The gas infrastructure was overburdened due to a lack of investment for the last 20 years. Had the investments that went into wind been placed into gas, this would have been a big nothing.
So Texas needs Ohio to come down there and teach them how to keep coal and natural gas plants running when it gets cold? Because it gets cold AF here and our main worries are if we have enough salt to pave the roads with.
The plants and all the infrastructure they need. Of course, that costs money to do and maintain, so it's probably cheaper for them to just deal with it on the rare occasions winter weather is an issue down there than to actually put the time and money in.
Ohio gets cold year after year; this is record setting levels of cold in areas not used to cold.
I'd wager that if you combined the 10 lowest cities in texas you might have one slow plow between them. Why would they have a fleet of them?
(The answer is because they are smart and could rent them out to the other unprepared states but thats kind of a gamble and one most tax payers don't want to be made with their money; rent from a private owned business if needed.)
In NC where I work when we have snow, the groundskeeping team obviously can't do any other work. They get their large and small front end loader and attach plows to all their trucks and keep all the parking lots and walkways clear until it stops snowing.
We only get any snow maybe once or twice a year, and only enough to matter every other year, and they handle it with what I assume is minimal cost by repurposing existing equipment and people, and having a couple attachable plows stored somewhere.
Is that like his statement that government needs to get these "private" companies back into energy production? Didn't he actually say that natural gas and nuclear plants have failed? You know, in the same interview where he failed to mention that half the wind power has failed?
This didn't happen in 1983 and 1989 with similar winter storms. What is one of the biggest changes? Coal. They've eliminated coal. It wasn't private companies that did that.
“Due to the severe weather and freezing temperatures across our state, many power companies have been unable to generate power, whether it’s from coal, natural gas, or wind power,” said Governor Abbott.
Coal and gas plants are a LOT more complicated than just "burn fuel, get electricity".
Same way you freeze any gas, low temperature and/or high pressure. Looks like natural gas specifically can freeze, especially before refined, with presence of water at pretty reasonable conditions if your pipes aren't insulated well.
It's damn near impossible to freeze Nat Gas- requiring temps lower than -300F. Liquefaction takes place at near -250.
Although water vapor can freeze up valves on the way to the first 'wet gas' refinement plant, it's squeezed out of the supply almost immediately. If that were the case, 2/3rds of the country would be screwed... it would lower the gas suply for everyone, not just TX.
The big problem here is that most of the NG produced in TX ends up in big interstate pipelines, compressed at 600-800 psi. Getting that to homes, businesses and even power plants requires local distribution infrastructure , which is completely overtaxed in TX right now.
There is a lot of water vapor in natural gas. Coming out of the ground, it's shit hot, but as it travels in pipes near the surface, it cools.
Second, is that, normally, Oklahoma weather is 90 degrees from April to October. There is ZERO winter, as it is known up north. Thus, the system is not prepared for snow, ice, cold temperatures. Pipes freeze, wall insulation is a parody, even small ice loads take out power, and streets are snot on a glass door knob slick, and impassable. The best you can expect is sand on the major intersections, maybe... Add to that people who have never been out of the state, except to Branson for a week, and have no idea of how to drive on snow or ice.
There is a state law that if a snow flake hits the ground, drive into something solid to stop...
Why don't we have these problems every year? Kansas sees single digit temps every year, these kind of artic blasts happen once every 7-10 years, maybe not as long as this one though. I just think there's something else going on.
Lived in OKC for 28 years. I could count the number of single digit nights, in all that time, one one hand. Call it, maybe, one ice storm a year, in all that time. It snowed, badly, twice.
A couple hundred miles north makes a difference.
Remember, the only thing between Kansas and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence, and it's down...
The windmills are still down. Coal was being artificially limited due to regulations. They just got the clear to ramp up production though. Generators and the nuclear plant should have never gone down but due to lack of funding they haven't gotten much love to winterize them. If only we didn't over-regulate them and subsidize wind.
They put all their resources into wind which stunted laying out gas pipelines for a growing population. So when this freeze hit, the gas was burdened and the wind was unavailable.
Blame T Boone Pickens. When he wasn't making enough money from natural gas because of fracking, he ordered $2 billion worth of wind turbines from GE. He wouldn't pay enough for land to put them on, so he whined till the gov't bought them from him. Then he died.
25% was wind, only half of that went out temporarily. Wind turbines can be winterized, but hardly worth doing in TX.
A Powewall in you home would give you independence from this outage. Combined with solar panels, would get you completely off grid most of the time. Not enough liberating technology is the real problem.
What a tool. Temporarily? It's still out. Not enough liberating technology? What an idiot. All we need is to be liberated from these idiot democrats. They eliminated coal. They want to eliminate fracking, which will kill natural gas. They want to eliminate all fossil fuels. The obvious problem with their idiot ideas? They want to kill all sources of power that are readily available today with no plan at all for the fact that there is nothing to replace it. Hence the situation in Texas, and that's just the beginning.
Texas largely relies on natural gas — especially during times of high demand — to power the state. Experts say natural gas infrastructure, from pumping it out of the ground to the plants in city centers, was unprepared for the plunging temperatures brought by the winter storm. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/
The "conservative" reflex to blame all on renewable energy is the stupidity here. If you had a Powerwall, you'd have about 3 days of backup power. Brush the snow off your solar panels and you'd get at least some power every day. Depend on govt. granted utility monopolies and you're fked. Fossil funded talking heads have a lot of us propagandized.
Yes liberation and independence are the eventual answer. It is the Trump philosophy writ small.
It’s okay though because former Gov. Scott has a diesel generator for his mansion. Let the plebs huddle in their automobiles with the heaters blasting.
I see those Austin leftists are now making their presence felt in the great state of TX. And this is just the beginning. All sorts of cool shit to look forward to, like massive debt due to unfunded liabilities, soul crushing taxes, rampant homelessness...
The wind farms are not the only issue, win is only 25% of the generation in TX and with 50% offline, still leaves 87% available. With 75% of the generation in TX based on coal, gas, and nuclear you would assume they could increase capacity if they can't, that's a failure.
The issues are choke points in the infrastructure. Utilities go cheap on core electrical and gas lines (and the cities let them), making them "just enough" to handle the normal load. When a super event happens, they cannot keep up.
My housing tract has never lost power/gas but the one next to us has low gas pressure because the feeds are under-built. The rolling blackouts are hitting problematic areas, not everywhere in TX.
I hope this opens some eyes that without reliable storage technologies, renewables are just the garnish on the edge of the plate.
It's not common to use the word "unreliable" but the word "intermittent", a category in opposition to "dispatchable". Because reliability is more of a technical aspect of the installation and not of the generation itself.
But the heart of the matter is correct: you cannot move away from dispatchable sources into intermittent ones without losing control over generation, seeing as energy storage almost doesn't exist in this grid scale.
Coal and gas plants have failed as well, according to the governor of Texas. If your plants aren't winterized, there's going to be problems.
The gas infrastructure was overburdened due to a lack of investment for the last 20 years. Had the investments that went into wind been placed into gas, this would have been a big nothing.
So Texas needs Ohio to come down there and teach them how to keep coal and natural gas plants running when it gets cold? Because it gets cold AF here and our main worries are if we have enough salt to pave the roads with.
The plants and all the infrastructure they need. Of course, that costs money to do and maintain, so it's probably cheaper for them to just deal with it on the rare occasions winter weather is an issue down there than to actually put the time and money in.
Ohio gets cold year after year; this is record setting levels of cold in areas not used to cold.
I'd wager that if you combined the 10 lowest cities in texas you might have one slow plow between them. Why would they have a fleet of them?
(The answer is because they are smart and could rent them out to the other unprepared states but thats kind of a gamble and one most tax payers don't want to be made with their money; rent from a private owned business if needed.)
In NC where I work when we have snow, the groundskeeping team obviously can't do any other work. They get their large and small front end loader and attach plows to all their trucks and keep all the parking lots and walkways clear until it stops snowing.
We only get any snow maybe once or twice a year, and only enough to matter every other year, and they handle it with what I assume is minimal cost by repurposing existing equipment and people, and having a couple attachable plows stored somewhere.
Lol, Texas ain’t even thinking about salt and roads right now. We were so unprepared as a stated it hurts.
laughs in driving down 35 on cleared roads
They found some salt for 35 after the pile up.
same
Salt is for pussies! (Laughs in Alaskan)
This just in, the fox guarding the hen house has cleared himself in all wrong doing for the great hen massacre
Is that like his statement that government needs to get these "private" companies back into energy production? Didn't he actually say that natural gas and nuclear plants have failed? You know, in the same interview where he failed to mention that half the wind power has failed?
This didn't happen in 1983 and 1989 with similar winter storms. What is one of the biggest changes? Coal. They've eliminated coal. It wasn't private companies that did that.
I don't believe that for a minute. Gas and Coal plants literally generate heat. That's what they do. They self defrost.
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-sends-additional-resources-to-local-officials-throughout-texas
Coal and gas plants are a LOT more complicated than just "burn fuel, get electricity".
How do you freeze a gas? It's that cold in Texas?
Same way you freeze any gas, low temperature and/or high pressure. Looks like natural gas specifically can freeze, especially before refined, with presence of water at pretty reasonable conditions if your pipes aren't insulated well.
It's damn near impossible to freeze Nat Gas- requiring temps lower than -300F. Liquefaction takes place at near -250. Although water vapor can freeze up valves on the way to the first 'wet gas' refinement plant, it's squeezed out of the supply almost immediately. If that were the case, 2/3rds of the country would be screwed... it would lower the gas suply for everyone, not just TX.
The big problem here is that most of the NG produced in TX ends up in big interstate pipelines, compressed at 600-800 psi. Getting that to homes, businesses and even power plants requires local distribution infrastructure , which is completely overtaxed in TX right now.
There is a lot of water vapor in natural gas. Coming out of the ground, it's shit hot, but as it travels in pipes near the surface, it cools.
Second, is that, normally, Oklahoma weather is 90 degrees from April to October. There is ZERO winter, as it is known up north. Thus, the system is not prepared for snow, ice, cold temperatures. Pipes freeze, wall insulation is a parody, even small ice loads take out power, and streets are snot on a glass door knob slick, and impassable. The best you can expect is sand on the major intersections, maybe... Add to that people who have never been out of the state, except to Branson for a week, and have no idea of how to drive on snow or ice. There is a state law that if a snow flake hits the ground, drive into something solid to stop...
Why don't we have these problems every year? Kansas sees single digit temps every year, these kind of artic blasts happen once every 7-10 years, maybe not as long as this one though. I just think there's something else going on.
Lived in OKC for 28 years. I could count the number of single digit nights, in all that time, one one hand. Call it, maybe, one ice storm a year, in all that time. It snowed, badly, twice. A couple hundred miles north makes a difference. Remember, the only thing between Kansas and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence, and it's down...
What you HAARPing on about?
Nuclear, please.
Deregulate until the regulations are sane.
Our nuclear plants went down too
1 went down for a temporary period.
All of this due to lack of funding for infrastructure, if we weren't subsidizing wind and over regulating these plants we'd be in a better position.
So 50% of our nuclear energy went down ‘for a temporary period’ like coal and the windmills.
The windmills are still down. Coal was being artificially limited due to regulations. They just got the clear to ramp up production though. Generators and the nuclear plant should have never gone down but due to lack of funding they haven't gotten much love to winterize them. If only we didn't over-regulate them and subsidize wind.
They put all their resources into wind which stunted laying out gas pipelines for a growing population. So when this freeze hit, the gas was burdened and the wind was unavailable.
and now they want to put all the cars on this same failing electric grid.
Blame T Boone Pickens. When he wasn't making enough money from natural gas because of fracking, he ordered $2 billion worth of wind turbines from GE. He wouldn't pay enough for land to put them on, so he whined till the gov't bought them from him. Then he died.
25% was wind, only half of that went out temporarily. Wind turbines can be winterized, but hardly worth doing in TX.
A Powewall in you home would give you independence from this outage. Combined with solar panels, would get you completely off grid most of the time. Not enough liberating technology is the real problem.
What a tool. Temporarily? It's still out. Not enough liberating technology? What an idiot. All we need is to be liberated from these idiot democrats. They eliminated coal. They want to eliminate fracking, which will kill natural gas. They want to eliminate all fossil fuels. The obvious problem with their idiot ideas? They want to kill all sources of power that are readily available today with no plan at all for the fact that there is nothing to replace it. Hence the situation in Texas, and that's just the beginning.
The "conservative" reflex to blame all on renewable energy is the stupidity here. If you had a Powerwall, you'd have about 3 days of backup power. Brush the snow off your solar panels and you'd get at least some power every day. Depend on govt. granted utility monopolies and you're fked. Fossil funded talking heads have a lot of us propagandized.
Yes liberation and independence are the eventual answer. It is the Trump philosophy writ small.
Watch the mini- series 'Chernobyl'. Similar Root Cause .. clueless gummint fucktards making serious decisions for all the wrong reasons.
Commies gonna commie.
Alex Epstein is great, his book is well worth a read: The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels
Excellent read, I've bought several copies. I even sent a copy to the VP of the power company in my area (I knew him back in college). Great red pill.
Wait, what? Are you telling me there isn't enough unicorn and rainbow energy to go around? 🦄 🌈
Is RainbowDash sleeping on a cloud again?
Need to use this cold to show how fake and dangerous this green shit is.
In before Epstein kills himself
Kek
Nuclear works stop hating on it
It’s okay though because former Gov. Scott has a diesel generator for his mansion. Let the plebs huddle in their automobiles with the heaters blasting.
Just like forest fires, this could have been prevented by not listening corporate sponsored leftist bullshit.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1361691271199264770.html
I see those Austin leftists are now making their presence felt in the great state of TX. And this is just the beginning. All sorts of cool shit to look forward to, like massive debt due to unfunded liabilities, soul crushing taxes, rampant homelessness...
How ya enjoying utopia so far Texans?
More people will buy wood stoves and kerosene heaters, which are more polluting than natural gas.
The wind farms are not the only issue, win is only 25% of the generation in TX and with 50% offline, still leaves 87% available. With 75% of the generation in TX based on coal, gas, and nuclear you would assume they could increase capacity if they can't, that's a failure.
The issues are choke points in the infrastructure. Utilities go cheap on core electrical and gas lines (and the cities let them), making them "just enough" to handle the normal load. When a super event happens, they cannot keep up.
My housing tract has never lost power/gas but the one next to us has low gas pressure because the feeds are under-built. The rolling blackouts are hitting problematic areas, not everywhere in TX.
I hope this opens some eyes that without reliable storage technologies, renewables are just the garnish on the edge of the plate.
It’s a reason why energy independence is so vital.
It's not common to use the word "unreliable" but the word "intermittent", a category in opposition to "dispatchable". Because reliability is more of a technical aspect of the installation and not of the generation itself.
But the heart of the matter is correct: you cannot move away from dispatchable sources into intermittent ones without losing control over generation, seeing as energy storage almost doesn't exist in this grid scale.
Coal, gas and nuke plants were down too.