number is of generation overall, while 10% is the amount on which ERCOT depends during winter. At least, this is whatWSJ reports ERCOT said.
The greenies and the government are to blame nonetheless, though. Even though freezing wind turbines weren't the immediate cause, the heavy subsidies and tax incentives to develop wind and other "renewables" meant less investment in updating and expanding gas and coal plants. Why spend money hardening a coal plant that they're just going to make you shut down anyway, and why spend money hardening or expanding a gas plant when you can get a better after-tax return on your money spending it building a wind farm.
We're certainly on the same page regarding wind: spending money on wind rather than proven, cheap, reliable gas and coal, is insane.
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.
My office is in one of those buildings. I haven't been in it since Friday, but it was lit up all the same. My landlord told me downtown was subject to rolling brownouts, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. I know people who have been going into work downtown, and they never lost power that I'm aware of. They specifically went in because they had heat in their office, but not at home. I might have done the same if I hadn't invested in a generator this year.
A MCF on this scale seldom has a single point of failure. Natural gas gathering and transport failed. Well wastewater collection failed which caused wells to be shut down. Many NG and coal plants weren’t winterized. And wind turbine and solar panel output plummeted. Throw in a lack of redundancy and NG storage and you have a royal mess.
That was mostly "nuisance" damage -- not necessarily a threat to health and safety.
Gardasil Perry is a bad penny that keeps turning up.
Also, Governor Let's Wear Masks Forever Abbott can piss off as far as I'm concerned as well.
A lot of that was nuisance and the rail tunnels needed major repairs before Sandy
Christie parked all the old NJ Tranit trains in the flood zone so he could get the feds to buy him new double decker trains, that was the reason for that
As someone who grew up with snow in northern Ohio and now lives in Texas, I don't think that's fair. Why would we spend money preparing for something that happens only once in a generation?
Even though I grew up with far worse winter weather than this, I had to do far more to prepare for it here just because it is so unusual and my house and its plumbing aren't designed for weather below 20 degrees.
Millions lost power in New Jersey due to Sandy. Only a fraction of that lost power during the far more destructive Hurricane Harvey, because that's something our grid actually prepares for. Even so, I wouldn't fault New Jersey for failing to spend billions of dollars to prepare for another hurricane when, again, it's a once-in-a-generation occurrence. I also wouldn't expect New Jersey to make the same preparations we make to power air conditioning during hot weather. New Jersey defines a "heat wave" as three consecutive days over 90 degrees--Houston averages over three consecutive months of 90 degree heat every year. New Jersey's would be declared a federal disaster area if it ever dealt with that.
What is significant going forward (once the recriminations stop) is what it’s going to take to repair the damaged wind generators. Don’t even know what the damage is yet but I know from an acquaintance how hard some of them can be to work on - some of them don’t have service lifts. It’s going to cost to fix them and even more to write them off (never happen). Meanwhile something has to replace the lost output. Good things can come out of this but they’re likely to be expensive good things.
As Hurricane Sandy approached, the powers-that-be implemented a storm preparation plan that was based almost entirely on the experience the prior year from Hurricane Irene. So everyone was preparing for what they expected would be torrential rainfall and interior flooding of rivers and creeks. Several people in my office were under mandatory evacuation orders in places like Morris and Somerset Counties. NJ Transit moved their trains to the Meadowlands Maintenance Complex in South Kearny from outlying yards in Gladstone, Dover and Suffern -- to deal with a scenario where the Raritan (Gladstone), Rockaway (Dover) and Ramapo (Suffern) river basins flooded again.
As it turned out, the 2012 storm was nothing like the 2011 storm. Coastal areas that had seen no damage in Irene were devastated by Sandy, and the interior areas that had been flooded in Irene saw no flooding at all in Sandy.
I’ve noticed that the capacity on the ERCOT page is over 51,000 MW now. Seems like maybe they’re getting some generation up and running. I’m thinking that they’ll be picking up a little bit of load as the generation becomes stable.
If Texans want to find blame for this all they need to do is for some of them to look in the mirror and others to look to their neighbor.
Power to Choose in Texas led many to opt in for Green energy suppliers hungry to find outlets to use their heavily tax incentivized green power options. Enough Texans choose this folly to cause it to displace more traditional and reliable power supplies. 23% of the state’s power now comes from “renewable” energy sources that are not even available in these weather extremes.
In the next acts of this green new deal we will see massive failures of offshore wind farms. I’ve spent 40 years in the offshore oil business. It is a merciless environment in good places. I can’t imagine the disaster when a Noreaster or errant hurricane wipe out a New England offshore wind farm.
Already the cover-up by the greenies has begun. They blame the failure on greedy capitalists who are too cheap to “weatherize” the windmills and solar panels. In their propaganda this failure has nothing to do with the inherent unreliability of these energy sources. This is a reality that is being learned all around the world. You can’t build a modern society on hopium, pixie dust and belief in Unicorns.
Texans. Look in the mirror and across the street to find the cause of this disaster. The seeds of it are in your Power to Choose and some of you did not choose wisely. Now everybody is paying the price.
How much do you love subsidized green energy now?
Someone has to say it: THIS was a cold weather event redux, first performed in 1989, repeated in 2011 and again here in 2021. Temps this time matched those in 1989, before Texas went with a de-regulated electric market. Temps in 2011 only dipped into the teens instead of the single digits as in 1989 and 2021.
“Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February 1-5, 2011”
2-01-2011 Feb 2 2011 ERCOT blackouts
https://www.balch.com/files/upload/NERC_8_16_2011_SW_Cold_Weather_Event_Final_Report.pdf
Doc also contains:
“Impact of Cold Weather on Gas Production in the Texas
and New Mexico Gas Production Regions of the United
States During early February, 2011”
“Winterization Document”
Prepared for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Prepared by Gas Technology Institute
by Kent F. Perry
An excerpt from pg 188:
After a Senate Committee hearing, the bill was amended and unanimously adopted by the Texas Senate. The House unanimously passed the bill on May 23, and the bill was signed into law by Governor Richard Perry on June 17, 2011.
“February Power Blackouts Across Texas echoed 1989 Failures”
By Eric Dexheimer
Austin American-Statesman, Apr. 10, 2011
Posted Apr 11, 2011 at 12:01 AM
Updated Dec 12, 2018 at 10:13 AM
https://www.statesman.com/article/20110411/NEWS/304119704
My source is the Texas Public Policy Foundation exit poll from the 2016 election and the CNN exit poll from the 2018 election, plus the general results from statewide and Harris County elections for the last 15 years.
It’s not the same Texans getting more liberal (although there are plenty of older Texans who were always liberal). It’s new, younger Texans who are liberal and not getting more conservative as they get older.
I don’t know where you live, but I can say that, in Houston, the most liberal people I know are whites who were born and raised in Texas.
Didnt know about apartments now can’t have gas stoves. Thanks for the info.
yes it did
I can’t ind the quote rom Gov. Abbott but he also said the grid did not ail.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/power-outages-texas-hours-power-plants-state-officials-update-ercot-electrical-grid/287-1cd1b3a2-b6b4-4756-b7c1-5f462e2f1bf7
Power outages could continue into Tuesday, last for hours as plants battle cold to get running again
One state official said the power plan was working exactly as it was supposed to to keep the grid intact.
Author: Jason Trahan
Published: 12:44 PM CST February 15, 2021
Power outages caused by severe stress on the state’s power grid will likely continue until Tuesday and maybe even beyond that, state officials said Monday morning.
The outages will continue until enough power is being generated to meet the demand of the system, Dan Woodfin explained. Woodfin is the director of system operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which coordinates the state’s power grid.
“We anticipate that we’ll need to continue these controlled outages at some level for the rest of today and at least the first part of tomorrow, perhaps all day tomorrow,” he said Monday.
As temperatures continued to drop overnight Sunday into Monday, wind and “thermal” generators began to fail in the extreme cold, he said, which has led to, in some areas, outages that have lasted for hours.
“We don’t know exactly why they tripped offline yet,” Woodfin said. “There’s some limited reporting that they do, but we’re certainly going to be doing our normal event analysis that we do. This one will probably be bigger than our normal event analysis, but we’ll certainly go through and figure out why those things have happened.”
He said ERCOT doesn’t actually initiate outages. Power companies such as Oncor in North Texas and CenterPoint in the Houston area, for instance, choose where to cut power, when, and for how long, he explained. There is no limit to how long such an outage can last.
Those companies avoid “areas where there are hospitals or emergency responders and those kind of things,” Woodfin said. “And there’s some other technical things that cause them not to use certain areas. So they’re kind of bound to use those areas that don’t meet one of those categories.”
Woodfin said the state’s power grid plan did not fail.
“The plan actually has worked,” he said. “There’s just insufficient supply of generation on the grid to meet that very high demand on the grid. The plan is intended to preserve the reliability of the grid as a whole, to make sure that we don’t have worse problems than these kind of outages. And so it has done exactly that and will continue to do it.”
more accounts that the grid did not fail. Grid repairs would be even worse than was we face
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/weather/texas-winter-storm-wednesday/index.html
Texas officials pointed the blame at the power company and called for investigations. US Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democrat who represents parts of Fort Worth and Dallas, said he’s learned from an industry executive that the power grid was just minutes from failing on Monday before state agency officials initiated emergency rolling outages.
“I want people to know that we were minutes away from the entire grid crashing,” he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera, criticizing ERCOT and Republican leaders for not better preparing for the freeze.
“They certainly could have taken some precautions that would have prevented what we’re having to deal with now,” Veasey said.
Because the laws of mathematical statistics say that the "once in a generation" thing can happen IN ANY YEAR. The failure to adequately do simple winterization is inexcusable.
Sure. And a power plant could also be hit by a meteor any year. But the issue is how much the plant operator is willing to spend—or, more importantly, how much cost the consumers are willing to bear—to meteor-proof the power-plant just because it could, but probably won’t, happen.
I don’t think there is anything simple or cheap about winterizing thousands of megawatts of power generation. Is it worth spending that money to prevent a once-in-a-lifetime event that will be over in a week? The plant owners, and the market, decided no. And that decision will now be second-guessed.
"I" vote "yes". Insulating and heat tracing pipes isn't rocket science, or particularly difficult.
"The plant owners, and the market, decided no. And that decision will now be second-guessed."
And rightfully so, because their CUSTOMERS will demand it. I personally hope some of these assholes, at minimum, lose their jobs.
Let's see what the collective cost of these outages is. Forget lost productivity and deaths, just the physical damage done to homes and businesses across the state from broken pipes, etc. will probably dwarf the incremental cost of winterizing the power infrastructure.
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.