Posted on 02/17/2021 5:32:50 PM PST by Meatspace
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) says he has “no defense” after his old tweet mocking California power outages have resurfaced as millions of people in the Lone Star state have lost power in their homes due to large winter storms.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Wind and solar are horrible as backups. They are the first to fail.
Well, there’s a bit of a difference for a state with that much sunshine to be out of power during the summer, and the entire state of Texas being half under with snow.
And, if instead of building giant half-useless windmills in West Texas we built another couple of coal fired plants, or even a couple of nuclear power generation plants, Texas would not be in the mess it is today.
No defense for the state politicians or the federal bureaucrats who caused this with their mandated policies.
What will Ted do to change this?
PERFECT! It's like criticizing those who built in a 250 year flood plain with those who build in an area that floods each Spring.
Cruz is right, put down the political axe it won’t help out . Green energy had nothing to do with this historic event. The lack of winterization of our power plants and specifically our natural gas grid did cause this. Us industry professionals told the RRC in 2011 to winter harden the gas grid and they ignored the Intel. Texas has more than enough gas turbines in spinning reserves as required by Error to take every single wind turbine down at a 15 minutes notice. This is Ercots down policy. For every megawatt of wind in the current power mix 1.15 OR MORE megawatts of reserves are held specifically to back it up. The gas grid failed and with it more than 60% of Texas total capacity know the difference between generation capacity and generation production totals. The fact is had the gas grid not gone into.critical shortage it.is.irrelevant that wind was frozen. ERCOT only counts on 1/3 of total installed capacity of wind in the winter and wind is only 31,000 of 125,000 total capacity so 10,000 of 125,000 megawatts. Wind did not cause This the professionals who have access to the real time data watched in horror as 42,000 megawatts of.thermal.capacity fell off line in under half an hour and the grid frequency dropped to 59.2 Hz at that level the grid should have collapsed totally. It is only divine providence that the grid held up.while at first 10,000 megawatts was shed then another 5000. Had the grid gone down a never before attempted black start would have had to be initiated the estimates are 3 weeks to over 5 for the whole grid to come back on line as each plant must black start spin up synchronise and phase match. The report will be presented to the legislature and what will be in it the main cause of load shedding was lack of winterized gas wells, feeder lines, lack of h2o scrubbers from said lines and lack of winterized power plant coolant intakes, and coolant towers. Let me be absolutely clear from a industry professional Texas can shut every wind turbine and solar panel down and still have over 80,000 megawatts of capacity the record high demand was set this week at 69,000 megawatts do the math. We need an honest not political motivated assessment and that means looking at what actually happened so it will never happen again we need to follow the professionals direction harden our gas grid and every power plant to sub zero temps. We need to bury below the first line gather lines not play plastic HDPE plastic on the surface and we need to mine out salt time natural gas storage space to hold at least 50 billion cubic feet that’s two days of reserves in gas storage. That is what will really prevent this from happening again. Pointing the finger at 5,000 megawatts out of the expected 10,000 while ignoring the 40,000+ thermal megawatts that dropped out is just political axe grinding and not useful at all.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/
Trump had this nailed years ago, before he ran for prez the first time.
Cruz could have chosen to listen and didn’t.
Cruz’s so-called mistake was willing blindness.
If he’s choosing to take off the blinders now, I have two words: too late.
Texas, pick better pols.
Thank you! Very interesting. Pols misprioritizing. Who’s thunk it?
Thank you! Very interesting. Pols misprioritizing. Who’da thunk it?
Coal plants can keep a month of fuel on-site in coal piles. The gas industry told the RRC in 2011 after the last major winter storm nearly collapsed the gas grid to harden it for subzero temps. The RRC ignored this. Texas needs AT LEAST 50 billion cubic feet of salt dome gas storage. We need to mandate h2o scrubbers for all main gas lines so they do not from methane hydrates like they just did and we need to mandate the below frost line trench burial of all HDPE gas and oil gathering lines to the tank battery. The policy of removing gas powered pipes line compressors which are self powered for grid powered electric needs to be reversed for now obvious reasons. Wind and solar did not cause the load shedding wind was only counted on for 10,000 megawatts at most and when the stage 3 was declared it was 5200 megawatts solar was zero as was expected at night. What was not expected was gas flow to drop from 24 billion cubic feet to under 12 not only knocking off primary gas turbines but also the spinning reserves and all the warm start back up as well. We also lost STP reactor number one with 1200 megawatts off line at the same time. All in all nearly 42,000 megawatts fell off zero of that was solar or wind. We need to be honest learn from the mistakes and harden the heck out of our infrastructure.
People don't understand that there is a money trade off when it comes to utilities. In a draught, which may not happen often, people need to reduce water use as the system capacity is balanced with water prices for the 99.9% of the time. But when that .1% time comes, we need to have a back up plan that doesn't raise prices considerably. In other words, Texas should have contracts with other states or other systems that can fill in the .1% of the time it freezes there for a few days.
Texas cannot import the kind of power needed to stop load shedding of the magnitude that just happened. Texas power grid is not frequency nor phase synchronised with either the Eastern interconnect nor the South western interconnect. Texas has 6 high voltage DC feeders when the stage 3 was declared 5 of 66 were in negative move meaning importing DC power and turning it into synchronised AC nearly 2,000 megawatts worth HVDC back to back interconnects are enormously expensive. Texas lost 40,000 megawatts the DC feeds brought in 2,000 to have 40,000 more would be in the tens of billions in infrastructure costs it would be cheaper to build new capacity inside the ERCOT grid than use DC/DC>AC station’s. To AC the Texas to either grid in an AC\AC link means one of the grid has to go black and then black start in phase and in frequency then roll on each and every.generator station to the new phase control weeks of power outages to do that. The Texas grid is not going to be hard AC linked ever because of that. Texas grid was independent from the start it has never been shut off since.
No one forced any policies green or otherwise on Texas.
The Texas political establishment owns this fiasco.
Correct. I’ve learned a few things in my cabin in the Hill Country without power and without water.
ERCOT Is completely a Texas entity. Whereas the rest of the nation are on grids that I’ve read are controlled by Chinese investors and groups.
Agree completely. It’s just foolish to take risks with critical infrastructure like the grid to either reduce costs or reduce carbon.
CA and TX had different rationales but ended up in the same place. A fragile electrical grid with no excess capacity and dependent on intermittent power sources.
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