OT{ Its Colder than a Eskimo Party

[clob94]

I have an oddity....only in Texas.....Our power went out for good last night about 7 pm. This was after hours of 9 min on....20 min off for about 8 hours....we got down to around 55 in the house this am. I used my magic powers to get it to around 64. then we noticed that all our ice was melting in both freezers.....what to do....what to do...???
Then inspiration hit...I filled my ice ball forms with water and took em outside where it was 21 degrees.Problem solved!...

May we live in interesting times...too hot in the freezer, but just right on the back patio!

Bought three pony kegs on Friday before all this hit. I've had them sitting outside on the patio. Rotating between them. Cold beer tastes just as good in cold weather as hot weather.

 

[Oldmanastro]

Bought three pony kegs on Friday before all this hit. I've had them sitting outside on the patio. Rotating between them. Cold beer tastes just as good in cold weather as hot weather.

What flavor are they and do you accept visitors (mask off of course) or do you deliver?

 

[2300 Nueces]

Getting the ****ing green weenie for sure. Little electricity and now the water pressure is going down at my house. I have other friends with no electricity and water since Sunday night. If I didn't know the results of stupid liberal policy my family may have frozen to death. I save firewood because every time I see one of those worthless windmill blades blocking the highway, I am reminded that liberals kill. I have a warm house because of my wisdom. The ****ing libs would kill my family in worship of their mother earf. I filled 3 5 gallon buckets full of water 2 days ago in anticipation of the stupid mother ****ers killing the water treatment plants. Next, no gasoline for a week. I found a small gas station close to the house with a little gas. The lines were building when I left.... they aren't getting a truck til maybe sunday. The libs are shoving the green weenie up everyone's ass except china because well they are to be envied. **** you liberals.

 

[clob94]

What flavor are they and do you accept visitors (mask off of course) or do you deliver?

Faust Brewing 1/6 of Polka Pilsner, 1/6 keg of Stella, and a 5L keg of hofbrau original with another 5L keg in reserve. It's been a good winter break.

 

[StrangerHorn]

I am warm and got some Shiners going, all neighbors have no Elect for last 2 days, got my Gen running plenty of gas, of all my neighbos hat have pools and no Generator...sad, such thing as being dumb and being smart

 

[outhereincali]

Tim Boyd mayor of Colorado City, Texas social Darwinism at its finest.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/

That's right keep blaming it all on us liberals and windmills.

 

[outhereincali]

I am warm and got some Shiners going, all neighbors have no Elect for last 2 days, got my Gen running plenty of gas, of all my neighbos hat have pools and no Generator...sad, such thing as being dumb and being smart

That's right keep telling yourself that.

 

[2300 Nueces]

View embedded media

Tim Boyd mayor of Colorado City, Texas social Darwinism at its finest.

View embedded media

When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.

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What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.

It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called Ecofin.


And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.

One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.

The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.


Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.

“They hate it when I say that,” he said.

Power outages plague Texas, other states amid deadly cold, snow

The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called Tuesday for reform of the state’s electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.

“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”

He said he would work with the legislature to find ways to “ensure that our state never experiences power outages like this again.”

The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings into “what went wrong.”

Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies blamed the power failures on frozen wind turbines and warned against the supposed dangers of alternative power sources. Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.

But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.

As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.

In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.

“At a time when the need is the greatest it’s ever been, it’s a strain on the system like we’ve never seen,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.

See how covid-19 is reshaping the electric rhythms of New York City

Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend.

In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent.

“But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston.

There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”

On Tuesday, both agencies announced that they would now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.

Energy won’t be the same when this is over

Texas shares with California an unwillingness to compensate generation companies for maintenance, Hirs said, unlike most of the rest of the country. He said that what happened to California in the heat last summer has now been reflected in Texas’s winter.

“Both Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year,” he said. “There’s a tremendous human cost. People died in California. People died in Texas.”

Texas is unique among the states in having a grid all its own that is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country. That has prevented Texas from importing much electricity as its power plants went down, but Hirs said that the cold is so widespread across the heart of the nation that no one has any electricity to spare anyway.

