The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power
POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, September 14, 2025 08:00
VIEWED: 11410
PAGE 5 of 18
This simple paperwork blunder left Texans cold during the deadly freeze
When Texas lawmakers met last month to begin sifting through the wreckage of the state’s energy grid, many expected to hear tales of poorly insulated power plants rendered inoperable by the latest winter storm.
Instead, energy executives raised an even more confounding problem: dozens of natural gas facilities had not filled out a two-page application for outage exemptions before the storm, meaning their facilities lost power at a moment when their fuel was needed most to feed struggling power plants.
“We had basically people calling saying hey, turn a power plant back on, or turn a gas processor back on, and it’s like, it’s too late,” said Curtis Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corp., whose subsidiary, Luminant, is the state’s largest power generator. “You can’t do it when you’re in the middle of it.”
Oncor scrambled to flip power on to more than 150 gas facilities in the Permian Basin after receiving urgent calls from the Public Utility Commission that gas providers needed their power restored, said Allen Nye, chief executive of Texas’s largest electricity delivery company.
The problem, Morgan and Nye said, was that unlike hospitals, 911 call centers and fire stations, many gas production plants had never been identified as “critical” facilities, a designation that could have shielded them from outages during emergencies.
Yet the process of getting a facility designated as critical infrastructure couldn’t be easier. The owner simply needs to fill out the two-page form each year and turn it in to the local utility company.
The same problem was identified during the state’s last major freeze, in 2011. A federal after-incident report concluded that just under a third of production losses in the Permian and Fort Worth areas were caused by outages, mostly power cut to electric pumps on gathering lines at the wellheads. It advised gas and electric companies to close the communication gap so the same thing didn’t happen during the next emergency.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Simple-paperwo
rk-blunder-Texans-cold-winter-storm-16032163.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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If the Texas Blackout of 2021 fails to spur transformational change in ERCOT, I’m not sure what will. The Legislature is on track to leave the same old system in place to fail us again.
Almost anyone with a hand in the February fiasco urged lawmakers to tread lightly and avoid overprescribing solutions. So far, the bills that have moved out of committee and are working their way through the Legislature only propose cosmetic changes.
Proponents promise House Bill 11 will mandate weatherization, but all it does is order the Public Utility Commission of Texas to draft a rule requiring electric companies “to prepare generation facilities to provide adequate electric generation service during an extreme weather emergency.”
The bill does not refer to national or international engineering standards, nor does it propose a penalty if a company fails to prepare. The bill is about as vague and toothless as they get.
House Bill 10 reorganizes the ERCOT board to replace five seats historically held by outside energy professionals with five political appointees who live in Texas. The media made a big fuss about how the people who filled those seats lived outside Texas, but based on past hearings, they were the most serious people in the room. More political puppets will not lead to better power plants.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article
/Texas-lawmakers-slow-walking-desperately-needed-16047727.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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The history of the state’s all-powerful electricity overseer shows a pattern of failure.
For 20 years, ERCOT has been a misbehaving, secretive, arrogant, even criminal grid operator
More at https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/03/26/in-20-years-ercot-
has-been-a-misbehaving-secretive-arrogant-even-criminal-grid-operator/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Texas Death Toll In February's Winter Storm Nearly Doubles To 111
The state says the first storm-related deaths took place on Feb. 11, but due to long-term effects, some Texans succumbed to illness and injury as recently as March 11. Some people's medical equipment stopped working without power, cutting them off from lifesaving treatments. Others died of carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to heat their homes or cars.
February's brutal winter storm exposed massive problems in Texas' power and water systems. It also killed 111 people, according to numbers released Thursday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That number almost doubles the earlier estimates of at least 57 fatalities as investigators confirmed the cause of more deaths.
More at https://www.npr.org/2021/03/26/981594093/texas-death-toll-in-februarys
-winter-storm-nearly-doubles-to-111
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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So .020% of the fake Covid numbers, huh?
A. Buy a generator.
B. Have a reasonable supply of food and toiletries on hand at all times.
Not only won't 99% of those people spend some of their stimmy money on a generator, but I bet if you polled every American right now 95% of them would tell you that they don't have any more paper towels or toilet paper on hand than they did this time a year ago.
