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 2 of 18
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Just fyi the endquote [ /quote] function doesn't play well with links. You need to put a space in between the link and the endquote for the endquote to work.
It's nice to know that at least a few people on these boards are still intelligent and courteous.
This is a problem that happens nearly every day here. I just don't make a fuss about it unless somebody chronically screws it up like idiot Ted.
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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
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lol
Why would a dummy ever admit to that?
Looks like Mr. Burns is trying to Cuomo himself.
lol... Mr. Burns...
This shit just writes itself.
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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
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Surviving the Texas Freeze in a Gerrymandered City
The Texas freeze proved that our representatives feel no obligation to their constituents.
The first I heard from my congressman was at 5:14 p.m. last Tuesday, some 39 hours after Austinites began reporting they’d lost power in the midst of a deadly winter freeze. The high that day was 26 degrees, the low 7, and when the email came, my husband and I had just slid a half-mile down icy, barren streets to get warm at a friend’s apartment, our own heat and electricity having gone out that morning.
The congressman was not emailing to see how we were holding up. Instead, he seemed primarily concerned with assigning blame for the outages, which would leave, at their height, 4 million Texans without power and result in overwhelmed hospitals and an as-yet-unknown number of deaths. “Radical ideologies have politicized energy policy at the state and federal levels in recent years,” he declared, echoing the sentiments of other Republicans, who had already begun falsely blaming renewable energy sources as the primary reason for the outages. The congressman was in touch with various agencies to see how “additional federal deregulation” might solve the problem. To those still without heat and electricity, he suggested consulting an outage map for which he’d forgotten to include the URL; the “here” we were to click on linked to nothing.
The day after Roy’s initial email, subfreezing conditions continuing and much of Austin’s power, including ours, still out with no end in sight, the congressman released a statement not explaining how he planned to help the struggling citizens of his district but eulogizing Rush Limbaugh. “You may now return your talent to God, loaned to you to share with us all these years,” he wrote.
Roy wasn’t the only Austin Republican whose priorities did not seem to include looking out for Austinites last week. Like Roy, Rep. Roger Williams of the 25th District, was offering his own condolences to Limbaugh (“I’ll always cherish the time I got to spend with him”) and, bizarrely, attacking New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“Rule #1 for the Socialist Democrat Party, use any crisis available to lasso control”).
By contrast, Austin’s lone Democratic representative, Lloyd Doggett, who was also operating without power for much of last week, nonetheless used his social media feeds as a clearinghouse for essential information like where to find water, food, and warming shelters. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has raised $5 million in relief money for Texans, while former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who currently does not hold elective office, ran a virtual phone bank through which volunteers made almost 800,000 phone calls to Texas seniors, connecting them with food, water and transportation.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210224203447/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/02/texas-gerrymandering-freeze-power-outages-chip-roy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Oh... lol. You're suggesting that Democrats will fix the problem.
That's funny.
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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
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Quote:The Great Texas Power Rip-Off
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... lol. You're suggesting that Democrats will fix the problem.
That's funny.
Two decades ago Texas deregulated its power sector and required 60% of its residents to buy electricity from a retail power company. The other 40% stuck with traditional local utilities. The Wall Street Journal shows us the results:
According to the Journal, retail customers have paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities:
From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.
The Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, a group that buys electricity for local government use, produced similar findings in a study of the state’s power markets and concluded that high statewide prices relative to the national average “must be attributed to the deregulated sector of Texas.”
So what happens now? Probably nothing. In Texas, deregulation is something like a religion: it works by definition, even if it doesn't work. Just give it another 20 years and you'll see.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-the-great-texas-power-rip-o
ff/
None of this was supposed to happen under deregulation. Backers of competition in the electricity-supply business promised it would lower prices for consumers.
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:Here comes idiot boy, eager to again show us how fucking stupid he is, and he didn't disappoint.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.
You fucking moron. You don't know shit, and never will. Your brain started out weak, and your drug addictions have just destroyed it even further. You're basically a vegetable. It's a marvel you can remember to breathe.
Give your family (you don't have any friends) what they deserve. Make them rejoice. Kill yourself.
Your entire life is spent pulling on your permanently limp 2" pud, fantasizing about murdering black people for your god Trump.
You're too weak to actually defend yourself, though. You'll be the first to die. We will all toast your death. All of us.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Here comes idiot boy, eager to again show us how fucking stupid he is, and he didn't disappoint.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.
You fucking moron. You don't know shit, and never will. Your brain started out weak, and your drug addictions have just destroyed it even further. You're basically a vegetable. It's a marvel you can remember to breathe.
Give your family (you don't have any friends) what they deserve. Make them rejoice. Kill yourself.
