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The Texas grid may fail again this year, according to a local investigative journalist who this week raised the alarm about the grid's state of preparedness ahead of an Arctic weather front. "This is not a good start. Tried checking @ERCOT_ISO dashboard about grid conditions and it's down. Tried checking hourly resource outage data, that's down too," Jeremy Rogalski from K-HOU TV tweeted on Wednesday. He later added that he had gotten in touch with a spokesperson for the Energy Reliability Council of Texas who'd told him that the grid operator was having issues from an upgrade made back in...

Here are the key takeaways from Texas rolling blackouts:The Weather Channel Warns Of "Dangerous" Cold Temperatures Southwest Power Pool Says 17 States Limiting Energy Usage3.368 million Texans Without Power Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Calls Up Texas Army National GuardOncor Electric Delivery Continues To Warn About Extended "Controlled Outages" Texas Gov. Greg Abbott States Power Grid Not Compromised Power Crisis Hits Texas And 13 Other States Southwest Power Pool Declares Energy Emergency Alert Level 3Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner Warns Of More Blackouts Houston Mayor Sylvester Suspends Air Travel In Houston ERCOT Wholesale Electricity Prices Plunged From Cap Of $9k per megawatt-hour...

Thanks to experience with numerous hurricanes, we were prepared for the Texas power outage and no one slept in the cold at our house. When you are prepared, three days is not that bad.I have lived along the Gulf Coast my entire life, mostly in the Houston Area. I lived and worked in Louisiana when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Gustav slammed into South Louisiana and have learned from my successes and failures and those of my friends.After moving back home to Texas and a long period of relatively quiet storm activity, Hurricane Harvey was a test of different beast until...

Democracy dies in a low key response?What happens if a president does not do much to aid citizens in the middle of a weather disaster? Well, if the president is a Republican, the media condemnation would be loud and angry. But if the President is a Democrat, the reaction would be...meh. Such was the case with the Washington Post on Saturday running cover for Joe Biden over the fact that his response to the Texas winter storm has been rather underwhelming.

Last month, President Biden signed a series of executive orders undermining fossil fuels, on the grounds the “climate crisis” forced his hand. “We can’t wait any longer. We see with our own eyes. We know it in our bones. It is time to act.” Within days, most of the country was seeing “with our own eyes” and feeling “in our bones” a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were left frozen (and inoperable)....

A week before, Texas begged for help and asked for DOE to lift federal regulations barring state's energy output. -------------------------------------------------------- An Emergency Order from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy shows Texas energy grid operator ERCOT was instructed to stay within green energy standards by purchasing energy from outside the state at a higher cost, throttling power output throughout the state ahead of a catastrophic polar vortex. Going into effect Sunday, Feb. 14, Emergency Order 202-21-1 shows the Energy Dept. was aware of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide disaster declaration and that ERCOT was readying gas utilities in preparation for...

Criticism was rampant following comments by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) suggesting power outages in Texas due to a winter storm and accompanying low temperatures were evidence of why America needs her Green New Deal. “The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal,” she tweeted without evidence. “Long-term we must realize these are the consequences of inaction,” AOC (D-NY) added. Her comments come even as Texas governor Greg Abbott has placed blame on the power grid failures in-part on frozen wind turbines.

How could this happen in a state that is the nation’s biggest energy producer and home to several of the world’s biggest energy companies? The disaster can be traced to mistakes by Texas’ leadership and faults created by decades of opposition to more regulations and preparation.

I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out. As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm down here and, in spite of the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup truck, Texas has come to a standstill. When a little bit of ice settled on the freeway, a half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135-car pileup.

TEXAS POWER CRISIS THREAD: Once it was clear that the polar vortex would engulf the entire state of Texas @GovAbbott declared an emergency and asked President Biden for an EPA waiver to allow power generation facilities to operate at full capacity until the emergency passed. 2/ Biden's EPA refused Governor Abbott's request and instead offered to allow certain power generation facilities a waiver if they raised the prices they charged to Texans to more than $1,500/MWh resulting in massive statewide power outages and a failure of the grid. (Letter at below thread) 3/ The truth is that the federal government...

