Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Some may think this is about the weather which visited Texas the past week or so, but their disaster has been ongoing for years.

Texas has claimed to be at the leading forefront of Tech power, replacing reliable Power sources with Renewable Power, such as Solar Power and Wind Power.

Solar Power output was 0% in the past week, just like in Yurp.
WQind power failed as well.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Some may think this is about the weather which visited Texas the past week or so, but their disaster has been ongoing for years.

Texas has claimed to be at the leading forefront of Tech power, replacing reliable Power sources with Renewable Power, such as Solar Power and Wind Power.

Solar Power output was 0% in the past week, just like in Yurp.
WQind power failed as well.

---

Enron was based in Texas. Biggest energy scam ever. What else does anyone need to know?

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.

---

Natural gas is great for generating electricity, until hydrates block pipelines, shutting down the power plant furnaces.
https://petrowiki.spe.org/Hydrate_problems_in_production

---

Quote:

---

Coal is great for electricity until the CO2 from burning coal gets high enough to melt glaciers. The last time the atmospheric CO2 amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, when temperature was 3.6°–5.4°F higher than during the pre-industrial era, and sea level was 50–80 feet higher than today.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-ch
ange-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

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.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh... lol. You're suggesting that Democrats will fix the problem.

That's funny.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by reaverfan:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Solar Power is great until the sun isn't out.

---

Here comes idiot boy, eager to again show us how fucking stupid he is, and he didn't disappoint.

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.

---

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. What’s clear is that no one — neither the power plants that failed to cold-proof their equipment nor the grid operator charged with safeguarding the electric system — was prepared for such an extreme weather event. What happened in those two hours highlights just how vulnerable even the most sophisticated energy systems are to the vagaries of climate change, and how close it all came to crashing down.

The warning signs started well before the cold set in. Nearly a week before the blackouts began, the operator of a wind farm in Texas alerted the grid manager, known as Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that ice from the impending storm could force it offline, an early signal that capacity on the system would likely be compromised.

On Thursday, a natural gas trader trying to secure supplies for his company’s power plants for the holiday weekend was surprised to see prices surging. The reason? There were concerns that gas production in West Texas was at risk of freezing off, which would crimp supplies for power generation. And Sinn, the owner of Aspire Commodities, noticed from his computer in San Juan that day-ahead power prices on Texas’s grid were climbing, a sign that the market was anticipating scarcity.

By Saturday, a considerable amount of capacity was already offline, some of it for routine maintenance and some of it due to weather. This is because in Texas peak demand is associated with summer heat so many plants do routine maintenance in winter.

Wind was the first to go, as dense fog settled over turbine fleets, freezing on contact. The slow build-up of moisture over several days caused some of the blades to ice over, while connection lines began to droop under the weight of the ice until power production from some wind farms completely ceased. But because the resource makes up a minor share of Texas’s wintertime power mix, grid operators didn’t view it as a big problem. Then gas generation began declining. That was inconvenient, but not unmanageable. There was still plenty of supply on the system.

On Sunday, the mood in the control room grew tense. As the cold deepened, demand climbed sharply, hitting and then exceeding the state’s all-time winter peak. But the lights stayed on. Magness and his director of system operations, Dan Woodfin, watched the monitors from an adjoining room, satisfied that they had made it through the worst of the crisis.

“We thought maybe we are OK for the rest of the night,” Magness said.

They weren’t.

At 11 p.m., the green dots on the monitor overlooking the control room turned red. Across the state, power plant owners started seeing instruments on their lines freezing and causing their plants to go down. In some cases, well shut-ins (wells where production is turned off - kiki) in West Texas caused gas supplies to dip, reducing pressure at gas plants and forcing them offline. At that point, virtually all of the generation falling off the grid came from coal or gas plants.

“Contrary to some early hot takes, gas and coal were actually the biggest culprits in the crisis,” said Eric Fell, director of North America gas at Wood MacKenzie.

Back in Taylor, the town northeast of Austin, where Ercot is based, orange and red emergency displays began flashing on the giant flat-screens that lined the operators’ workstations.

“It happened very fast — there were several that went off in a row,” Magness said.

In the span of 30 minutes, 2.6 gigawatts of capacity had disappeared from Texas’s power grid, enough to power half a million homes.

“The key operators realized, this has got to stop. This isn’t allowed to happen,” said Magness.

By that point, the temperature outside had fallen to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 Celsius). Across the state, streets were icing over and snowbanks piling up. Demand kept climbing. And plants kept falling offline.

No one in the room had anticipated this. And it was about to get worse.

The generation outages were causing frequency to fall — as much as 0.5 hertz in a half-hour. “Then we started to see lots of generation come off,” Magness said.