Bill Magness, chief executive of ERCOT, said in an interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas that he thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than it once was.

“In 2018 we had some very cold winter times, but we saw the generation fleets performed very well through that,” he said. “I think we really made some progress getting ready for these winter times. And this storm has been extraordinary. We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”

Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt was that the sudden high wholesale price of electricity may have caused ERCOT’s computers to order companies to “shed load” — that is, cut off customers — rather than deal with the spike in costs.

The state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered ERCOT on Monday to allow for those high prices. They almost certainly will not last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short run, probably will fall most heavily on the retail utilities.

That's right keep blaming it all on us liberals and windmills.

Raise prices, taxes, food costs, everything. The people are only serfs after all. Commynism for all!! This dude does not explain the "greening" of the grid. We have been replacing gas generators for electric generators which caused the failure of many of the piplines.

How much gasoline is refined in Texas that is exported to the rest of the country? Be careful smartass, you might get what you deserve.

Conservatives in the Texas house have been trying to address this concern but the libs continue to calendar the bill and ignore it. They took the money earmarked for the grid and paid off the teacher's unions last year.

The owners of ERCOT are going to be exposed. NAMES pls....

https://brazosjournal.com/2021/02/16/texas-power-failure-highlights-systemic-corruption-episode-105/

 

[Oldmanastro]

That's right keep telling yourself that.

Did he say something offensive or smart alec? I don’t see it.

 

[westx]

I hear schools are closing Thur/Fri to conserve energy

 

[StrangerHorn]

Did he say something offensive or smart alec? I don’t see it.

If them California people old

 

[clob94]

The last person on this board that I need to worry about is @GuaranteedFresh! -- but I haven't heard from him since this crap started.

Yo Fresh-- you alright man? Are your ties staying warm?

 

[clob94]

Bette Midler claims Texas outages is God punishing Senators Ted Cruz, John Cornyn

Bette Midler tweeted that the current situation in Texas is some kind of divine retribution against Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

www.google.com

Bette Midler is fvcking cvnt trash. I've never raised a hand to a woman in my life. Bette is making me reconsider my upbringing.

 

[LonghornMM]

I've had no power or internet since Monday evening. Just got it back about 30 minutes ago. No telling how long it might last though. This sucks! It's inexcusable what has happened with ERCOT throughout the state. Some heads should roll!

 

[outhereincali]

If them California people old

Well to me it reads like insensitivity towards those without generators. If not than I stand corrected.

And there are far more important issues. I agonize about what's happening in the state where I was born and raised. Where I lived for 45 of the 48 years of my life (3 years in the army). I still love TX food, music, and other things that make TX culture so great. So spare me the I live in CA I must be liberal/ socialist bs.

I have family there. 2 brothers and 3 kids. Numerous cousins and an aunt or uncle that are still around. I'm relieved that right now they are fine. But my daughter in laws family has not been as fortunate. More people will die before this is over and I'm upset about it. They don't deserve this and neither do your loved ones and friends.

I want to get to the bottom of this and I will keep diggingng no matter how long it takes. The ERCOT people are horrible human beings, but there are other energy companies, and at least 7 elected officials that are culpable. And don't forget the aggie dumbass aka Rick Perry who was secondary of energy, a department he couldn't even name in a presidential debate a department he would one day lead. I can't prove it but there is dark money involved in this and Rick Perry is to stupid to hide his tracks.

More will be revealed.

 

[clob94]

Well to me it reads like insensitivity towards those without generators. If not than I stand corrected.

And there are far more important issues. I agonize about what's happening in the state where I was born and raised. Where I lived for 45 of the 48 years of my life (3 years in the army). I still love TX food, music, and other things that make TX culture so great. So spare me the I live in CA I must be liberal/ socialist bs.

I have family there. 2 brothers and 3 kids. Numerous cousins and an aunt or uncle that are still around. I'm relieved that right now they are fine. But my daughter in laws family has not been as fortunate. More people will die before this is over and I'm upset about it. They don't deserve this and neither do your loved ones and friends.

I want to get to the bottom of this and I will keep diggingng no matter how long it takes. The ERCOT people are horrible human beings, but there are other energy companies, and at least 7 elected officials that are culpable. And don't forget the aggie dumbass aka Rick Perry who was secondary of energy, a department who couldn't even name in a presidential debate a department he would one day lead. I can't prove it but there is dark money involved in this and Rick Perry is to stupid to hide his tracks.

More will be revealed.

Let me lay it out for you.

Texas is the oil capital of the world. We wanted to have some green stuff to be able to be diverse.

Obama offered all kids of tax breaks to make wind and solar profitable even though without subsidies it isn't.

So we had a huge pot of money to spend and we went bat sh!t building wind farms. We built more than any other state. WAY more.
But to get the full meal deal winterized windmills, we'd have had to spend gobs more money. So we opted for the mid range instead of the Siberian package.

After we'd spent gobs of money out windmilling everybody else, we had a smaller pot of money left. Well, that money was also needed to winterize our gas, coal and nuclear plants. But we didn't have enough yet to winterize them all. So, because it rarely gets really cold in Texas for long periods of time- we kicked the can down the road a few years until we DID have the money to winterize our Other plants-- on the off chance that wind mills sh!t the bed in a bad storm.

And wouldn't you know it-- a bad storm came before we could get all that done.

The 40 gigawatts of power the windmills crank out was reduced to 4 GW and the other plants could have caught up and bridged the gap-- if they'd been winterized.

So, had we not have gone bat sh!t crazy building windmills, or say, built 30% less, we'd have had the money to winterize our Other power plants for a once in a generation cold spell.

But we didn't.

 

[outhereincali]

Let me lay it out for you.

Texas is the oil capital of the world. We wanted to have some green stuff to be able to be diverse.

Obama offered all kids of tax breaks to make wind and solar profitable even though without subsidies it isn't.

So we had a huge pot of money to spend and we went bat sh!t building wind farms. We built more than any other state. WAY more.
But to get the full meal deal winterized windmills, we'd have had to spend gobs more money. So we opted for the mid range instead of the Siberian package.

After we'd spent gobs of money out windmilling everybody else, we had a smaller pot of money left. Well, that money was also needed to winterize our gas, coal and nuclear plants. But we didn't have enough yet to winterize them all. So, because it rarely gets really cold in Texas for long periods of time- we kicked the can down the road a few years until we DID have the money to winterize our Other plants-- on the off chance that wind mills sh!t the bed in a bad storm.

And wouldn't you know it-- a bad storm came before we could get all that done.

The 40 gigawatts of power the windmills crank out was reduced to 4 GW and the other plants could have caught up and bridged the gap-- if they'd been winterized.

So, had we not have gone bat sh!t crazy building windmills, or say, built 30% less, we'd have had the money to winterize our Other power plants for a once in a generation cold spell.

But we didn't.

No you can not blame this on windmills. You can blame this on deregulation and putting profit above peoples lives.

 

[GuaranteedFresh!]

The last person on this board that I need to worry about is @GuaranteedFresh! -- but I haven't heard from him since this crap started.

Yo Fresh-- you alright man? Are your ties staying warm?

Yeah man, the family is all good. I've got a backup generator and 2 suitcase inverters to keep the electricity up and going. Pipes are g2g since they are all wrapped with heat strips.

My wife has been a total badass seeing how I skipped town to NC last friday. My tennants finally moved out and the last time I paid a contractor for repairs I got taken for $6k so I've been prepping to sell.

Last bit of flooring goes in tomorrow and I'll take care of a few errands before heading back friday. Hopefully my truck doesn't shell out the other wheel bearing hub on the return trip.......that was a fun experience.

Hang in there fellas, you'll be moaning about the sweltering heat before you know it.

 

[GuaranteedFresh!]

Let me lay it out for you.

Texas is the oil capital of the world. We wanted to have some green stuff to be able to be diverse.

Obama offered all kids of tax breaks to make wind and solar profitable even though without subsidies it isn't.

So we had a huge pot of money to spend and we went bat sh!t building wind farms. We built more than any other state. WAY more.
But to get the full meal deal winterized windmills, we'd have had to spend gobs more money. So we opted for the mid range instead of the Siberian package.

After we'd spent gobs of money out windmilling everybody else, we had a smaller pot of money left. Well, that money was also needed to winterize our gas, coal and nuclear plants. But we didn't have enough yet to winterize them all. So, because it rarely gets really cold in Texas for long periods of time- we kicked the can down the road a few years until we DID have the money to winterize our Other plants-- on the off chance that wind mills sh!t the bed in a bad storm.

And wouldn't you know it-- a bad storm came before we could get all that done.

The 40 gigawatts of power the windmills crank out was reduced to 4 GW and the other plants could have caught up and bridged the gap-- if they'd been winterized.

So, had we not have gone bat sh!t crazy building windmills, or say, built 30% less, we'd have had the money to winterize our Other power plants for a once in a generation cold spell.

But we didn't.

A lot of the anti-oil outlets are saying wellheads froze up and caused the power shortage. Maybe there's something I'm missing because those damn things are always hotter than hell, they can't freeze. Something else might have though, like the chem-injector or something else downstream. Smells fishy.

 

[Son of Wasatch]

I don't know if the people on here who've lived in San Antonio for awhile remember this.

On 1/12/85 it snowed 16 inches in one day. Nothing like that ever happened before or since. I couldn't believe it. I went to some friends house to hang out we rented a bunch of movies and had fun. And the snow stuck for a few days. It made the national news. Of course San Antonio is not Chicago in the winter time. They don't have the equipment to clear the highways of snow. So Loop 410 was closed and I had to take the access roads. Took 45 minutes instead of the usual 15 😂 Back then I had a '63 Mercury Meteor but I learned how to drive on very ice roads that night. Does anyone who was in San Antonio around that time remember this. If so what are your memories?

And that massive pileup in Dallas last week was a terrible tragedy.

Best week of my life, the entire Madison football team got together for a snow bowl. That was a hell of a team we had, 17 guys signed scholarships. But that was some epic fun. The snow drifts were like 3 feet deep.

 

[Son of Wasatch]

Bette Midler claims Texas outages is God punishing Senators Ted Cruz, John Cornyn

Bette Midler tweeted that the current situation in Texas is some kind of divine retribution against Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

www.google.com

Bette Midler is fvcking cvnt trash. I've never raised a hand to a woman in my life. Bette is making me reconsider my upbringing.

Lol, Bette Midler is a no body, I have no idea what the last thing she did was, maybe that Disney movie about the witch sisters. That was like early 90's. Her words are about as important as Aunt Ester from Sanford and Son.

 

[Son of Wasatch]

Well to me it reads like insensitivity towards those without generators. If not than I stand corrected.

And there are far more important issues. I agonize about what's happening in the state where I was born and raised. Where I lived for 45 of the 48 years of my life (3 years in the army). I still love TX food, music, and other things that make TX culture so great. So spare me the I live in CA I must be liberal/ socialist bs.

I have family there. 2 brothers and 3 kids. Numerous cousins and an aunt or uncle that are still around. I'm relieved that right now they are fine. But my daughter in laws family has not been as fortunate. More people will die before this is over and I'm upset about it. They don't deserve this and neither do your loved ones and friends.

I want to get to the bottom of this and I will keep diggingng no matter how long it takes. The ERCOT people are horrible human beings, but there are other energy companies, and at least 7 elected officials that are culpable. And don't forget the aggie dumbass aka Rick Perry who was secondary of energy, a department he couldn't even name in a presidential debate a department he would one day lead. I can't prove it but there is dark money involved in this and Rick Perry is to stupid to hide his tracks.

More will be revealed.

Let me get this straight, you are 48 years old, but you say in 1985 you were driving? How the hell did you pull that off? I am 52, I was in 10th grade in 1985 at Madison high school when that Big snow storm hit. I was still 16 so you would be 12.

I smell some Bull crap.

Oh, and if you are going to call someone "to stupid" you might want to spell the word "too" correctly.

 

[DHHorn]

No you can not blame this on windmills. You can blame this on deregulation and putting profit above peoples lives.