...although a relative handful of natural gas power plants did freeze up, either due to the weather or due to lack of natural gas supply as some pipelines also lost pressure, the unarguable fact of the matter is that so-called “renewables” were utterly useless to Texas consumers during this life-threatening emergency, and that without Natural Gas, the entire state would have been left freezing in the dark. That is according to the official data according to ERCOT and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So, next time you see the leftwingers at the Texas Tribune or Houston Chronicle or New York...

The story from some media sources is that frozen wind turbines are responsible for the power shortfalls in Texas. Other media sources emphasize that fossil fuel resources should shoulder the blame because they have large cold induced outages as well and also some natural gas plants could not obtain fuel. Extreme cold should be expected to cause significant outages of both renewable and fossil fuel based resources. Why would anyone expect that sufficient amounts of natural gas would be available and deliverable to supply much needed generation? Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class...

What’s behind the devastating power outages in Texas? Some say the problem was freezing natural gas pipelines; some say it’s because wind turbines froze or mismanagement by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). To find out what’s going on in Texas, I sat down with Jason Isaac, who predicted a power crisis in Texas months ago. He’s the director of Life:Powered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation seeking to “raise America’s energy IQ.” This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

TEXAS POWER CRISIS THREAD: Once it was clear that the polar vortex would engulf the entire state of Texas @GovAbbott declared an emergency and asked President Biden for an EPA waiver to allow power generation facilities to operate at full capacity until the emergency passed. Biden's EPA refused Governor Abbott's request and instead offered to allow certain power generation facilities a waiver if they raised the prices they charged to Texans to more than $1,500/MWh resulting in massive statewide power outages and a failure of the grid.Amuse Twitter

he White House said on Thursday a severe winter storm engulfing Texas and nearby states was the type of extreme weather event that climate change is triggering, rejecting assertions by Texas officials that “green energy” caused widespread power outages. The crisis in the largest U.S. oil- and gas-producing state has put Democratic President Joe Biden’s White House squarely at odds with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who initially did not acknowledge Biden’s 2020 election win. Abbott had ordered state officials in January to fight Biden’s push here to combat climate change by pausing new oil and gas leases, and cutting...

*snip* . . . . Isaac acknowledged the need for some targeted reforms—like winterization requirements and mandating backup generating capacity—that would shore up the grid’s preparedness for future events, he said that federal integration of Texas’s power system is a bad idea. “We’re an independent state and we like our Texas independence,” he said. “And the last thing we want to do is have our grid controlled by any kind of federal regulatory agency or the federal government,” he added. One thing Isaac said he fears with greater federal control of Texas’s grid would be “market distorting policies that pick...

Wind power was so plentiful in Texas that producers sold it at a negative price. What? Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep. The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow. Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed....

During the recent heat wave in Texas, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the operator of the electric grid covering most of the state, set a new record for electricity use when demand for electricity reached 69.8 gigawatts (GW) between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. on August 10. ERCOT has been able to handle this extremely high demand without any system emergencies. In its summer 2015 reliability assessment, the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC) had forecasted a higher reserve margin for Texas's electric grid this summer (16.24%) compared with previous years (14.98% in 2014). Reserve margins reflect the...

As was discussed on the February 2nd edition of Pratt on Texas, the ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) rolling blackouts across the state could have been prevented with better planning and policy. Electrical engineer, Ross Aten, joined Robert Pratt to talk about how too many coal and natural gas power plants within ERCOT were taken offline for maintenance. Ross also explained that if you, ‘ran the numbers’, the only way ERCOT could have met peak winter demand usage is if wind energy across the state was producing at significant totals. However, because of the ice storm and lack of...