So, people are freezing in Texas and the power is going out. Conservatives blame windmills. Liberals blame not enough windmills. What is the truth?
You can’t handle the truth.
We cannot know what the truth is about anything any longer because our media sources are all unreliable. They all specialize in telling us their own brand of truth because that is what drives their revenues and paychecks.
Windmills and solar did not cause Texas’ energy crunch. Energy producers know with certainty that those technologies are hobby-farm levels of electricity. They know with certainty that they are unreliable and should not be counted on for anything important… like keeping the lights on. So they have massive extra capacity from Natural gas generation. Not “just enough” or “enough for 95% of normal demands. MASSIVE.
Reliance on fossil fuels did not cause the crunch or make it worse. Windmills and solar fill a niche in an otherwise natural gas/nuclear/coal dominated generation facility.
Capitalism did not cause the crisis. Power companies all pretty much run the same way whether they are not for profits, co-ops, or public utilities. They all cover the operating costs with service fees and put a buffer aside to fix things that break and improve the grid over time. Government interference like what happens in California is the only thing that destroys the ability of those companies to operate efficiently.
What did cause the crisis:
- Massive immigration from outside the USA and from “Blue” states, increasing the population much faster than the grid expanded. (windmills included)
- Massive cold weather of a type that is nowhere near normal for that area. Texas homes don’t have the insulation factors we have in the northern states. Texas residents have to make up for that the only way they know how, by cranking up the heaters, making demand for electricity skyrocket.
- Covid lockdowns keeping people in their homes causes their normal daily demands for energy to increase to keep their homes comfortable beyond their normal non-working hours while at the same time, businesses are still carrying a full heating bill for the 5% of people who still show up.
It’s no one’s fault. All the people in Texas simply demanded more electricity than was possible to produce.
genericviews.wordpress.com 
I live in Texas so I reckon I am as much of an expert as anyone else – especially those who do not live here. The combination of multiple factors – not any one of them alone – was the
cause of this ‘disaster’. It was a cascade of ALL of those factors hitting at once.
Here is another way to look at it. If a similar set of circumstances hit cold locales all at once what would happen to them? I’m talking an area that has little to no air conditioning that was to get an extended stretch of unseasonably hot weather – say 100+ degrees for a couple of weeks – those folks would suffer but in all probability most of them would get thru it – as did most Texans.
Are there things that can and should be undertaken to mitigate such a possibility from happening again, certainly,
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don’t know how accurate this is … i live in tx, too – lots of stuff going around … i’m pretty much ignoring most of it b/c, even when they do have ‘official’ investigation results, i know they’ll be skewed and, in the very least, incomplete.
however … saw this:
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.
3/ The truth is that the federal government controls how Texas generates electricity – the mix of sources and the capacity of each. The EPA requires that Texas’ fossil fuel power generators operate far below their maximum output.
4/ Gov. Abbott knew that if the EPA would allow our natural gas and coal power plants to operate at peak efficiency they could meet 110% of the demand the state faced last week. The EPA refused.
5/ Sadly, Biden’s acting EPA chief, David Huizenga, is not an expert at power generation but instead an expert with nuclear waste management. When Gov. Abbott received the EPA’s refusal he knew Texas was in trouble and there was nothing he could do about it.
6/ My question? Why didn’t @GovAbbott simply order all Texas power generation facilities to operate at peak efficiency and force Biden to send his army to Texas to stop us? Does anyone think Biden would have sent the army to shut down our national gas power generation facilities?
7/ SHOCK: President Biden refused @GovAbbott’s request that he sign major disaster declarations for 177 Texas counties after refusing to allow Texas power plants to operate at 100% capacity during the polar vortex resulting in massive power outages.
msn.com/en-us/news/us/…
8/ If President Trump had refused to provide disaster relief for 177 counties the Texas Tribune would be in each county sharing the stories of average Texans struggling to stay warm, feed their families, and pay their bills. Since Biden refused to provide relief: silence.
9/ CORRECTION: I used EPA instead of DOE in this thread. Also, to be clear the DOE refused Abbott’s request to allow power plants to operate at full capacity without charging at least $1500/MWh – a price that would have bankrupted the retail electric industry/consumers.
10/ To put the DOE’s actions in context their demand that generators sell their additional capacity at $1500/MWh is like telling gas stations they can sell gas to consumers at $1500/gallon – it was a price so high it was basically saying, “no, you can’t increase capacity”.
11/ While we lost much of our renewable supply (wind and solar) our natural gas and coal are required to operate at 60% capacity to reduce emissions. They CAN operate at 100% if they get a waiver from the federal government (as Abbott requested). Biden refused…
12/ This morning on the Sunday political TV shows Biden surrogates claimed that the power outages and the lives lost rest solely on @GregAbbott_TX. The media won’t look at evidence that the DOE refused the governor’s request to allow for additional power generation. Sick.
13/ If you’re a reporter working on this story just talk to any power plant in Texas with three boilers. Most are only allowed to run two boilers at a time due to restrictions on pollution. They could run the third with a waiver from the DOE (one that was effectively denied).
@mentions
unroll
14/ According to ERCOT’s own data they knew that 100% of wind power was at risk of going down during the polar vortex. There are wind turbines that can operate in very cold conditions, but they cost far more than the ones Texas operators purchased.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1363522274091929601.html?fbclid=IwAR0hqmRJ7J9fiBkV0X3pcEKSUQa3h7MyHYodIemRjGrSk46uC-FRI-N-hU8
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Thanks for the details.
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i hope it was okay that i copied and pasted the whole thing in a comment – thought it best since they could take the info on the link down.
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“It’s no one’s fault.”
Was hoping we could just blame the Jews. It is tradition.
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