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
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You know that when you've spent a year desensitizing everyone with made up Covid death numbers that 40 deaths sounds like nothing, don't you?
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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 
Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6
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Quote:It would be similar to being careless around a table saw, cutting off a finger, then saying it "sounds like nothing" because you have 9 other fingers and 10 toes. Plus there are still other people with all their fingers and toes, so why should you be cautious around a power saw? I think the answer is to never cut off even one finger and never kill even one person by cutting off their electricity out of negligence. Or even cutting off electricity during a freeze to millions of customers because it is far easier and more profitable than keeping the electricity on.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You know that when you've spent a year desensitizing everyone with made up Covid death numbers that 40 deaths sounds like nothing, don't you?
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:Interesting but mostly irrelevant. Building more power plants when their fuel supply is frozen in the pipes is pointless. I don't't think power utilities have control over their gas suppliers, do they? Did the regulators have authority to require weatherizing nat gas pipes?
Originally posted by second:
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
Even weatherizing a power plant won't help if the fuel supply is missing. Maybe having dual-fuel plants would have helped if they had heated oil storage tanks on-site. The only kind of power plant that would make sense to weatherize would be nuclear, bc the fuel is there for a long time.
Also, to be clear, the issue was NOT "green energy". Wind power made up only about 15pct of the power mix, and solar - altho vanishingly small- actually continued on as usual. The numerically largest loss of MWH was from nat gas fired plants.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It would be similar to being careless around a table saw, cutting off a finger, then saying it "sounds like nothing" because you have 9 other fingers and 10 toes. Plus there are still other people with all their fingers and toes, so why should you be cautious around a power saw? I think the answer is to never cut off even one finger and never kill even one person by cutting off their electricity out of negligence. Or even cutting off electricity during a freeze to millions of customers because it is far easier and more profitable than keeping the electricity on.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You know that when you've spent a year desensitizing everyone with made up Covid death numbers that 40 deaths sounds like nothing, don't you?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Nah.
It's more like tearing off a hang-nail and getting a boo boo in comparison.
--------------------------------------------------
" '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
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Since the power crisis, the electricity and natural gas industries have engaged in a chicken-and-egg blame game — generators say they couldn’t make electricity because of gas shortages and gas companies say they couldn’t deliver the fuel because of power shortages.
Texas is one of only two states with split regulation over electricity and gas. The Public Utility Commission oversees ERCOT and the electricity industry. The Railroad Commission oversees oil and gas.
In legislative hearings dissecting the power crisis, Christi Craddick, a Republican who chairs the Railroad Commission, said she was unaware that natural gas producers could seek exemptions, like hospitals already have, from rolling outages — exemptions that would have kept gas flowing to power plants.
Power outages left gas processing facilities and pipeline pumps inoperable. The lack of power limited the gas supply, according to Enverus, an energy research firm. Texas natural gas production fell by nearly half during the storm, according to the research and consulting firm IHS Markit. With half as much natural gas to power plants, the output of electricity was also cut in half.
Some larger companies, such as Houston natural gas pipeline company Kinder Morgan, said they took steps after 2011 to gird their equipment against similar storms and did not experience significant disruptions to the flow of gas to power plants. Texas government, however, has no comprehensive data on the measures that the industry completed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210312124726/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/freeze-risk-texas-natural-gas-supply-system-power-16020457.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 state’s grid manager booted two more retail electricity providers from Texas wholesale power markets this week after they failed to make payments to cover their purchases during the recent power crisis.
At least three retail power companies have been banned from participating in the market because they could not cover bills run up when frigid weather and failing power generators drove prices to the state maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour — more than 300 times average wholesale prices. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, ousted Entrust Energy, which owes some $290 million, and Power of Texas, which owes an amount that was not available Friday.
On Friday, San Antonio’s municipal utility CPS Energy sued ERCOT, alleging that the grid manager left power prices too high for too long. CPS ran up a tab of about $1 billion buying natural gas and power at exorbitant prices during the storm.
Just Energy, a Canadian company with more than 350,000 customers in Texas, filed for protection from creditors in Canada this week and said it would seek bankruptcy protection in the United States. Earlier this month, the state's largest electric cooperative, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, filed for bankruptcy protection in Houston.
Brazos racked up an estimated $2.1 billion in charges over seven days of the freeze, according to its bankruptcy filing. Brazos accounts for about $1.9 billion of ERCOT’s $3.1 billion shortfall.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210313122417/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/More-power-companies-booted-from-the-market-after-16022459.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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Quote:You, OTOH, are entirely uninteresting and completely irrelevant. Do the one and only thing you can do to make the world a better place.
