Texas, 'He Is Lying. People Are Dying'

A large number of peep on this forum divert from reasoned facts by throwing out one line attacks which did not fit at all. They parrot the same old lines while accusing the other person of parroting. My impression is that they live in a one dimensional world of scripted thought, half truths, and out right lies.
Irony... I’ll bet you have research to back this up but we have to pay to see it 😂
 
Didn’t have AC until I went to college.

It’s not really that gangsta to live in Asheville and poo poo AC. A lot of the houses there don’t have them. If you’re up high enough you’re only going to see a handful of really warm days all year.
 
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Congrats. You luckily ranted the exact same slanted rant. Being called on the slant you’ve now transitioned to a stupid baseless emotional plea to authority. Run along now.
Your lack of character is readily apparent to any who read your posts. Belittling me reveals you to be small-minded and insecure.
 
I wasn't sure where to post this (and this isn't a knock on Texas) but seeing all those nice cars lined up in Texas of people trying to get food or the news stories of people running out of food. I call b.s. on most of that.

I have no sympathy for those people who doesn't prepare for hard times where man made or in this case natural. Unless your homeless or really hurting there is no reason you shouldn't have enough food in your house to sustain you and your family for at least two weeks. While it may not be what you want or the most nutritious it'll keep you from starving.

What if you don't have running water? Well right now in my house I probably have anywhere from 3-6 12 packs of "coke, soda" varieties and probably a couple of 2 liters of some kind. Not to mention there is probably a couple bottles of Gatorade or powerade stuck in the back of a cabinet.

"Prepping" or "Preppers" always get made fun of by regular people and in the liberal media for being mentally ill or unhinged.

However, even if your not hardcore preparing for a EMP or TEOWAWKI! It's up to every single person & their family to prepare for a "LCE" or "Life Changing Event" that could only effect them for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. It could be from severe weather, hurricane, tornado, ice/snow storm to the unexpected like Nashville saw back at Christmas.

Like my mother always says "Prepare for the worse, and hope for the best!"
 
It’s not really that gangsta to live in Asheville and poo poo AC. A lot of the houses there don’t have them. If you’re up high enough you’re only going to see a handful of really warm days all year.

I prefer to think he a tough sonna.
 
Enjoy trying to repair the billions of dollars in damages, blame the dead for dying, and the ruined lives upon the afflicted. Slap the tar brush of “liberal” on anyone who has the audacity to mention another opportunity to mea culpa and prepare to avoid future tragedy. Keep parroting the line of those who continue to promote that which allowed this to happen and accuse the “unfaithful” of the deception and deflection of which you and your ilk are guilty. Proclaim that you are Texas, and everyone who disagrees with you are unworthy. Oh, and deny that you and your Texas have any impact on others outside of Texas. Happy trails...

You sound angry at Texas. What gives?
 
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Your lack of character is readily apparent to any who read your posts. Belittling me reveals you to be small-minded and insecure.
You’re a serial virtue signaler and hypocrite. You’ve leveled personal attacks also but I guess “that’s different”. You’re clueless on what actually happened in Texas that’s a given.
 
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Just got back from Home Depot because I have to buy pre-emergent. Because you see spring is only a couple of weeks away. The OAT sensor in my truck said 65 degrees. Frigging Texas... 🤬
 
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Enjoy trying to repair the billions of dollars in damages, blame the dead for dying, and the ruined lives upon the afflicted. Slap the tar brush of “liberal” on anyone who has the audacity to mention another opportunity to mea culpa and prepare to avoid future tragedy. Keep parroting the line of those who continue to promote that which allowed this to happen and accuse the “unfaithful” of the deception and deflection of which you and your ilk are guilty. Proclaim that you are Texas, and everyone who disagrees with you are unworthy. Oh, and deny that you and your Texas have any impact on others outside of Texas. Happy trails...
Are other southern states hardened like texas needs to be?
 
Are other southern states hardened like texas needs to be?
Probably better on the renewables I’d guess. Everybody but Texas cow toes to the Fed oversight which is his rant fear here. You see contrary to the rest of the country Texas doesn’t really GAF about renewables. They are not considered base load capacity here.

Where I see the stupidity lying is with natural gas energy regulation lying with the Texas Railroad Commission instead of the Energy Reliability Commission of Texas.

