Hmmm...I was told just yesterday, it was no ones fault and it just happened...
Look for the source of any giant screw-up and you will find government at the root of it every time. We need a free market in energy. Obama and the enviro-nuts want to deprive us of energy and halt progress. They won’t be happy until we are all living in cold caves and using latrines.
I am with Dewhurst. This is technology for the better? Yeah right. What about the people that have medical issues at home. So much for telling them. What about the surgeons that may have been performing surgery?
What fools. They didn’t plan anything. They relied on computers.
We need grownups running the show. People who plan and think and are responsible.
Characterizing the weather this week as a “cold front” is ridiculous and ruins any credibility this writer might otherwise have had.
We’re living in a soft and silly time when mere inconvenience is intolerable.
Bad stuff happens. Good folks suffer the consequences. That’s been true since the beginning of time. Accept it and move on.
This is ridiculous. No matter what the weather has been in the past they should have planned for Global Warming and properly winterized their equipment.
Yeah, we had no electricity, but we have the most windmills!
WE have heat tapes at our house in west Texas, and the water was on running slowly. When the power went off, and of course since it was 5 degrees the pipes froze and broke.
Calling a plumber gets you on a waiting list for Tuesday or Wednesday. So, a week without water, and no parts to be had to do the work by oneself.
How about lack of adequate border preparation causing it. If we didn't have so many illegals wasting electricity, we wouldn't have had this problem. Yo, David, whacha gonna do 'bout that, huh?
I heard that Texas has not allowed electric stations to be built for about 15 years. They don’t have the capacity for an extra load like this.
The blackouts were due to winds dying down and the generation not meeting the forecast of wind generation during the Arctic blast.
We in New Mexico still don't have NG for heat
thanks to the rolling blackouts in Texas.The blackouts shut down the NG compressors.
This happened when it was 20 degrees below zero
in northern New Mexico.
Should be 1 nuclear power plant per 1 million in population.....that never gonna happen aside, woodstove and oil lamps are yer friend in times like these. My new home , 2 years old now , is a passive home. Double stud walls, expanding foam insulation, house wrap, triple pane windows and storm windows etc and smaller in size. We only have to run the central heat and air on days when temperatures are extreme. Our Kohler whole house generator is plumbed to commercial natural gas line and is good for such rolling brownouts, blackouts aka whatever they call em tomorrow.
Average homeowner can off set such events with insulation, woodstove, and a whole house emergency generator. My neighbor recently built a battery backup system with 24 deep cell batteries that runs a trace power inverter that provides power for all his homes needs for allegedly 96 hours and or longer if he just uses lights, fridge and freezer. The system is plugged into a trickle charger 24/7 so when power fails they just flip over to the battery system.
Can’t rely on goobermint to be there folks.....take responsibility for your own well being, comfort and security.
I don’t think you want to be prepared for truly out of the ordinary weather. A couple of years ago Tucson had a strong rain couple with a big dip in the temps, left all of our bridges iced up. We only have one de-icing truck to deal with that, some folks complained that we were “unprepared” but it was the first time in Tucson history anything like that had happened. Should the tax payers have been footing the bill for a whole bunch of unused de-icing trucks for all those decades “just in case”? Of course not. Similar with this storm. Their electrical demand nearly doubled, and 10% of their plants were rendered in-operable, I don’t see how anybody is supposed to prepare for that. Should they double the number of plants they have keeping them barely running decade after decade “just in case”? That’s silly.
Rolling blackouts might be a mild embarassment, but the alternative of having the entire ERCOT region blacked out would have been more than an embarassment. ERCOT did what it needed to do to alleviate a much worse alternative.
Now, under media pressure, Texas utilities will spend a billion ratepayer dollars annually on a winterization program that will come in handy once every 50 years.
Did some work at a gas plant in North Texas many years ago. Much of of the equipment was more exposed than the plants up north. In fact that was part of the reason I was there - to get some instruments to read the temperature and turn on heaters when it got cold like this. The flip side is, exposed, they had less problem with the high summer heat. Doesn’t help that they canceled so many coal plants and are trying to rely more on wind. They also have a problem that they are on their own grid and are limited on the power they can bring in from other states.
Did some work at a gas plant in North Texas many years ago. Much of of the equipment was more exposed than the plants up north. In fact that was part of the reason I was there - to get some instruments to read the temperature and turn on heaters when it got cold like this. The flip side is, exposed, they had less problem with the high summer heat. Doesn’t help that they canceled so many coal plants and are trying to rely more on wind. They also have a problem that they are on their own grid and are limited on the power they can bring in from other states.
Two reasons REGULATIONS and WIND ENERGY is the cause!!!
If we had built coal fired or even better nukes instead of the crappy windmills this would not have been a problem.
Not to me.
The only embarrassment is the idiot ‘Pre-sent’ for his part in destroying a perfectly good country and jerry jones for taking power to heat his precious dome while others put up with blackouts.