Your entire life is spent pulling on your permanently limp 2" pud, fantasizing about murdering black people for your god Trump.
You're too weak to actually defend yourself, though. You'll be the first to die. We will all toast your death. All of us.
27.
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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
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This is originally a Bloomberg story. But since Bloomberg's behind a paywall, here's the Yahoo! reprint version.
Quote:
The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas’s Electric Grid
(Bloomberg) -- The control room of the Texas electric grid is dominated by a Cineplex-sized screen along one wall. As outdoor temperatures plunged to arctic levels around the low-slung building 30 miles from Austin last Sunday night, all eyes were on it. The news wasn’t good.
Electric demand for heat across the state was soaring, as expected, but green dots on the corner state map started flipping to red. Each was a regional power generator, and they were spontaneously shutting down — three coal plants followed quickly by a gas plant in Corpus Christi.
Then another metric began to flash: frequency, a measure of electricity flow on the grid. The 60 hertz needed for stability fell to 59.93.
Bill Magness, chief executive officer of the grid operator, was watching intently and understood instantly what was at stake. Below 59 and the state’s electrical system would face cascading blackouts that would take weeks or months to restore. (All hail the smart grid! kiki) In India in 2012, 700 million people were plunged into darkness in such a moment.
Texas was “seconds and minutes” from such a catastrophe, Magness recalled. It shouldn’t have been happening. After the winter blackouts of 2011, plants should have protected themselves against such low temperatures. The basis of the Texas system is the market — demand soars, you make money. Demand was soaring last Sunday, but the plants were shutting down.
If insufficient power came in, the grid wouldn’t be able to support the energy demand from customers and the other power plants that supply them, causing a cycle of dysfunction. So over the following hours, grid operators ordered the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.
More than 2,000 miles away in San Juan, Puerto Rico, power trader Adam Sinn had been sitting at his computer watching the frequency chart plummet in real time. He knew the dip would be enough to start forcing power plants offline, potentially causing more widespread blackouts. It was an unprecedented situation but, from his perspective, entirely avoidable.
In fact, it was a crisis years in the making. Texas’s power grid ... is famously independent — and insular. Its self-contained grid ... is powered almost entirely in-state with limited import ability ..., thereby allowing the system to avoid federal oversight. ... It’s also an energy-only market, meaning the grid relies on price signals from extreme power prices to spur investments in new power plants, batteries and other supplies.
There is no way to contract power supply to meet the highest demand periods, something known as a capacity market on other grids. There are no mandates or penalties compelling generators to make supply available when it’s needed, or to cold-proof their equipment for storms like the one that slammed Texas last weekend.
So, as the cold began shutting in natural gas supplies, freezing instruments at power plants and icing over wind turbines, there wasn’t enough back-up generation available to meet demand. As many as 5 million homes and businesses were abruptly thrust into frigid darkness for nearly four straight days as the crisis continued, ensnaring more than a dozen other states as far as away as California and roiling commodity markets across the globe.
Now, as the snow across Texas melts and the lights come back on, answers remain hard to come by.NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
This seems to be the crux of the problem: "Texas’s power grid (is) also an energy-only market, meaning the grid relies on price signals from extreme power prices to spur investments in new power plants, batteries and other supplies."
But why use-up profits to build new production, especially when keeping production low and products in short supply means you can jack up sales prices to extreme levels?
This is an oft-repeated failure of 'capitalism'-only economics (even in theory, and most definitely in practice) across many products and markets. When producers/ manufactures/ monopolies/ consortia have a lock on the market and there's no significant competition you get far higher profits by keeping production down.
It's the reasoning behind OPEC, for example - agreements to limit production across producers to keep sales prices high.
So there's no mystery why Texas failed to prepare for cold weather after 2011. It didn't pay then - and it won't pay now.
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The ERCOT grid, Magness said in a separate call yesterday with reporters, was “seconds and minutes” away from a total blackout—an uncontrolled event that, had it happened, later would have required essentially firing it up from dead. The procedure, known in the industry as a “black start,” never has happened in Texas but is the subject of annual ERCOT drills. It would involve activating diesel generators at designated power plants across the state to restart them, gradually reintroducing electricity into nearby power lines, then linking together these re-powered “islands” until the ERCOT grid is back up, Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, explained Friday. “It’s just an incredibly difficult process and takes time,” he said.
Had such a blackout occurred, it would have brought the state to its knees, potentially for weeks or months, an economy that would rank tenth globally if Texas were a country. The emergency required “immediate action,” Magness said, which is why ERCOT began ordering what it terms the “controlled” blackouts that cut off electricity to much of the state.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/texas-blackout-preventable/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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