But if you cross the TRC you wind up sleeping in a bed with a severed horse head 🤷‍♂️
 
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Maybe you can clear this up since you live in Texas. Read an article the other day that said after the 2011 freeze episode, a Democratic representative put forth a bill to force the state and ERCOT to protect the power plants and gas distribution equipment better and the Republican controlled state government rejected the bill. Is that true?
Hey you got a link to that bill handy I’d like to read up on it and shove it in the inbox of my state rep if they didn’t act on it. TIA
 
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It’s not really that gangsta to live in Asheville and poo poo AC. A lot of the houses there don’t have them. If you’re up high enough you’re only going to see a handful of really warm days all year.

I grew up in the mountains
Relative of Hog?

If he is he must be a distant cousin on my moms side, the family faction we disowned
 
Plagiarized from a friend RE renewables, natural gas, base load, etc... it still doesn’t explicitly call out the fuel delivery to natural gas which failed us. TLDR version: even if we add wind you have to offset wind with reliable generation capacity to insure you have enough. In Texas that means natural gas.

Caveat: I don’t fully agree with the conclusions but he got a lot right.

Copied from another post. For your consideration. I’m still studying this mess.

The Energy Solution for Texas — and the US

By John Droz

In response to the excellent commentaries about the Texas wind energy fiasco (e.g. from Tucker Carlson), there is a lot of pushback baloney — because the guilty parties never want to acknowledge the failures of their policies. It is always the blame of someone else, or something else.

Always.

This brief, simplified article is about the primary core problem, that essentially no one is talking about...
In every electric grid (like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, in Texas), Supply and Demand have to be matched every second. Otherwise, when Demand exceeds Supply there would be blackouts — which would happen daily (as occurs in some third world countries).

To assure that this matching is continuous, there is a Grid Safety Reserve. This consists of operating standby fossil fuel supplies, amounting to 15±% of the current demand. When Demand exceeds Supply+Safety Reserve, again there would be blackouts — which is what is currently happening in Texas.

The two fold purposes of this Safety Reserve are for the Grid to able to fully handle: 1 - unexpected changes in electricity Demand, plus
2 - unexpected downtime for electricity Sources.
That sounds sensible, so what’s the problem?
Well, for industrial wind to work on any Grid, it needs to have a 100% augmenting supply to compensate for its continually, rapidly, changing power output (i.e. to maintain the per second balance explained above). For technical and economic reasons, this augmenting supply is almost always gas.

OK, so for every 10 MW wind project, does that means that there needs to be a dedicated 10 MW gas facility? YES!
Is that happening — e.g. in Texas? NO!

Why not? Because:
1 - To maintain the false narrative that wind is inexpensive, wind developers (and
their political allies) resisted acknowledging that such augmentation is necessary. 2 - Wind developers didn’t pay for the augmentation their product requires — which
they should (i.e. not ratepayers).
3 - Since wind wasn’t properly paying for it, utility companies said: let’s save some
money and skip the necessary augmentation.
4 - The Grid operator (ERCOT) failed to require wind developers to pay for the
necessary augmentation, or for utilities to provide it.
5 - Worse, the Grid operator allowed utility companies to steal from the Safety
Reserve (!) to absorb the frenetic daily wind fluctuations.
Such theft is totally wrong — and should be illegal — as the Grid Safety Reserve is for unexpected Demand or Supply changes. Conversely, wind energy is expected to continuously change through the day, every day.

The Grid Safety Reserve was never intended to compensate for continuous, inherent unreliability. All Grid operators should impose a penalty on any normal operation of their wind fleet that steals from the Safety Reserve — as it jeopardizes all of their ratepayers.

To be clear, this embarrassingly ignorant set of realities is going on in most US Grids. How they get away with it is simple:
1 - The public is deceived about the necessity of augmentation, and
2 - In most other places in the US, the Wind contribution to the Grid is low single
digits — e.g. 5%. In such a scenario, Wind can steal 5% of the 15±% Grid Safety Reserve, and no one will be the wiser. Everybody looks the other way...
However, in the Texas case, Wind energy is claimed to be 28±%. Clearly a 15% Safety Reserve can’t handle a loss of 28% — which is exactly what happened this week.
So, when wind goes to near zero in Texas, the Grid will have blackouts — even if everything else is at full capacity! If there are also failures of conventional capacity, the situation will be worse.