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" '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 
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:You can play the same game with any cause of death. How many died from Glioblastoma multiforme (brain cancer)? Too few to worry about. How many died from the Texas power blackout? Too few to worry about.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So .020% of the fake Covid numbers, huh?
A. Buy a generator.
B. Have a reasonable supply of food and toiletries on hand at all times.
Not only won't 99% of those people spend some of their stimmy money on a generator, but I bet if you polled every American right now 95% of them would tell you that they don't have any more paper towels or toilet paper on hand than they did this time a year ago.
https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-types/brain-cancer/types
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You can play the same game with any cause of death. How many died from Glioblastoma multiforme (brain cancer)? Too few to worry about. How many died from the Texas power blackout? Too few to worry about.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So .020% of the fake Covid numbers, huh?
A. Buy a generator.
B. Have a reasonable supply of food and toiletries on hand at all times.
Not only won't 99% of those people spend some of their stimmy money on a generator, but I bet if you polled every American right now 95% of them would tell you that they don't have any more paper towels or toilet paper on hand than they did this time a year ago.
https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-types/brain-cancer/types
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
You sure can.
Any death except for fake Covid deaths, of course.
But throw in Demographics and I really couldn't care less. Texas is so far away from me it might as well be on the moon. But honestly, if it's not my family or friends who died, I'm not going to lose any sleep or even post any threads about it if people were dying right in my own back yard. More people get murdered in Chicago every single weekend than died in Texas when it got chilly.
People die. All the time.
All I can say is sorry that your system sucks. Good luck getting it fixed and getting people to start using any good times to prepare for the inevitable bad ones.
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" '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
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Texas leaders, stop asking nicely for industry to secure our power grid. Mandate it.
More than a month after the catastrophic failure of Texas’ power grid, elected officials and political appointees refuse to take true responsibility or move with urgency to fix the problems.
The shameful show of finger-pointing and shallow concern hit the national stage Wednesday as several Texas officials testified before Congress on the impact and causes of February’s storm.
One moment served as a glaring allegory of Texas deflection: Railroad Commission Chairman Christi Craddick was asked whether she, as the state’s top oil and gas regulator, would start requiring operators to fill out a short form that keeps their power from being shut off during outages.
The question by U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey should have been a no-brainer. Craddick herself had testified that in the middle of the blackouts, crews returning to gas fields found they couldn’t restart production because they’d lost power for their equipment. That problem was the result of gas production plant owners not filling out simple paperwork to become designated as “critical facilities,” making them exempt as hospitals are from having their power cut so they can keep supplying fuel to power plants.
Even so, Craddick wouldn’t commit to requiring the form be filled out. Veasey pushed back. Craddick continued to dodge the question. Letting industry police itself is a basic tenant in Texas’ laissez-faire approach to oversight. It’s unclear what kind of burden she thinks filling out a free form that takes about two minutes to complete would impose on companies.
Veasey wasn’t having Craddick’s excuses. “Republicans just want this problem to go away,” he said. “They don’t want to deal with this, they don’t want to require anybody to do anything, which means we’re going to be sitting in the cold again and that is the problem. They are running out the clock.”
Coming from a Democrat, that may sound like partisan rhetoric — except for the fact that the complacency and political cowardice he describes has all happened before. It set the stage for February’s disaster. And it will lead to another tragedy unless lawmakers resolve to finally act this session. Texas oil and gas regulators knew that gas suppliers had their power cut during the state’s last major freeze in 2011. A federal after-incident report had warned that communication gaps between gas and electric companies should be fixed to prevent it from happening again.
A state report in 2012 said the same thing, with regulators at the Texas Public Utility Commission and Railroad Commission concluding that “cascading” grid failures could happen if companies that provide fuel for power generation lost power themselves. That’s exactly what happened in February. It is not government overreach or far-left sabotage to require energy companies to engage in basic emergency planning. It’s the least a government can do to protect its residents from a harsh winter storm.
Lawmakers need to pass safeguards, and elected leaders such as Craddick need to stop leaving Texans’ health and safety to chance and voluntary compliance.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-
Texas-leaders-do-your-jobs-Stop-16058201.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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Let me know how much that costs.
Then divide it by 11 and tell me when the rest of America is going to have that much money given to them per US citizen.
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" '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
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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