Posted on 02/17/2021 6:13:45 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
It is a good thing all those coal miners are learning to code. It helps keep everyone warm. (sarc)
Texas desperately needs dissolution mined salt cavity natural gas storage that’s dispatchable and we need to either go back to pipeline pumps being gas powered or have back ups for the electric pumps be it dedicated grid lines or diesel engines. Once failure started in the gas system it cascaded. The last thing you shut down is residential gas flows , having to relight all those pilots and also gas is a life line fuel people are using stoves and ovens and fireplaces to stay alive.
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Gee, no bias in this article. /sarc
There are several serious challenges. By serious I mean challenges generally not able to be overcome with current technology.
Generating power from renewable sources takes a lot of resources. These include somewhat exotic materials to make high efficiency solar panels, rare-earth magnets for high efficiency wind turbines, the roughly 27 tons of non-recyclable material in each wind turbine...etc. Oh, and most of those wind turbine designs don't handle extreme cold - they stop. Ask the people in Minnesota how they've worked out, or Texas now, etc. Even more fun when you have to expend energy in the form of heat and fuel for vehicles to go and repeatedly de-ice the blades so they will even have the aerodynamics to work once the oil in the gearboxes is heated enough to lubricate...
Even if you solve the generation problem, then you've got a distribution problem. Fossil fuel and nuclear fuel based power plants are distributed across the country. The places where wind and solar are possible options - not so much. We would need a much more robust power distribution grid to move energy from where it can (maybe some day) be reasonably generated to where it is most needed. The existing grid can barely handle minor perturbances now. Often it can't, if power generation isn't available locally for some reason it is often difficult or impossible to bring in power from adjoining areas. Instead you get blackouts, brownouts, rolling outages, etc. Also, the further you try to send power, the more losses you experience - not very green, expending power into simple resistive heating of transmission lines and parasitic losses through coupling to other conductors.
Even if you solve the generation and distribution problems, then there is the storage problem. Fossil fuel and nuclear fuel generating stations run year round. Night, day. Windy, calm. Rainy or dry season... Solar, wind, and hydro electric all have their ups and downs (literally). This means you would need to build in excess generating capacity and extra transmission capability, and somehow come up with a scheme to store incredible amounts of energy. Simply not possible with existing technology. Consider, at work we have an entire room about the size of a nice 2 bedroom apartment, full of batteries for a building-wide UPS. These will keep the computer systems (and only the critical computer systems) up for about 20 to 30 minutes - long enough to start up and warm up the backup generators. But to have enough capacity to run *everything* (all computers, lights, HVAC, cooling for the server rooms, elevators, grills in the cafeteria, water heaters...) for potentially several days while wind and sun play their games...we would need something like another building the size of our building filled with nothing but batteries.
Climate change
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A concept that is changing our country yet has no definition.
In the Coast Guard, if the ship ran ground or worse yet sunk, the Captain was held responsible even if it was another watch stander in charge at the time. I watched Governor Abbot distance himself from ERCOT and the Green New Deal yesterday on Tucker Carlson. “We need an investigation” It doesn’t work for me
Electric grid regulators said the U.S. will have to develop vast supplies of power storage — such as gigantic batteries
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Must be a lot bigger than those old “lantern” batteries.
Probably near the size of that ball of fire in the sky.
Many of the wells had to be shut-in for two reasons. Their tanks at the well site filled up with salt water and the trucks couldn’t get in to dispose of it. Also, compressors went down on several pipelines. All of that should be remedied by now except we are now experiencing Round #2.
Biden’s fault!
Lies, nothing but lies.
These people never stop
As a great Texan once said, “Let ‘em freeze in the dark.”
NB-CIA...
Thanks for pointing that out NBC!
"Texas produces more electricity than any other state, but only about one-quarter of it comes from wind and solar..."
Since when is 1/4 a small slice?
The all time low in downtown Los Angeles was 26 degrees in 1949. At LAX it hit 23 in 1937. Burbank recorded 22 in 1979. In Lancaster it got down to 2 degrees in 1984. Don’t know for sure but there’s was likely very little or no snow. If an ice storm like this hit Southern California then climate change is real and it wouldn’t be getting warmer.
...contrary to a wave of conservative critics who tried to falsely pin blame for the situation on renewable energy.
Isn't that rich, as NBC tries to falsely pin blame for the situation on climate change.
Don’t confuse capacity and produced volume of power consumption. Wind and solar is 25% of consumption not capacity. Wind is 31,000 megawatts of capacity. Last night 42,000 megawatts of gas coal and nuclear dropped off line and there was still 59,000 megawatts of.capacity of which only 4000 was wind and zero was solar.
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