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It's cold AF, this southerner doesn't do cold. At 50 degrees it's fucking cold for me. I can count in one hand how many times I've seen snow at my home my entire life.
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It's been over 48 hours without power, it's fucking cold inside my house. I have a generator but no electric heaters. I've never felt the need to have them. Stores are wiped cleaned so can't find one either.
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It's so fucking cold that multiple pipes have already burst flooding my first floor. I didn't flood during Harvey and the 52 inches of rain that came with it but this freeze flooded my home.
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To the northerners that say oh that's just light sweater weather. Our infrastructure isn't designed to handle this cold. Kinda like where you're from, the infrastructure might not be able to handle 100+ degree weather for over two months straight, or 15 inches of rain in a single weekend. Our infrastructure is built for that, not prolonged subfreezing temperatures.
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Fuck ERCOT
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I'm "essential" so still have to work and do my best to take care of the family from work.
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I love Texas
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Trump is the legitimate president.
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Why am I making this post? Green energy is cool and all but it will never replace fossil fuels. To anyone that says solar and wind power are the future, just look at this fucking mess.
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I'm not waiting for the government to save me. My dad came over to my house and helped me clean and fix the pipes. My neighbors are helping me out with water, I'm helping them by letting them charge their phones and flashlights. I fired up the grill and my neighbor brought over deer meat that was going to go bad.
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Don't turn off my fucking gas centrepoint. The fireplace is the only heat that I have.
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Stay warm pedes, some of you have it way worse than I do.
Sorry I'm rambling.
They should be supplementary to fossil, hydo, thermal, and nuclear options, and the amount of gain from each source should be actively adjusted depending on the local climate conditions.
Example:
If things were peachy as fuck right now, solar and wind and hydro would generate the majority of the energy but we keep the fossil fuel plants and nuke plants on minimum to save as much fuel as possible.
When a shit storm like this hits, we fall back on the huge pile of reserves we saved during good times to get us through the bad.
Unfortunately, this sort of hands on, practical management evades dullards like government bureaucrats like bumper crops evade Soviet era annual farm yields.
On a sunny and/or windy day, the energy you get from solar panels and turbines is gravy. But you can't rely on it.
How many of the panels and turbines are broken now and have to be replaced? Why waste the money replacing any of those at this point?
I don't think I said that. But yeah, sure.
No, I’m just criticizing green energy for being a waste of everything.
Nuclear should replace all the fossil fuels, and wind solar to supplement.
here here, nuke plants are the way.
The more alternatives, the less you get of conventional capacity, PERIOD.
So you have a variable supply trying to meet variable demand. When all that capacity is conventional you can adjust. When only 80% is variable and the peak happens when the 20% is offline, you have a problem. There is no way to make up that deficit. This is the problem with having a large percentage of the grid as alternative without a way to store excess power.
No one is investing in a power plant that will only operate that one random winter day out of the year.
The power plant that operates one random day are diesel generators, and everyone invests in those
Why does wind get the winter off and fossil fuels have to go to school year round?
If we were serious about wind energy, we'd use this design from Japan (testing done in the Phillipines).
https://challenergy.ph/our-product/
We still need fossil fuel and nuclear back ups in cold weather, because our electricity storage tech doesn't let current flow in subzero temperature.
They have jet engine powered generators for peak demand handling.
"Green" energy is supplemental - it's not enough to rely on during epic storms... just too many variables to make it dependable on a large scale.
You can't just build generation facilities for back up power in the ERCOT market. The wholesale power cost structure will not support even the fixed costs. There was a time in Texas when G&T's built peaking plants for back up power to support extreme whether conditions such as what we are going through right now and also during extreme heat waves that cause the real time settlement prices to spike. The highly subsidized solar and wind projects are keeping peaking plants from ever being built. When subsidized wind farms can sell their power on the ERCOT for -$1 at a profit, how can a a fossil fuel peaking plant compete? They can't, and that's why Texas will experience more load shedding events like this in the future.
Perhaps the problem was stated before ERCOT came into being.
No one said correcting a mistake would be easy.