The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power

POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, September 14, 2025 08:00
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1KIKI

Friday, February 26, 2021 2:16 AM

We get that.

You just can't have power generators providing power as they gear up to speed or wind down, because that messes with the frequency. And considering how big those suckers are, restarting would take a long, long time.

Oh, I was too lazy to look this up earlier, but there is the phase diagram for clathrate (methane hydrate ice):

and converting kpa pressure to the more familiar psig, the charted range is from 0 to ~17,404psig with the first denote at ~2900psig; and converting Celsius to the more familiar Fahrenheit, the range is from ~1.5F to ~95F. The minimum pressure and temperature limits beyond which clathrates will never form appear to be at around ambient pressure and 10F. The recent temperatures in Texas were marginally above the limits for clathrate to exist.

REAVERFAN

Friday, February 26, 2021 3:39 AM

Texas’ Libertarian Winter Nightmare
The blackouts and misery of Texas are because of free-market ideology.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2021/02/texas-nightmare-
winter-libertarianism/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Imagine+No+Religion&utm_content=44

And let’s be clear: None of this had to happen. This wasn’t unforeseeable or outside our control; it wasn’t human civilization overwhelmed by unstoppable nature. It was, in every sense of the word, a man-made catastrophe. And it happened because of libertarian, free-market ideology run wild.

Start with this fact: Alone among the states, Texas has its own power grid, like an isolated island in the middle of the country. The reason is explicitly ideological. By building a grid that doesn’t cross state lines, Texas avoids federal regulation.

But this also means that in an emergency, it can’t import power from neighboring states. Some outlying regions, like El Paso, connect to the national grid instead of the state grid – and in El Paso, the lights stayed on.

In keeping with its laissez-faire ideology, Texas also doesn’t mandate that power plants prepare for extreme weather. Its regulations are more like gentle suggestions. An operator can be fined for not having a plan, but there are no requirements for what the plan has to say or whether they actually have to do anything to implement it.

They don’t even have the excuse that no one could have seen this coming, because this isn’t the first time that the cold brought Texas to its knees. Just ten years ago, a similar freeze caused similar blackouts, leaving 3 million people in the dark:
----

Face it Russian trolls and trumptards: Your moronic ideology caused it. Nothing else.

1KIKI

Saturday, February 27, 2021 1:27 AM

Thanks for agreeing with me.

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
This is an oft-repeated failure of 'capitalism'-only economics (even in theory, and most definitely in practice) ...

SECOND

Saturday, February 27, 2021 5:22 AM

'Muzzled and eviscerated': Texas Governor Abbott's appointees gutted enforcement of Texas grid rules

A decade ago, after an Arctic cold spell knocked out power and left millions of Texans shivering in the dark, the Public Utility Commission’s enforcement apparatus swung into action. Their aim: punish the companies that had promised but failed to deliver electricity in an emergency.

Specialists contracted by the state agency worked with an enforcement team the utility commission created four years earlier. More recently, it had added lawyers whose only job was to pursue wrong-doing. The energy companies eventually paid fines and settlements totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to prepare for the extreme weather.

Two weeks ago, history repeated. Millions of residents were left without power and water in below-freezing temperatures. The damage far exceeded the 2011 storm. Nearly a third of the grid’s power plants went offline. Dozens of deaths have been attributed to the event, with a full accounting yet to come.

But the enforcement tools that worked to hold companies accountable for the 2011 failures had been removed under Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees on the utility commission. Hearst Newspapers reported last week that commissioners in November cut ties with the Texas Reliability Entity — the specialists hired — leaving state regulators without an external independent reliability monitor.

Four months before that, the governor’s commissioners had also disbanded the Oversight & Enforcement Division. The head attorney was told he no longer had a job; nine other team members were reassigned throughout the utility commission.

Several pending cases were dropped. According to commission records, by the end of 2020 the number of enforcement cases had fallen 40 percent.

Critics and former employees say the division was cut precisely because it was working — the state’s most recent move in a 25-year campaign to pare down oversight to favor energy companies and their largest customers, starting when Texas began deregulating its electric market in the 1990s.

The governor’s office disputed that . . .

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/critics-abbott
-power-grid-rules-texas-deadly-storm-15982421.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, February 27, 2021 7:37 PM

Natural gas distribution needs electricity: About half the gas pipelines use electricity for their compressors, but many were not listed as essential services and have said their power was cut off, creating gas supply problems for power plants.

Two kinds of winterization: Texas lawmakers have long known of the need to winterize Texas power plants, roughly a third of which went offline during the disaster, but natural gas shortages caused by frozen wellheads and power disruptions were the biggest reported hindrance for power plants.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Texas-lawmaker
s-call-for-Public-Utility-15982430.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, March 5, 2021 5:19 PM

The prospect of profiting from record-high electricity prices failed to persuade Texas power plants to weatherize operations to prevent last month’s catastrophic power failure.

