Posted on 02/20/2021 5:54:13 AM PST by karpov
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Engineering challenges can be solved, but the real menace is an unwillingness, expressed through politics, to pay for the greenhouse reductions we say we want.
Power lines are unwelcome. Solar arrays and wind farms are not everybody’s idea of pretty and so must be located in unpopulated areas. Batteries can’t yet cure an intermittency problem, leaving only conventional plants. Coal is the worst of greenhouse offenders, gas is better and yet still opposed by greens, and forget about nuclear.
Texans had a rough week, say it again, because of an outlier cold snap that its system was designed to handle by shutting down. Temperatures are headed back into the 50s and 60s this weekend. You, me and everyone else live in utility districts where certain emergencies, such as those caused by trees on power lines or wildfires, are also designed to be handled by systems shutting down. We live with this.
But I doubt many people will be phlegmatic when Texas-like rolling blackouts come to the Northeast or New England one of these winters, as they almost did in the 2014 polar vortex. Falling trees won’t be the culprit. The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants to support our desired renewables in the face of cold spells a lot more predictable than those that landed on Texas.
This outcome is all but guaranteed unless we get a better discussion than the one we’re having. Then something else will become manifest: When the design performance limitations of utility systems come into play, it will always be in the interest of politicians and utility executives to change the subject to global warming.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Two more outstanding related articles from today:
An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power
> Feb 20
How would your family, and a hundred thousand other families, like to be stuck in your cars for days at minus 16 degrees?
The death toll would be huge. It almost happened in New England in 1989.
And in Texas this week.
Understanding the Texas Energy Crisis
> Feb 20
A rhetorical battle is now underway to make sure the Texas energy crisis does not go to waste. As the largest electoral star in the remnants of red states, the stakes for changing the politics of the state are considerable. The arctic weather that descended on Texas February 14 weekend flummoxed the power grid of the state and set up a debate on whether renewables like wind or fossil fuels like natural gas will bear the brunt of the blame. At the heart of the management of this question is ERCOT, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/understanding_the_texas_energy_crisis.html
yes the problem is we need to do more dumb ideas, but do them better.
the left is all about doubling down on evil ideas.
...but the real menace is an unwillingness, expressed through politics, to pay for the greenhouse reductions we say we want.
They might as well say that airplane crash deaths will be reduced if people wear their seatbelts.
That is not what happened in Texas. We had adequate natural gas backup. It failed because production and transmission capacities plummeted due to the cold weather. And since half of Texas's coal and lignite fired generation was replace with gas and renewables, that meant we basically had just about all of our cards in the natural gas basket with no significant storage capacity for gas.
The new normal is back. No republican in the WH to rage at.
Yes, we need to get back to more coal in the mix.
Finally, somebody gets it. This is a problem created by lack of conventional power generating capacity. This wasn’t a weather event. It was a power outage event.
The weather wasn’t really that extreme. We’ve hit lower temperatures 5 times since records have been kept - and we dip into the teens every 3 or 4 years. We either have to accept that a few times a year we’re going to be in “rolling blackouts”, build new generating capacity, or augment our own homes and businesses with local power generation.
I sure noticed how he gets a total pass for doing almost nothing about this. No visit and barely any FEMA.
Unfortunately, the author of the article even contradicts himself by blaming "wind power" for the Texas fiasco after doing such a great job explaining how NATURAL GAS was really the problem.
Class warfare. Elimination of the Kulaks.
The 10% will install generators to get them through the outages.
The poor will be ghettoized and given power as long as they obey their masters.
The middle class will continue to be squeezed.
Class warfare. Elimination of the Kulaks.
The 10% will install generators to get them through the outages.
The poor will be ghettoized and given power as long as they obey their masters.
The middle class will continue to be squeezed.
Not only that, but whatever the problems (transmission or generation), solar and wind must island and not feed power into the system until the system problem is remedied. I’m considering an upgrade to a battery storage system this summer.
It got down to -2 here, and the NG generating plant just west of me never shut down. I never lost one second of power. ERCOT-managed locations did. It was a political event, and money was spent on green energy instead of dependable fossil-fuel powered sources. Lt Governor Dan Patrick has already stated emphatically several times on TV that after the hearings next week, this won't happen again.
“In Texas, politicians, utility executives and citizens have repeatedly been asked by nature: Do you want to winterize your grid against rare winter outages or do you prefer lower rates? Lower rates kept winning, at least till now.”
This is a lot of the problem. To the pointy-headed libertarian types in the Republican party, they say ‘let the market decide’. Well, ‘the market’ did decide, and it went with the cheaper power (probably not much cheaper, by the way, maybe 5% less, if that).
Well, most VOTERS don’t relate to pointy-headed libertarian type politicians and don’t want to freeze their (components) off in the middle of winter. And most voters will REPLACE pointy-headed libertarian type politicians if they promise to protect them against freezing in the winter, even if those are Democrats and their ideas are full of crape.
If the pointy-headed libertarian type Republicans, who run Texas government, do not QUICKLY figure out that some regulation is needed (at least to prevent another, similar, disaster)...they will be replaced very soon by other politicians who have no problem imposing regulations on industry.
Anyone know if its possible to remove enough water out of nat gas that flows to power plants to lower the freezing point?
Must invest in companies that sell quiet generators and companies that sell security systems
… Not here in Tennessee... we got Nukes and Big F’n TVA Batteries that recharge (fill) every time it rains.
Yup, live here between Norris, Melton Hill, and Watts Bar hydroelectric, plus Kingston steam plant, BullRun steam plant, and Watts Bar nuclear. We’re pretty much set (but they are decommissioning Bull Run - stupidly)
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