Look closely at this graphic:

This is a visual description of the recent power sources in Texas:
1 - Which sources are up and running and carrying 95%± of the load? [Answer:
Fossil Fuels and Nuclear]
2 - How much of that “28%" is wind supplying? [Answer: < 5%]
Question: so which source is to blame?
Now you know the answer, and who is to blame.
john droz, jr. physicist North Carolina 2-18-21

PS — To be sure there are other secondary sources that have earned chastisement here. Mark Mathis (Clear Energy Alliance) has a fine list of rogues gallery candidates:
#1 - ERCOT waited too long to initiate conservation measures. (But those measures wouldn’t have been necessary if ERCOT had taken reliability seriously.)
#2 - Texas rapidly increased its dependence on unreliable wind power from 6% in 2010 to 28% in 2020.
#3 - Policymakers and ERCOT know that during common weather events (heatwaves, cold snaps, night time, etc.) that wind typically has very low electricity generation — but they kept installing turbines anyway.
#4 - Between February 8th and the 16th wind power crashed as turbines froze. Coal increased by 47% and natural gas increased by a stunning 450%. But it wasn’t enough as millions of Texans lost power in frigid temperatures.
#5 - The rush to install industrial wind turbines soaked up so much of the available utility investment capital, that there wasn’t enough left for transmission upgrades and infrastructure maintenance. Those infrastructure weaknesses contributed to the Texas blackouts.
#6 - Wind power is massively subsidized (esp Federally), which has distorted the Texas electricity ratepayer market. This discouraged new investment for reliable critically important base-load power (e.g. nuclear).
#7 - Wind subsides have made older base-load power generators unprofitable. Texas has shut down more than 3,000 Megawatts of power from conventional sources over the past few years, while adding 20,000 Megawatts of unreliable wind. This has made the ERCOT Grid far less reliable.
#8 - Unlike some other Grids, ERCOT is an energy only market — meaning that there is no compensation for reserve power. This discourages that necessity.

####
 
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Inspired by bham’s EIA data picture which I shared a retired buddy went data mining. Here is the generation capacity and temp curves for the whole event timeline.

The issue is highlighted on the temp curve. The time below freezing. If you remove the singular 2 hr blip we were below freezing for a week plus straight with the lows reaching ridiculous levels. The demand on natural gas and the gas lines freezing was the Achilles heel.
View attachment 353205View attachment 353206

One thing a lot of people ignore is that as you add solar, wind, and natural gas to the grid, it really affects the dynamics of the utilities' baseload capacity especially if weather or other factors threaten any or all of them then. Those are more commonly fossil and nuclear, and have higher capital and operating and maintenance costs. I still stick largely by my two cowboys with a lot of money, a big jet engine, and a generator on the gas generating electric power - think Enron operating on the cheap. As you add those three elements to the grid it really squeezes utilities to maintain and continue operation of coal and nuclear plants. Generally natural gas has been reliable and comparatively cheap because of simplicity in operation - why Enron was involved in the first place - a couple of cowboys and a lot of money. Starting up or throttling a gas turbine is a much simpler operation than fossil and certainly easier than a nuclear plant. So as you add gas, wind, and solar to the mix and in a capacity that digs into coal and nuclear baseload then you are talking about idling plants with very expensive operating costs - you absolutely don't start fossil and nuclear plants by flipping a switch, and an idled plant not producing because the utility has to absorb what solar and wind operators are adding to the grid is a costly proposition. On the chart when the blue and yellow swamp the fossil and nuclear you are putting your electric power in the hands of amateurs running for fun and profits over serious utility businesses.

Since TX has an abundance of gas, the lower fuel and operating costs make it very attractive. Do as little as possible and pump out electrons for profit works works for suppliers who amount to amateur utilities that might even cut and run if NG prices climb. Somebody brought up earlier, do you prepare for the isolated (every hundred or even ten year event) or do you play the odds. Texans have a choice to make on that. On the other hand when the Chinese turn off our "smart" grid someday, Texans may be the ones enjoying the other side of the "logical" game. My choice is dedicated, regulated utilities generating, managing, and distributing the power input to the grid - just makes sense from a logistical and resource management standpoint. I disagree completely with one big interconnected power grid - preferring smaller regional grids perhaps with "unsmart interconnects".
 
One thing a lot of people ignore is that as you add solar, wind, and natural gas to the grid, it really affects the dynamics of the utilities' baseload capacity especially if weather or other factors threaten any or all of them then. Those are more commonly fossil and nuclear, and have higher capital and operating and maintenance costs. I still stick largely by my two cowboys with a lot of money, a big jet engine, and a generator on the gas generating electric power - think Enron operating on the cheap. As you add those three elements to the grid it really squeezes utilities to maintain and continue operation of coal and nuclear plants. Generally natural gas has been reliable and comparatively cheap because of simplicity in operation - why Enron was involved in the first place - a couple of cowboys and a lot of money. Starting up or throttling a gas turbine is a much simpler operation than fossil and certainly easier than a nuclear plant. So as you add gas, wind, and solar to the mix and in a capacity that digs into coal and nuclear baseload then you are talking about idling plants with very expensive operating costs - you absolutely don't start fossil and nuclear plants by flipping a switch, and an idled plant not producing because the utility has to absorb what solar and wind operators are adding to the grid is a costly proposition. On the chart when the blue and yellow swamp the fossil and nuclear you are putting your electric power in the hands of amateurs running for fun and profits over serious utility businesses.