No one saw this coming because it has never happened here before. In hind site, instead of spending the time trying to go green they should have been updating the power plants we had or building new ones, but the constant whining about global warming from the left was blinding. At least everyone can see now that the world has to have fossil fuels to operate and all this net zero carbon stuff is a fairy tale. Electric cars are pretty much useless as well in an event like this. That’s my political take.

My common sense take is whoever was in charge of risk management of our power grid has some explaining to do because it shouldn’t be a political decision on whether or not a power plant needed to be winterized. They really missed the mark.

 

[clob94]

No you can not blame this on windmills. You can blame this on deregulation and putting profit above peoples lives.

I'm not blaming it on windmills. I'm blaming it on government tax credits that were given if windmills were built.

The Obama admin wanted to go as green as they could so they literally made it so that if electricity were FREE-- windmills would still be profitable. The tax credits were huge. So we took our federal money and spent like crazy on windmills. But as I said, we didn't pay for the Siberian cold windmills, we paid for the warm weather windmills. Look it up Cali.

Then after spending all that money going big on windmills (Texas, go big or go home) we didn't have enough money left to winterize our OTHER plants. Most natural gas plants are water cooled. Well, water freezes. See where I'm going with this?

We went TOO hard on windmills and hedged our bets because we didn't NEED to build windmills that would operate in super cold temps-- because this is Texas. When does it every get SUPER cold for long stretches?

Had we have built 25-30% fewer windmills, we still would lead the nation in wind power, just by not as much--- AND we'd have had enough money to winterize the other gas, coal and nuke plants-- thus preventing this.

Does it make sense now Cali? Nobody is saying "wind power bad"-- I'm just saying "Texas went overboard on windmills because Obama made tax credits so high" to build them.

 

[clob94]

Yeah man, the family is all good. I've got a backup generator and 2 suitcase inverters to keep the electricity up and going. Pipes are g2g since they are all wrapped with heat strips.

My wife has been a total badass seeing how I skipped town to NC last friday. My tennants finally moved out and the last time I paid a contractor for repairs I got taken for $6k so I've been prepping to sell.

Last bit of flooring goes in tomorrow and I'll take care of a few errands before heading back friday. Hopefully my truck doesn't shell out the other wheel bearing hub on the return trip.......that was a fun experience.

Hang in there fellas, you'll be moaning about the sweltering heat before you know it.

Still got the house in Fayetteville eh? My buddy down the street-- the AF JSOC guy I've been trying to hook you up with over beers, still has his too.

As far as oil well heads freezing, whomever told you that is the dumbest mother fvcker on legs. Well heads operate on the north slope in Alaska in the dead of winter. The pump stations that push natural gas through the line, yes, a few of those pumps seized. But other than that- no-- no oil wells froze.

 

[clob94]

@outhereincali

Here are a few links for you to see the graphs produced by ERCOT and other showing how the load dropped off of one source of energy and was supplemented by another.

EIA launches redesigned Hourly Electric Grid Monitor with new data and functionality

www.eia.gov

Generation

View data on DC ties, generation outages, resource plan details and scheduled generation, and find forms to submit generation and outage data/requests.

www.ercot.com

Just browse through and you'll find them. I'd post the links directly but they are downloaded via PDF so I can't. You have to find them. I've got another link showing the charts--

Chart of ERCOT power sources - where from? | TexAgs

Chart of ERCOT power sources - where from? discussion on the TexAgs Politics forum.

texags.com

Above you can see how natural gas had to surge to help with declining wind.

We did the right thing building wind farms-- we just did it the wrong way. Wind isn't profitable-- unless you're plugged right into it. Wind energy doesn't transfer well through power lines. Too much is lost over distance. But being right next to a wind farm is kick ass-- so long as the wind blows. Solar is great- so long as the sun shines. Having both is really good so long as you're right next to the wind and solar farm, and the sun is shining and the wind is blowing--- unless it gets dark and REALLY cold-- then you're fvcked. You become reliant on VERY expensive batteries that don't last very long.
The problem with batteries is they cost way too much and don't last long. They are made with rare earth elements and those are hard to come by.

