State of green energy in Texas
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"Half of Texas’ wind turbines frozen in winter storm, limiting state’s power output."
This is why any renewable energy calls from the left besides nuclear energy is a joke.
The left hates nuclear, what are you talking about?
I meant that calls from the left about more renewable energy are completely a joke.
The left never calls for the only efficient form of an alternative to fossil fuel which is nuclear energy.
Of course the left hates the only viable alternative option.
"But muh nuclear waste" they yell while not knowing that Bill Clinton cancelled a fast neutron reactor (meaning very little waste and no long lived waste at all and can consume existing long lived waste) at a greater expense than finishing after a corporate media scaremongering campaign.
christ, did he do anything right?
He correctly pointed out that black people had a crime problem in their communities and tried to do something about it
by funneling cocaine through the Mena, Arkansas airstrip?
You can just leave "the left" out of the statement, because I think they were meaning "any calls for renewable energy, unless it's nuclear, are trash". Since The Left would never call for nuclear anyway, it's a safe bet that any calls for renewable energy from them are trash.
You're right, but the reason that particular conversation is dominated by anti-nuclear voices is the absolute dominance of the Left.
don't worry it's all good they'll just use a fossil-fuel burning helicopter to spray de-icing liquid pumped out of a fossil-fuel burning tanker truck onto the turbines.
Leftists take another L.
Is it really an L? They're still doing it and get away with it, and if anyone calls them out on it there's a swarm of "scientists" to declare "on the whole this uses less fossil fuels than a gas turbine" and label their critics as "ignorant science-deniers"
It will be a L when more and more people lose their power and see how fucking retarded replacing all fossil fuels with wind power is.
Trust the science tm bullshit cannot shield them.
No but blaming the "greedy" corporations can. That's what they're doing in California: they get Newsom out there to accuse the power companies of not properly maintaining the power grid, and all these lefties lap it right up.
California has a majority of mentally challenged leftists.
I can see what you said working for the left in states similar to CA like OR, HI, IL, NY, WA, NJ and MA.
The other states are not that far gone though.
Chicagoland area might buy it, but I'd like to think that the rest of downstate is skeptical enough to not swallow that BS hook, line, and sinker. ComEd and Ameren aside, we have enough smaller local electric co-ops that know you're going to need a hell of a lot more than a wind turbine field or a bank of solar panels to provide enough juice for the customers when the weather gets shitty.
People argue that renewable power is going to be so much cheaper than fossil and nuclear. Nuclear is only expensive because it is NIBYed to death and fuel reprocessing is disallowed .
However I argue that when renewable makes up [a high fraction] of your electrical supply then a huge amount of redundancy is going to be needed or else events like this are going to shut down the economy. I wonder if that cost is going to be factored in?
I'm pro nuclear, but there are a zillion cost-drivers for a power plant, and lack of reprocessing isn't one of them. Reprocessing is more expensive than using fresh fuel, and it increases the footprint of total waste, ironically. Most of the fuel being used in commercial plants was mined up 30+ years ago and has just been sitting around. There's not much pressure to institute a reprocessing program.
NIMBY affects all wind projects like crazy, btw.
I'm not anti wind power at all and think windmills are cool. I don't suspect they pay themselves back though and all in all I like to approach energy as a business decision.
It's the same with solar, sure they are neat and all and it's not a horrible thing to distribute power load down to a rooftop that is just sitting there otherwise. When I looked into it even with the government paying me a tax credit for it, the payback was totally unreasonable compared to what I pay to get power off the electric grid, the majority of which comes from natural gas and nuclear. I'd essentially have to bet on getting more than the expected useful life from the panels to break even.
I think nuclear and natural gas is the way to go. Nuclear is slow to spin up and down, so make it cover the base load along with the existing coal plants. Supplement as needed in high demand times with natural gas. Leave wind and solar for small applications unless it gets cheap enough to be viable without subsidies. Yeah I know it won't happen because everyone is afraid of nuclear because the Soviets screwed it up and the Japanese built them in risky areas.
Nuclear reactors can follow loads much more quickly, but our legacy fleet is running 50 year old designs that can’t.
Just out of curiosity, what's the point in windmills if they don't pay for themselves? Is it a long-term interest or infrastructure fail-over or what?
I might not have been clear enough about me liking windmills. I do like them as my inner nerd and engineer person. You know, "hey we built this cool device to capture the wind and turn it into electricity!" An similar example would be my mechanical watches, sure I could get a quartz watch for a fraction of the cost and it is better at keeping time. But I like the mechanical ones because they are cool and have tiny gears in them and keep the time for me with no power other than me moving.
On a large scale practical business perspective, presuming they don't have a payback at all, then well they should be avoided.
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.
This wouldn’t have happened if we just expanded our nuclear grid.