Since TX has an abundance of gas, the lower fuel and operating costs make it very attractive. Do as little as possible and pump out electrons for profit works works for suppliers who amount to amateur utilities that might even cut and run if NG prices climb. Somebody brought up earlier, do you prepare for the isolated (every hundred or even ten year event) or do you play the odds. Texans have a choice to make on that. On the other hand when the Chinese turn off our "smart" grid someday, Texans may be the ones enjoying the other side of the "logical" game. My choice is dedicated, regulated utilities generating, managing, and distributing the power input to the grid - just makes sense from a logistical and resource management standpoint. I disagree completely with one big interconnected power grid - preferring smaller regional grids perhaps with "unsmart interconnects".
Read my last two posts. One copied writeup and one link to a piece stating the opinions of informed engineers.

Spoiler alert: the answer isn’t to add more wind/solar or harden the wind/solar we already have
 
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One thing a lot of people ignore is that as you add solar, wind, and natural gas to the grid, it really affects the dynamics of the utilities' baseload capacity especially if weather or other factors threaten any or all of them then. Those are more commonly fossil and nuclear, and have higher capital and operating and maintenance costs. I still stick largely by my two cowboys with a lot of money, a big jet engine, and a generator on the gas generating electric power - think Enron operating on the cheap. As you add those three elements to the grid it really squeezes utilities to maintain and continue operation of coal and nuclear plants. Generally natural gas has been reliable and comparatively cheap because of simplicity in operation - why Enron was involved in the first place - a couple of cowboys and a lot of money. Starting up or throttling a gas turbine is a much simpler operation than fossil and certainly easier than a nuclear plant. So as you add gas, wind, and solar to the mix and in a capacity that digs into coal and nuclear baseload then you are talking about idling plants with very expensive operating costs - you absolutely don't start fossil and nuclear plants by flipping a switch, and an idled plant not producing because the utility has to absorb what solar and wind operators are adding to the grid is a costly proposition. On the chart when the blue and yellow swamp the fossil and nuclear you are putting your electric power in the hands of amateurs running for fun and profits over serious utility businesses.

Since TX has an abundance of gas, the lower fuel and operating costs make it very attractive. Do as little as possible and pump out electrons for profit works works for suppliers who amount to amateur utilities that might even cut and run if NG prices climb. Somebody brought up earlier, do you prepare for the isolated (every hundred or even ten year event) or do you play the odds. Texans have a choice to make on that. On the other hand when the Chinese turn off our "smart" grid someday, Texans may be the ones enjoying the other side of the "logical" game. My choice is dedicated, regulated utilities generating, managing, and distributing the power input to the grid - just makes sense from a logistical and resource management standpoint. I disagree completely with one big interconnected power grid - preferring smaller regional grids perhaps with "unsmart interconnects".

What a stupid thread..All about politics. Everything is so political and I am sick of it. With Kerry and Crew I am sure we will have peaches and creme in 9 years
 
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Plagiarized from a friend RE renewables, natural gas, base load, etc... it still doesn’t explicitly call out the fuel delivery to natural gas which failed us. TLDR version: even if we add wind you have to offset wind with reliable generation capacity to insure you have enough. In Texas that means natural gas.

Caveat: I don’t fully agree with the conclusions but he got a lot right.

Copied from another post. For your consideration. I’m still studying this mess.

The Energy Solution for Texas — and the US

By John Droz

In response to the excellent commentaries about the Texas wind energy fiasco (e.g. from Tucker Carlson), there is a lot of pushback baloney — because the guilty parties never want to acknowledge the failures of their policies. It is always the blame of someone else, or something else.

Always.

This brief, simplified article is about the primary core problem, that essentially no one is talking about...
In every electric grid (like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, in Texas), Supply and Demand have to be matched every second. Otherwise, when Demand exceeds Supply there would be blackouts — which would happen daily (as occurs in some third world countries).

To assure that this matching is continuous, there is a Grid Safety Reserve. This consists of operating standby fossil fuel supplies, amounting to 15±% of the current demand. When Demand exceeds Supply+Safety Reserve, again there would be blackouts — which is what is currently happening in Texas.