 

[soonersoldier]

Let me lay it out for you.

Texas is the oil capital of the world. We wanted to have some green stuff to be able to be diverse.

Obama offered all kids of tax breaks to make wind and solar profitable even though without subsidies it isn't.

So we had a huge pot of money to spend and we went bat sh!t building wind farms. We built more than any other state. WAY more.
But to get the full meal deal winterized windmills, we'd have had to spend gobs more money. So we opted for the mid range instead of the Siberian package.

After we'd spent gobs of money out windmilling everybody else, we had a smaller pot of money left. Well, that money was also needed to winterize our gas, coal and nuclear plants. But we didn't have enough yet to winterize them all. So, because it rarely gets really cold in Texas for long periods of time- we kicked the can down the road a few years until we DID have the money to winterize our Other plants-- on the off chance that wind mills sh!t the bed in a bad storm.

And wouldn't you know it-- a bad storm came before we could get all that done.

The 40 gigawatts of power the windmills crank out was reduced to 4 GW and the other plants could have caught up and bridged the gap-- if they'd been winterized.

So, had we not have gone bat sh!t crazy building windmills, or say, built 30% less, we'd have had the money to winterize our Other power plants for a once in a generation cold spell.

But we didn't.

So Leadership did not make the right choices as it relates to where and how much monies were spent as well as identifying the importance of rolling out infrastructure to protect the State's power grid? I do not consider myself green, and do not believe what just happen was political, but I do do know our State's failure in preparedness had nothing to do with wind turbines.

This is about the unbelievable power of ERCOT, which currently answers to no one, and our State's leadership (both sides of the aisle) having a huge ego - driven blindspot.

 

[clob94]

So Leadership did not make the right choices as it relates to where and how much monies were spent as well as identifying the importance of rolling out infrastructure to protect the State's power grid? I do not consider myself green, and do not believe what just happen was political, but I do do know our State's failure in preparedness had nothing to do with wind turbines.

This is about the unbelievable power of ERCOT, which currently answers to no one, and our State's leadership (both sides of the aisle) having a huge ego - driven blindspot.

I don't disagree with the second part of this. But here's the deal--

From 2008-16, there were MASSIVE tax incentives to "go green". So massive that even if the price of electricity were "free" to the consumer, the windmill operator would still pull a profit. That's how huge the tax incentives were.

Well, Texas leadership ain't stupid-- the can smell money just like anyone. So all these private companies start building windmills in West and South Texas. They are getting huge tax incentives from the federal government and getting assistance from the state government. Big money is flowing here-- billions and billions.

So we are building windmills at a record clip to grab as much of these federal dollars as we can, and the state is loving it because it's diversifying our energy grid at literally no cost to the state. And yet the state is getting to benefit from it, because they are selling the power. Did the state stop and say "hey fellas, maybe you should winterize these windmills like they do in Norway and Finland and Iceland"---? No. No they didn't.
Why?
Because this isn't Finland or Norway or Iceland. This is Texas. It doesn't get that cold here.

And then one day it does get cold--- and all these windmills that were built with "good intentions" are shown to be lacking in the cold weather department.

Look-- do you buy snow tires when you go to the tire shop? Or do you buy highway tires?

You buy highway tires.

And then one day it snows and your highway tires slip and slide all over the road and you crash into a ditch. You bought really expensive highway tires. Good quality tires. Really good tires-- they just weren't made to drive on snow. Same thing applies to the windmills.

 

[oldhorn2]

Bill gates on CNBC this am....He is investing heavily in which green energy product?...... Nuclear.....

He also refused to deny that he is shorting Tesla...

 

[clob94]

Bill gates on CNBC this am....He is investing heavily in which green energy product?...... Nuclear.....

He also refused to deny that he is shorting Tesla...

Pelosi just spent millions going long on Tesla. This is going to be interesting.

Nuclear for a baseline is the way to go. Yes, it's expensive-- France is nuclear driven and their cost per KWh is about 25 cents. I think we pay 8 cents here in comal county.