Originally posted by SignyM:
Interesting but mostly irrelevant.
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True Cost of Major Power Outages Remains a Mystery, Report Finds
Very relevant to the recent blackouts in Texas, we find that people aren’t estimating the costs borne by electricity customers of being without power for a long period of time.
Regulations play an important role in this information disparity. The data for grid repairs is so robust in the Texas case study, which focused on two utilities responding to Hurricane Harvey in 2017, because the utilities had to convince regulators of the need to raise rates to recover their costs.
This process in Texas involves hearings, which are sometimes contested. Utilities have to supply significant data to justify charging more.
Texas, and many other states, don’t have regulations in place that mandate utilities to consider human and business interruption costs from being shut down for extended periods due to power outages. According to the report, these costs don’t have a direct impact to the utilities themselves, so there’s no incentive to take them into account.
Utilities are under-investing right now because they are factoring in only their costs and only their benefits. If we could get them to internalize the broader cost to customers and society into their decision-making, then we might see quite a bit more investment in grid resilience.
More at https://www.engr.utexas.edu/news/archive/9183-true-cost-of-major-power
-outages-remains-a-mystery-report-finds
https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/publications/case-studies-economic-im
pacts-power
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' last Public Utility Commission member resigns at Gov. Greg Abbott's request
He is the latest in a long line of officials who have left the PUC or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas since last month's deadly winter storm. At least 57 people died in Texas as a result of the storm — most of them from hypothermia — according to preliminary data the state health department released Monday.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/16/texas-public-utilty-commission
-resignation/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This simple paperwork blunder left Texans cold during the deadly freeze
Dozens of natural gas facilities had not filled out a three-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.
At the height of the “snowpocalypse,” social media teemed with pictures of the power haves and have nots — prompting outrage that vacant downtown office buildings had electricity they didn’t need while average citizens endured teeth-chattering cold or worse.
Former utility regulator Jennifer Hubbs saw those pictures and wondered why her bosses at the Public Utility Commission and her counterparts at the Texas Railroad Commission had not followed through on simple recommendations to keep power flowing to gas suppliers and adopt the emergency procedures she and others proposed years earlier.
“I’m on Twitter and I see a photo of downtown Houston lit up like a freakin’ Christmas tree and all the houses around it dark. It hit me like a physical blow,” she said. “You know, we might have avoided rotating outages entirely if we had just approached it with some sense.”
The final 2012 report Hubbs oversaw — the Texas Energy Assurance Plan — concluded that if the companies that provide fuel for power generation lost power themselves, it could create “cascading” grid failures.
But with no single elected official or bureaucrat in charge of ensuring the two industries work out an emergency plan to keep the power supply chain powered up, the push for voluntary compliance never fully materialized.
When Oncor checked its records during the storm, it found only 35 Permian Basin gas facilities had registered as critical infrastructure to be protected from power shut-offs, Nye said; none had had their power turned off. He said the company added another 168 facilities to the list during the freeze.
A full assessment of how big a role electric power cut to gas facilities played in the grid outages is likely months away. Yet how some of Texas’s largest and most sophisticated energy companies, depended upon by nearly every resident and business, failed to complete a two-minute paperwork chore remains one of the most baffling mysteries of last month’s deadly outages.
Deepening the puzzle is that 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.
“Gas producers, processors, pipelines, storage providers, and LDCs should identify portions of their systems that are essential to the ongoing delivery of significant volumes of gas, and which are dependent upon purchased power to function reliably under emergency conditions,” it recommended.
As the deep freeze settled over the state a decade later, however, it became clear that the problem remained unfixed.
A fix that costs nothing
The failure of gas and electric companies to communicate with each other — again — demonstrates Texas’s power grid near-collapse last month was an integrated failure spread throughout the system.
Generators and pipeline owners balked at weatherizing their equipment. Lawmakers and regulators neglected to exercise meaningful oversight of the state’s deregulated power industry, leaving it vulnerable to emergencies. Even electric power to the grid’s single biggest fuel source, natural gas, wasn’t secured.
The discovery a decade ago that gas suppliers’ poor communication with power companies had threatened the integrity of the grid prompted a flurry of urgent discussions and meetings about how to assure the electricity would stay on. A follow-up report, the Texas Energy Assurance Plan — a federally funded initiative meant to protect the grid against natural and man-made em
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