Thinking of our Friends in Texas

I dont live in Teaxas. I am going by what they say on the news. Its not one news site, its all of them that say the same story.

Does anyone know WHY the non-green power plants are under capacity right now today ?

This will explain most of it;

From the article;

“Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter,” The Washington Post reports. “But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter,” and the losses tied to thermal plants mostly “relying on natural gas dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines by a factor of five or six.” According to ERCOT, wind power generation is actually exceeding projections.

One nuclear reactor and several coal-fired plants went offline, but “Texas is a gas state,” Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas, told The Texas Tribune. And “gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Instruments and other components at gas-fired power plants iced over, and “by some estimates, nearly half of the state’s natural gas production has screeched to a halt due to the extremely low temperatures,” as electric pumps lost power and uninsulated pipelines and gas wells froze, the Tribune reports.

After a 2011 winter storm knocked out power to about 3 million Texans, a federal report warned Texas the same grid debacle would happen again if it didn’t adequately weatherize its power infrastructure and increase fuel reserves — and reminded Texas that “many of those same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years earlier and had gone unheeded,” The Associated Press reports.

“Upgrades were made following the 2011 winter storm,” The Texas Tribune notes, but “many Texas power generators have still not made all the investments necessary to prevent the sort of disruptions happening to the equipment.”

The other thing that residents of Texas are screaming (about and rightly so) is why areas that have come back online are allowed to light large Corporate Buildings like Christmas when they are closed.

Never understood that crap anywhere, it’s like America saying “Look how effing cool we are, we will burn electric for no reason other than Vanity”
I always was raised to relate electric to water, you wouldn’t leave a sink faucet running after you used it and left the room, so why should you leave the electric “Tap” on when not needed?
Not talking security lights, talking unoccupied working/living spaces.
If we all give a little it makes a big difference on the Grid, not to mention lower bills for us all.

Texas appears to be unique in that it keeps it’s own power and therefore is isolated/shutoff to/from neighboring states which could help out if they were linked up to each others Grid but they are not.

Here’s an idea with those of us who have a long commute via car/truck. Charge powerbanks and flashlight batteries on drive and use them at home instead of AC lights.
Your vehicle produces more juice than it needs so it costs no more of fuel mileage and your flashlights at home have been saying “Use me , make me earn my keep”

It’s Win, WIn, WIN :slight_smile:

Enough for now, keep safe everyone and remember sharing a smile costs you nothing and makes you feel better too.

It’s weird, Michigan is a “gas” state also. I don’t know what the ratio of NG vs Electric furnaces, but put it this way. I’ve never seen an electric furnace in a house in this state. And I remember 2 power outages in the last 30yrs. One was from ice and downed lines, and the other was a construction crew that cut a main line.

And this has never happened as far as I know. And I can guarantee Michigan has much colder temps on a normal basis than Texas has ever seen, including last Monday. It’s –13ºF right now.

I don’t know, maybe TX households only have electric heat pump furnaces which don’t work very well in temps under 50ºF, and not at all if electrical grid is down

Ahh, there it is, ” it didn’t adequately weatherize its power infrastructure and increase fuel reserves “. :wink:
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Now the blame falls on those responsible for not fixing a known problem. :wink:
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Thanks Muto !!
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I never saw a building where they purposely leave all the lights on.

Global warming contributes to Texas cooling. I guess keeping the pipelines and wind turbines warm wasn’t even a consideration before this. I wonder how feasible it would be to prevent a repeat of this in the future? Maybe string up some Texas lumens lights around the important spots.

Good luck to everyone down there and stay safe. It seems like everyone in the country (and the world) is going to have a taste of Mother Nature’s wrath in their lifetime

https://images.app.goo.gl/yufxEGMuhCSbrAiE6
NYC skyline

Only 10% of the lights are on, how do you know those offices are empty? Could be the cleaning crew etc.

Also some sky scrapers have outdoor display lights to show off the building.
This is normal.

Yeh, no one wants to spend the bux to prepare for a “once in 20yrs” storm, let alone a “once in 100yrs or more” storm.

The grid was in trouble in 2011 as well.
This article breaks down how they operate on daily basis. Pretty interesting and thorough;

All of our infrastructure is in the same boat. Look at the roads for instance. Bridges, sewers, water systems.

You hit the nail on the head. Although, it is not all the news sites. ArsTechnica, Bloomberg, Politifact, Houston Chronicle, etc actually did the reporting to inform people of what is really going on. Many sites just want people angry and want people to distrust renewables in order to further the profits of the existing energy industry. (And avoid accountability for not taking the steps to winterize their infrastructure.)

There are indeed a lot of news sites telling the same story. Unfortunately the story they are telling is a ferry tale.

I work in the world of logic. I have to look at failure points and design logical solutions to mitigate them. This was a massive failure. When 90% of the failed infrastructure is legacy fossil fueled and you decide to address it by attacking the 10% of the so called feel good ideas that failed, you will not be able to address the issue. It is simply an illogical approach. The greenies had virtually nothing to do with this situation. Does not matter if their ideas are genius or illiterate.

When I was in the power industry the idea of wind turbines being economically viable was unfathomable. Crazy ideas of wild eyed “greenies”. My power company also sold their share of a fiber optic line at a huge loss because the idea that a fiber optic cable could be economically viable seemed unfathomable to the people that were making the decisions. They felt they had been sold a bill of goods by us youngns’ and it was better to cut their losses and run. We were crazy to suggest that one day that cable would deliver it’s promised data at a profit. That was then, this is now. Wind Turbines make sense, fiber optic cables can and do make money. These are not crazy ideas. Sometimes it just takes a while to fully mature.

Okay, now I’m hearing that gas lines and pumps and so on were all freezing up. Okay, great, different premise, different opinion. No problem with that.

But my (distant) cousin lives down in one of the Carolinas, and they’re always talking about ice storms yanking down power lines just from the sheer weight of the ice, and how they frequently go without power after a big ice-storm, blah blah blah. That was what I was basing my tirade upon. And there, it’s quite valid. :laughing:

So great, now the energy cos in Texas need to wrap their pipes or heat them or whatever they have to do, same as people here in mobile homes have to wrap/heat their under-the-house pipes to keep them from freezing. Lessons learned, I hope.

Lessons learned-no. Contracts awarded after the thaw-oh yes

Yeah, prob’ly.

Same as work. You know there’s a Big Glitch in a program. When things are slow, you wanna fix it before the Big Crush, but nope, other things to do. Then the Big Crunch hits, and everyone’s running around like a chicken-head trying to just Push Things Through.

Like a leaky roof, too. Clear weather, too many other things to do than patch it. Wait ’til the monsoon, then run around changing and emptying pots’n’pans collecting water from the dripping.

Same ol’ same ol’…

Are you CRAZY !!!

Do you have any idea how many lights it would take to light up an entire house ?

What kind of a whacko would have that many flashlights ..Oh wait a minute .... never mind

If they could just pipe all the political speechifying into a heat pump, I bet it could cook a medium size city. :laughing: