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
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 “.
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Now the blame falls on those responsible for not fixing a known problem.
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Thanks Muto !!
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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
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.
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.
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.
From what I’m reading and hearing, the particular wind turbines that were installed are not cold weather rated. Many Nordic countries use wind power without an issue. Of course the cold weather models are more expensive, so it was a simple question of profit. In many ways the same goes for the natural gas systems. The corporations looked at short term
Profit instead of long term stability. Here in the US, businesses look at things in 3 month increments, ie: quarterly earnings. In other countries they traditionally look at long term viability and investment.
