State of green energy in Texas
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An extra note for this with a little info since I live in Texas and have been looking. Just to show how rough these windmills are taking it.
Current wind power output in the state is about 2GW. This is a system that I think at it's all time peak produced almost 20GW. I looked yesterday and the production was a pretty consistent just under 10GW and I think that's fairly normal for this time of year. So these things are only producing at about 20% of what is expected. It's rough on a power grid that averages 20% of it's available electricity from wind. Add in that extra 8GW and there's a lot less trouble here.
On top of that, a handful of coal plants were totally decommissioned in just the last few years. Plants that would be really useful right now.
Isn't your grid pretty much independent of the rest of the power grid in the country? If so I can't help but wonder if there's an ulterior motive here in trying to get your state's grid more inter-twined with the rest of the country's.
It is, at least most of the state. I knew that, but just read up on it all more last week. It's been that way pretty much ever since electric grids were created to avoid federal regulations, as it's not interstate commerce. I'm sure the feds would love to get it more intertwined, as if I understand correctly Texas actually has more connections with Mexico's grid than the rest of the US and most of the time is a net seller of electricity.
I suppose there could be some ulterior motive, but I can't think of what they would have done to cause this. It's just massive demand in the wrong season added to the fact that the windmills got frozen up. I think it's common to do plant maintenance in the winter (usually the off-season) as well and take down generators for a month. I've heard unconfirmed rumors that coal deliveries were held up (those would likely come from out of state), but I toured a coal plant when I was in college and at least back then they kept a pretty large amount of reserves on site. If a coal plant goes offline, it's usually weeks to get it going again.
Maybe the plant closings could have been, but I was looking that up an hour or so ago and it sounds like they had just become less financially viable with the windmills being decent on top of natural gas being easier than coal to operate and plentiful here. Texas is thought of as the oil state since that's the cash crop and all, but there is tons of natural gas here too.
It's one of those things had it just happened to part of the state or whatever then the rest picks up the slack, but when you cover the entire state in 35 degrees below normal temps and snow, it's a mess.
Maybe Biden colluded with Trudeau to send Canada's cold weather down here? Impeach!
Chemtrails are what he's talking about. Apparently the government has had other ways to effect weather for ages, but I'm a bit meh on that, although they are the same people who created heart attack guns.