“Historically, Texas has relied on high prices to ensure reliability,” said Michael Pickens, the global research firm’s associate energy director. “I think the five days that we were in emergency conditions demonstrated that the high prices alone aren’t enough to ensure reliability. We need to go beyond just prices.”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/CERAWeek-expe
rts-question-Texas-profit-driven-16001846.php

Texas should winterize its electric generation plants or consider connecting its grid with other parts of the country to help avoid another deadly blackout like the one last month that left people without heat, power or water for days, experts at a top energy conference said on Thursday.

Texas needs better standards for reliability, several experts said. That could include winterizing equipment, requiring natural gas-fueled plants to be able to run on liquid fuels (propane’s boiling point is -43.6°F/-42°C) for five days in case the natural gas system fails to deliver fuel, and connecting its grid with neighbors, they said.

Connecting the Texas grid with neighbors would benefit the state “99% of the time,” Webber said, adding, “We export every form of energy except the electron.”

www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-texas-electricity/texas-will-have-to-wi
nterize-its-grid-or-interconnect-with-neighbors-experts-idUSKBN2AW20W

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, March 5, 2021 7:27 PM

I bet the ratio of individuals who were prepped for a catastrophe in Texas far outnumbers the ratio of people in California.

--------------------------------------------------

A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

SECOND

Friday, March 5, 2021 9:11 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I bet the ratio of individuals who were prepped for a catastrophe in Texas far outnumbers the ratio of people in California.

You would be wrong if you looked at Texas Trumptards. None were ready. For example: the Trumptard across the street has a Generac natural gas powered electric generator. It came with the house, but didn't start in the cold. I got it to start manually because I can read the manual. Trumptards can also read, but they come to an understanding of what is wrong very slowly or, sometimes, never.

More examples from my street: Two different Trumptards didn't get their sprinkler system vacuum breakers (FEBCO 765-1 PVB) ready for the freeze and they didn't know how to turn off the resulting gusher of water. For one case, I dug into the ground to find the valve. The other case required vise-grips because there was no handle on the shutoff valve. Did I mention that they panicked because of the huge quantities of water flowing down the street? Trumptards only have two modes. 1) Dull-witted paralysis as in the case of the Generac that won't start. 2) Panic as in the case of the water leaks. When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Actually there is a third mode: 3) Misunderstand what is obvious to anyone who is NOT a Trumptard.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, March 5, 2021 9:18 PM

Sounds like stupid people for sure.

I think you're misdiagnosing them because of your political bias.

Oh, and it's March 5th now. You're the Trumptard that keeps bringing up Trump.

What's Biden* up to?

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

SECOND

Monday, March 8, 2021 10:41 PM

A tale of two freezes: How the Texas grid stayed on in the 1989 cold snap.

In the days leading up to Christmas 1989, the deep freeze hung over Texas for days on end, driving temperatures down to 7 degrees in Houston and minus 7 in Abilene. The power stayed on except for a two-hour window of rolling outages.

Flash forward to 2021. A similar but not quite as frigid cold snap left millions of Texans without power for days. More than 40 people died.

How Texas’ power grid became so much less resilient to the cold is a question that will be examined in the months ahead as state and federal officials investigate the blackouts.

Here's what experts are saying made the difference.

On the demand side, 1989 and 2021 were very similar in terms of a rare event that came strikingly close to a summer peak in power usage. But on the supply side, things looked very different.

At the time of the 1989 cold snap, Texas’ power market still operated under a traditional utility model, in which regulated monopolies such as the old Houston Lighting & Power Co. managed the power plants, the transmission lines and then billed the customers — with rates set by state regulators based on how much money companies invested in their system. Each time utilities built backup generation to handle periods of extreme demand, they received a healthy rate of return.

But then in the late 1990s, the Texas Legislature decided to shift to a free market system, in which generators are paid based on how much electricity they sell. The market-based system offered little incentive for power companies to harden their plants against the elements.

The state in 2021 didn’t do what regulators had done in 1989: requiring weatherization.

Also, 2021 gas-fired plants could only burn gas. The 1989 plants were built to be dual fired, so you can burn oil if the gas supply runs low.

When it comes to the events of 1989 and what went right, NERC’s report attributed it to a policy requiring utilities to take a specific series of steps when weather forecasts predict temperatures below 25 degrees, including powering up plants so as to be able to come online in no more than an hour if needed.

In 2021, there were no government requirements and no policies in a free market. It’s up to the market to decide if and when power plants come online.

More at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/A-tale-of-two
-freezes-How-the-Texas-grid-stayed-16005807.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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