Posted on 02/17/2021 4:25:52 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
AUSTIN, Texas - Anger over Texas’ power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted Tuesday as millions of residents in the energy capital of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat — out for 36 hours or longer in many homes — would return soon or stay on once it finally does.
“I know people are angry and frustrated,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who woke up to more than 1 million people still without power in his city. “So am I.”
Making matters worse, expectations that the outages would be a shared sacrifice by the state’s 30 million residents quickly gave way to a cold reality, as pockets in some of America’s largest cities, including San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, were left to shoulder the lasting brunt of a catastrophic power failure, and in subfreezing conditions that Texas’ grid operators had known was coming.
The breakdown sparked growing outrage and demands for answers over how Texas — whose Republican leaders as recently as last year taunted California over the Democratic-led state’s rolling blackouts — failed such a massive test of a major point of state pride: energy independence. And it cut through politics, as fuming Texans froze in the dark Monday night, downtown skylines glowed despite desperate calls to conserve energy.
“We are very angry. I was checking on my neighbor, she’s angry, too,” said Amber Nichols, whose north Austin home has had no power since early Monday. “We’re all angry because there is no reason to leave entire neighborhoods freezing to death.”
She crunched through ice wearing a parka and galoshes, while her neighbors dug out their driveways from six inches of snow to move their cars.
“This is a complete bungle,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Apartments cannot have gas stoves anymore its against fire code. All my.mates in apartments are suffering no heat, light, or hot food. All the more reason the never live in human beehives. Even a single wide trailer in the sticks has propane just saying.
He’s trying to reboot society right now and end all support for systems which existed before Globe 2.02.1
Ya mean that the Red state - Blue state metric doesn’t hold here?
Gee.....who woulda thunk?
Sooner or later Americans are going to learn that most ALL our problems can be laid at the feet of the RULING CLASS.
The Red/Blue divide is just a wedge that our “betters” have devised to separate Americans from their wealth and whatever wealth their labors might attain. The only difference is the manner and speed at which that separation will be attained
Abbot was on statewide news and issued an EO directing the legislature to do a investigation in the next session which starts in 12 days. He knows he is cooked if he doesn’t make heads roll and fast.
Hope you and your family are doing OK. Praying for everyone in Texas. I have a lot of family there, and basically all have been affected, they either lost power completely, or at least having rolling blackouts. Lots of reports of water being shut off as well. Hopefully a wake up call that will be answered, but for now everyone’s safety and health should be our main concern. God Bless!
Back in the day, growing up in Queens, we had a coal furnace and steam heat. There was a coal bin in the basement, basically a 10’ x 10’ room full of coal. My father had to shovel coal into the furnance in the morning to get heat. And shovel out the ash. Happiest day of his life is when we converted to natural gas.
I still remember the coal truck, a regular fixture.
Checked ABC News last night to see pictures of frozen windmills in Texas, they didn’t have any. If a Republican owned Coal Plant had been the problem, they would have had pictures on all night.
Agreed. Furthermore, unless technology catches up with these plans by 2030, there won’t be enough lithium to power these electric cars.
Texas has 11000 wind turbines (T Boone Pickens made a killing) and most of them froze. Their plated capacity is 25000 megawatts and at one point they were getting like 1800. As a result the compressors in the natural gas systems lost power and so the gas generators in some cases were disabled, A cascade of failure due to reliance on intermittent power sources.
Look up UT Austin lithium extraction from shale gas/oil wells. One well produces enough lithium for 200_300 cars per day in the saline produced water that comes up with the oil and gas. That’s one well, the Permian basin has 30,000 wells there will be no shortage of lithium its a matter of price per kg. UT breakthrough is ion exchange to.make it super cheap to get the lithium us geologists know has been there all along.
I used to marvel at the way the coalmen would tip their barrels on edge and then spin them up the driveway using only the palm of one hand.
(Newtown/Elmhurst)
Gas production took a nose dive at the well heads I drill those wells rigs are shut down. Trucks cannot get to the tank battery to haul off the produced water so wells are shut in. The wells gathering lines to the tanks also are freezing they are HDPE plastic on the surface not in trenches below the frost line. Gas hit a unheard of $100+ mmbtu unbelievable.
***A wood burning stove might be a good idea.***
“I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the Party is beneath the dignity of any man. And the Party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city. “ —from Dr Zhivago
Maybe you need to understand what ERCOT is. It isn’t a state
organization but a group that owns power generation/distribution
in the state of Texas. It has members from across the USA. Sally
Talberg is chair person of that group at this time.
http://www.ercot.com/about/governance/directors
snip
ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,
governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public
Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members
include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail
electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and
distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities.
Thank you!
Generator doing its thing, so that is nice.
Yes, so many areas without power AND water. Saw where most of Houston is without - or w/very low - water.
Happy memories. The arrival of the coal trucks in my neighborhood in my youth, till about 55, was a great time. The noise the coal would make going down the shoots into the cellars was awesome to a young guy who also loved fireworks.
Alas we along with everyone else in the neighborhood converted to natural gas. The benefits were I did not have to shovel the coal into the furnace or take out the ashes each day. We used the ash as a dirt enhancer for our garden, worked great. Still had steam heat out of a boiler contraption that looked like something from an industrial complex with meters and relief valves all over it.
The disaster in Texas cannot be blamed on Democrats, who have not held any statewide office in this century. It can be rightly blamed on moderate Republicans like the younger Bush, Perry, and Abbott, as well as the mostly moderate GOP politicians in other statewide offices and the Legislature, who did not push back against environmental regulations under Clinton and Obama and who pushed wind and solar at the expense of natural gas, which Texas has in abundance.
No, Texas is trending blue because of liberal Texans and because of the candidates at the top of the ticket, not Californians. People moving to Texas voted more Republican than native Texans in 2016 and 2018. A majority of native Texans voted for Beto O’Rourke in 2018.
The truth is that foreign immigrants don’t vote much, and the average person who chooses to move to Texas from out of state tends to be more conservative than the average Texan. They’re keeping Texas red.
We’ll see what happens next time without Obama or Trump at the top of the ticket turning out Democrat voters.
would love to see your source data on this...
my experience (5th gen texan) isn’t reflected in your statements at all.
I know not of a single texan getting more liberal.. could happen, sure.. unless you’re referring to children of illegals who are now voting age.
“The energy department issued an emergency order to raise pollution limits for now”
You’re saying they can run at a higher power at the expense of higher pollution, correct? That’s a reasonable thing to do.
It takes little time to raise the power level of a power plant I would think. Just change the combustion parameters to produce more steam which supplies more torque to the generators.
If that is the case then an appropriate amount of conventional generation capacity exists, and this rare weather case it was overwhelmed.
If they spent money on solar and wind rather at the sacrifice of conventional, that would have been unwise.
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