“The dismantling of Texas formerly reliable coal fired grid and the move to the ugly and undependable windmills and solar happened under Perry. (Abbott was his AG)”
Reliable base power supply requires on site fuel storage. coal has that, nuclear has that. Gas does not.
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.