To stem the plunge, operators would have to start “shedding load.” All at once, control room staff began calling transmission operators across the state, ordering them to start cutting power to their customers.

“As we shed load and the frequency continued to decline, we ordered another block of load shed and the frequency declined further, and we ordered another block of load shed,” said Woodfin, who slept in his office through the crisis.

Operators removed 10 gigawatts of demand from 1:30 a.m. until 2:30 a.m., essentially cutting power to 2 million homes in one fell swoop.

The utility that services San Antonio, CPS Energy, was one of those that got an order to cut power.

“We excluded anything critical, any circuit that had a hospital or police,” CPS chief executive Paula Gold-Williams said Friday. “We kept the airport up.”

Alton McCarver’s apartment in Austin was one of the homes that lost power. The IT worker woke shivering at 2:30 a.m., an hour after the blackouts began, and tried turning up the thermostat. “Even my dog, he was shaking in the house because he was so cold,” he said.

McCarver wanted to take his wife and 9-year-old daughter to shelter with a friend who still had power, but the steep hills around their home were coated in ice and he didn’t think they could make the drive safely. “You’re hungry, you’re frustrated, you’re definitely cold,” he said. “I was mostly worried about my family.”

The power cuts worked — at least in so far as Ercot managed to keep demand below rapidly falling supply.

But the grid operator shed load so rapidly that some generators and market watchers have wondered whether they exacerbated the problem.

What’s more, frequency continued to fluctuate through the early hours of the morning, potentially causing even more power plants to trip, according to Ercot market participants. The Sandy Creek coal plant near Waco was one them, falling offline at 1:56 a.m. in tandem with the frequency dip, according to data from the plant operator.

Ercot, however, maintains that the frequency stayed above the level at which plants would trip.

And as blackouts spread across the state, power was cut not only to homes and businesses but to the compressor stations that power natural gas pipelines — further cutting off the flow of supplies to power plants.

Power supplies became so scarce that what were supposed to be “rolling” blackouts ended up lasting for days at a time, leaving millions of Texans without lights, heat and, eventually without water. Even the Ercot control center lost water, and had to bring in portable toilets for its staff.

“It’s just catastrophic,” said Tony Clark, a former commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser at law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP.

By Friday, when Ercot declared that the emergency had ended, 14.4 million people still lacked reliable access to public water supplies, and the crisis had already cost the state $50 billion in damages, according to Accuweather. Meanwhile, some generators made a windfall as energy prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt-hour during the crisis. In all, generators have earned more than $44.6 billion in electricity sales alone this year — more than 2018-2020 combined, according to Wood Mackenzie. Those earnings don’t take into account any hedges that may have been in place.

In the wake of the blackouts, the Public Utility Commission of Texas announced an investigation into the factors that led to the disaster.

But at least the lights were coming back on. In the afternoon, shell-shocked people trickled out of their homes to soak up the sun. “It feels crazy standing outside in the 40 degree sunlight,” said Cassie Moore, a 35-year-old writer and educator, who offered up her shower and washing machine to her boss and friends who were still without power or water. “In this same spot a few days ago I was worried that my dogs might freeze to death.”

—With Javier Blas

(Updates with electricity sales total in third-to-last paragraph. A previous version corrected the individuals responsible for ordering the blackouts in the sixth paragraph and the timing and scope of the generation decline at Sandy Creek coal plant in the 37th paragraph, based on data shared by the plant operator. )

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/two-hours-nearly-destroyed-texas-130009
983.html

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
This is an oft-repeated failure of 'capitalism'-only economics (even in theory, and most definitely in practice) ...

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I bet the ratio of individuals who were prepped for a catastrophe in Texas far outnumbers the ratio of people in California.

---

Quote:

---

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?

---

Quote:

---

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

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

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?

---

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.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SignyM:
Interesting but mostly irrelevant.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So .020% of the fake Covid numbers, huh?

A. Buy a generator.
B. Have a reasonable supply of food and toiletries on hand at all times.

Not only won't 99% of those people spend some of their stimmy money on a generator, but I bet if you polled every American right now 95% of them would tell you that they don't have any more paper towels or toilet paper on hand than they did this time a year ago.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So .020% of the fake Covid numbers, huh?

A. Buy a generator.
B. Have a reasonable supply of food and toiletries on hand at all times.

Not only won't 99% of those people spend some of their stimmy money on a generator, but I bet if you polled every American right now 95% of them would tell you that they don't have any more paper towels or toilet paper on hand than they did this time a year ago.

---

You can play the same game with any cause of death. How many died from Glioblastoma multiforme (brain cancer)? Too few to worry about. How many died from the Texas power blackout? Too few to worry about.

https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-types/brain-cancer/types

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---