The two fold purposes of this Safety Reserve are for the Grid to able to fully handle: 1 - unexpected changes in electricity Demand, plus
2 - unexpected downtime for electricity Sources.
That sounds sensible, so what’s the problem?
Well, for industrial wind to work on any Grid, it needs to have a 100% augmenting supply to compensate for its continually, rapidly, changing power output (i.e. to maintain the per second balance explained above). For technical and economic reasons, this augmenting supply is almost always gas.

OK, so for every 10 MW wind project, does that means that there needs to be a dedicated 10 MW gas facility? YES!
Is that happening — e.g. in Texas? NO!

Why not? Because:
1 - To maintain the false narrative that wind is inexpensive, wind developers (and
their political allies) resisted acknowledging that such augmentation is necessary. 2 - Wind developers didn’t pay for the augmentation their product requires — which
they should (i.e. not ratepayers).
3 - Since wind wasn’t properly paying for it, utility companies said: let’s save some
money and skip the necessary augmentation.
4 - The Grid operator (ERCOT) failed to require wind developers to pay for the
necessary augmentation, or for utilities to provide it.
5 - Worse, the Grid operator allowed utility companies to steal from the Safety
Reserve (!) to absorb the frenetic daily wind fluctuations.
Such theft is totally wrong — and should be illegal — as the Grid Safety Reserve is for unexpected Demand or Supply changes. Conversely, wind energy is expected to continuously change through the day, every day.

The Grid Safety Reserve was never intended to compensate for continuous, inherent unreliability. All Grid operators should impose a penalty on any normal operation of their wind fleet that steals from the Safety Reserve — as it jeopardizes all of their ratepayers.

To be clear, this embarrassingly ignorant set of realities is going on in most US Grids. How they get away with it is simple:
1 - The public is deceived about the necessity of augmentation, and
2 - In most other places in the US, the Wind contribution to the Grid is low single
digits — e.g. 5%. In such a scenario, Wind can steal 5% of the 15±% Grid Safety Reserve, and no one will be the wiser. Everybody looks the other way...
However, in the Texas case, Wind energy is claimed to be 28±%. Clearly a 15% Safety Reserve can’t handle a loss of 28% — which is exactly what happened this week.
So, when wind goes to near zero in Texas, the Grid will have blackouts — even if everything else is at full capacity! If there are also failures of conventional capacity, the situation will be worse.

Look closely at this graphic:

This is a visual description of the recent power sources in Texas:
1 - Which sources are up and running and carrying 95%± of the load? [Answer:
Fossil Fuels and Nuclear]
2 - How much of that “28%" is wind supplying? [Answer: < 5%]
Question: so which source is to blame?
Now you know the answer, and who is to blame.
john droz, jr. physicist North Carolina 2-18-21

PS — To be sure there are other secondary sources that have earned chastisement here. Mark Mathis (Clear Energy Alliance) has a fine list of rogues gallery candidates:
#1 - ERCOT waited too long to initiate conservation measures. (But those measures wouldn’t have been necessary if ERCOT had taken reliability seriously.)
#2 - Texas rapidly increased its dependence on unreliable wind power from 6% in 2010 to 28% in 2020.
#3 - Policymakers and ERCOT know that during common weather events (heatwaves, cold snaps, night time, etc.) that wind typically has very low electricity generation — but they kept installing turbines anyway.
#4 - Between February 8th and the 16th wind power crashed as turbines froze. Coal increased by 47% and natural gas increased by a stunning 450%. But it wasn’t enough as millions of Texans lost power in frigid temperatures.
#5 - The rush to install industrial wind turbines soaked up so much of the available utility investment capital, that there wasn’t enough left for transmission upgrades and infrastructure maintenance. Those infrastructure weaknesses contributed to the Texas blackouts.
#6 - Wind power is massively subsidized (esp Federally), which has distorted the Texas electricity ratepayer market. This discouraged new investment for reliable critically important base-load power (e.g. nuclear).
#7 - Wind subsides have made older base-load power generators unprofitable. Texas has shut down more than 3,000 Megawatts of power from conventional sources over the past few years, while adding 20,000 Megawatts of unreliable wind. This has made the ERCOT Grid far less reliable.
#8 - Unlike some other Grids, ERCOT is an energy only market — meaning that there is no compensation for reserve power. This discourages that necessity.

####

You can't get something for nothing, and solar and wind are more expensive than credited because you have to have standby power to back them up, but that's somebody else's problem. Somebody has to pay for the backup whether it's operating costs of an idled plant or outages. Somebody has to pay, and a lot of different part time operators pumping electrons into the grid when times are good don't pay those costs. You can't get something for nothing, and somebody will pay when it goes wrong - and it's likely the consumer in this kind of scenario.
 

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