Bravo Sierra. Our (Texas) power issues are 100% self-inflicted by government. We eliminated perfectly good power plants and installed virtue signaling wind turbines and solar panels that are much more expensive and close to useless.
Right this moment, wind turbine capacity in Texas is 25,000 MW and it is producing exactly 3% of that number. Solar is barely a trickle with this cloud cover. We do not need expensive vapor technology to store this pathetic, infrequently generated, expensive power from solar and wind, we need real, serious power plants. Coal, nuclear, gas. No more money on wind and solar, none.
We need to fire each and every person involved in the decision making process, and start over. It is basic stuff. Build and maintain real power plants, not toys, and build them for winter and summer conditions. Power plants do not have to fail in cold weather unless the people running them are incompetent.
Wow! They’d been getting about 4 GW from wind most of yesterday. Right this moment it’s .7 GW, slightly less than your 3%.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
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
A power plant can trip for any number of reasons at any time including cold weather. Yes, it could be operator error or a design error but these are about the least likely causes. Power plants consist of many mechanical, electrical and electronic components that work in harmony to keep everything in balance. Cold weather pushes some of these comports towards the outer edge of design tolerances thus a trip becomes more likely.
The key to power supply reliability writ large is redundancy. This lack of redundancy that is plainly obvious has been driven by political forces that first drove coal out of the energy mix and more recently forced wind and solar into base load reliance. Wind and solar are worthless for base load purposes much less emergency surges. You can't push a button to make the sun to shine or wind to blow just right.
I worked for a number of years at a huge chemical complex in TX. We had three 1500 megawatt cogeneration power plants on site that supplied 100% of our steam usage and had excess electricity that fed into the TX grid. IIRC, it was something like 500MW normally into the grid.
A small electrical short in some wiring caught insulation on fire, the fire moved through cable trays and eventually the whole port plant plant was blazing.
The TX grid had spare generating capacity idling and absorbed the hit without dimming a light locally or anywhere in the state.
Relying on wind and solar for some 25% of grid capacity is nuts. I've read claims that 50 to 90 something percent of the wind and solar were knocked offline. I have no idea what the actual number is but whatever the amount offline, there doesn't appear to be sufficient conventional generating capacity + backup to handle mass demand surges. Another piece of the problem is that natural gas production deceased due to the new energy policies and this cascaded into a fuel shortage. This falls on political forces. And of course, I fully expect those political forces point the finger at everyone and everything except themselves.