Interesting... Conservatives complain about lying, yet:
“Every grid operator and every electric company is fighting to restore power right now,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness.
Multiple electrical generating units began tripping offline quickly Sunday night, causing a collapse in electricity supply and prompting the outages. The units fell offline due to the cold weather, ERCOT officials said during the call.
Most of those that went offline were natural gas, coal or nuclear facilities that shut down. Combined, it in total took more than 30,000 megawatts from the grid."
Strangely wind turbines (and other power plants) in North East rarely have issues in the winter. Could it be that good old fashioned greed by operators and lack of regulation by the State are actually the cause?
When you have a problem with power generation during a crisis do you focus on the 20% of power generation that is credibly contributing to reduction of extreme weather that caused the problem in the first place? Or do you gloss over the 80% that failed and is making the problem worse?
We as a nation - have a shaky infrastructure,
the citizens deserve better. Updating will take
generations not a band aid or " quick fix ".
Oh noes we can't have that. That would require way too much government interference. We need our freedumb in Qmerica because MAGA!
Meanwhile in Canada, just a mile from the US border, we picked up another foot of snow last night and the windmills are spinning away just fine, generating power for our grid. Wherever you find Big Oil then you will find the lies they spin about alternative energy sources, small minded and short sighted.
I have relatives in the Houston area that say they have had no electric since 2 AM on 2-15-21. Social media friends in Austin have said the power is being cycled on and off, back and forth just so they can have electricity. It might go 2 or 3 hours and be turned off a while. Lots of things come into play here but it is cold everywhere and that part was not figured into the power structures in some Texas areas. Houston is 14 degrees and Dallas is 6 degrees. I lived in Texas 20 years and only remember cold once, but it was not like this.
I'm in mid Missouri where it is zero right now and is said to be in the minus numbers over night. So far I have had no electric problems but the storm door did freeze shut once.
I can only remember one other time similar in the past 40 yrs in texas
and its lucky I have a personal heater and that my daughter and grandson like it cold our heater did its annual outage right after the freeze started and the ex neglected to renew the wood pile so we are as they say a little fucked but its ok she uses the oven on and off and our electric has held steady
Any technology, especially newer technology are bound to have hiccups. Coal fired power plants had lots of pollution replete with dangerous compounds in the plume, and nuclear power plants had problems with spent fuel rods and melt downs.
So it should be expected that when an aberrant intense blizzard hits, the wind turbine equipment has some difficulties. Since they were not necessarily designed or built for these conditions, to experience freezing is almost expected. This will allow engineers to re-design for the future with new understanding.
No reason, like some of the hayseeds on here, to advocate for abandoning the technology.
There are windmills that weather far worse winters than Texas, maybe the Republicans in charge weren't smart enough to buy quality equipment.
Exactly! There are hundreds generating power in MN that withstand worse and keep on turning...
@Zster can't trust texas politicians like cruz