Sometimes people have to learn things the hard way, even when the lesson is already painfully obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still don't realize that electricity isn't something you can afford to have be anything other 100% reliable.
I've learned from perusing garbage on Reddit that a lot of people have totally no idea about how any of electricity distribution works. But, since they are on Reddit they know everything about it and are 100% certain the issues are due to right wing politicians, deregulation, rich people, and capitalism.
I've been reading up on it a lot and find it rather interesting myself, perhaps since it's slightly similar to the work I do albeit in a different field of utilities. It's way more complex than most understand and wind power isn't the whole problem. Of course if you mention just one windmill is down they will remind you of this. Lots of lessons to be learned from this, one of which is that wind power is not perfectly reliable. That should have been obvious, and those forecasting it know that already. It's one of those things though where ok you forecast the windmills won't do shit, but there's no where else to get power to make up the difference, so well here you are.
Lol we could have had cheap universal energy 60 years ago if it wasn’t for hippies and democrats, who made egregious propaganda to scuttle and regulate nuclear power to death.
I would have added that the USSR was probably looking to also destabilize the US nuclear program in any way that it could considering how far behind they secretly were in nuclear weapons.
Yeah, it's really sad and pathetic that even a place like Texas with enormous amounts of suitable land, locations that would likely welcome the economic boost, etc. and it only has a whopping two Nuclear plants. Comanche Peak is one of the newest in the country having come on in the mid 90s of all things. Area around it is great for camping and hiking and you'd never even know the plant was there. You can't even see it most of the time from a distance.
I work in a small municipal power plant and the big driver of all of this is a natural gas shortage.
The cold went so far south that a bunch of extra furnaces are on and its putting a huge extra load on the gas grid. Then a bunch of the natural gas wells are in the south but not set up for this cold of weather. The well heads are freezing solid.
Due to the green energy push we have been replacing coal power plants with natural gas. There is no gas to keep them running.
The wind turbines are having 2 problems. The lube oil in them down south is meant for warmer climates and is too thick to function in this cold. Then all the ice on the blades has them out of balance and if they can warm them up enough to get them to turn. The turbines will just tear itself apart.
Finally solar dosen't work well with ice and snow on the cells.
I wonder how many people are gonna die in the attempts to repair.
There is no gas to keep them running.
Hm. Is it possible that the sudden demand could help fuel a recovery in natural gas production? I know that the oil price drop did major damage to the sector.
As you say, they know windmills are not reliable. So why didn't they have a contingency for this event?
Because rolling blackouts is the contingency. The people pushing renewable energy want us living without electricity. The lower our standard of living goes, the better off "mother Earth" will be.
Sort of. Rolling blackouts are the contingency so that the politicians can campaign on "equitable power distribution" while resolving absolutely nothing and pocketing money from energy commodity traders like California did with Enron. Enron's traders were causing brown outs on purpose.
Probably not wrong there. The funny thing is the "rich" will just start buying batteries, solar panels, etc. and the "poor" will all just deal with it. Since everything is class or race to them they will have to stop that.
I kind of think of it as "water that you can't ever store".
Britain's electrical grid basically fucking dies every day around 6:00 because almost the entire country turns on a fucking kettle. The sheer amperage needed to boil that much water basically drains the fucking grid at max capacity for 10 minutes, and they have to pull as much power from continental Europe as they can just to cover the load.
Then, they have to turn all that shit off. It's a fucking nightmare. All because the brit bongs want their tea at exactly one specific time.
I mean if you played fucking SimCity 2000, you'd know that Wind Power is a good supplement to mainline power solutions (natural gas, coal, etc.) but it should not be your primary source.
Every renewable power source right now has some sort of drawback. Solar requires acres upon ACRES of fucking land to gather the kind of energy that nonrenewable energy can make. Wind is subject to shit weather (surprise) and also is extremely bad for flying animals (shishka-bird).
On top of that, you need batteries to store power when solar power/wind power is unavailable. That also takes a shitload of land as well. Texas may have room for that but shitholes like New York and urban California doesn't.
You'd think these leftists would like having a solar power farm with accompanying batteries built in their backyard?
From what I understand there was a two part problem with the entire thing. The first was how houses weren't really designed for anything past a certain point. The houses didn't have the insulation, and design that a house actually needs to be properly fit, but the prices still went up because of demand.
The second is that the last power station was made in '79. Life the Universe and Everything now has a question for the answer of 42. They didn't make any back ups, or new stations, and nothing could keep up with the demand from all of the new residents.
If you want a lot of entertainment - go to the Austin subreddit and look at all the leftists foaming at the mouth and whining about why the State isn't properly taking care of them and demanding that the problem isn't the wind turbines but the evil big box stores sucking up all the power (because the roads are nearly impassible and the big box store owners can't get to their stores to TURN THE LIGHTS OFF!) and if there was only some equitable way to determine who got power when it runs low...
Oh and they're sure the rich people's houses all have power as they tweet from their cellphones in the middle of austin high rise apartments downtown.
To be fair, it looks like a lot of the non-green power generation in Texas was also built under the assumption that it would never get cold. However, the communists are never fair when they start their screeching, so as far as I'm concerned it's completely the fault of frozen wind turbines.
Agreed. There is lots of important nuance here, but it is also important to make the watermelons take a fucking L because they won't do it unless they are forced to.
If only someone could have predicted wind power isn't reliable
All science identifies this. It is a known problem. There is no question. Batteries are not efficient enough to mitigate this. The Left is intentionally cherry-picking science and using """"""experts"""""" to explain away what is patently obvious.
They do the same shit with Climate Change. No one with a brain thinks we have 12 years to live. We will however have immigration problems and food/water instability as this century progresses.
Again, the way to use wind and solar is for small-scale turbines servicing each property, backed up by already-existing centralized megaprojects (whether fossil fuel, hydro, or nuclear). Not everything that achieves the same result is meant to be handled in the exact same way, and two things that should be handled in different ways can actually complement each other, but humans get caught in that false either/or bullshit.
It could still be done, of course, and the failed "green" megaproject land reclaimed for the wild (or farming), but it would take the sort of thinking that just isn't available right now. But hey, we've had public pushes and PR for stuff like replacing your old asbestos with the pink stuff, upgrading to modern furnaces from old gas burn boxes (those are fun), getting rid of leaded gas, etc. But no, they want to keep everyone "on subscription" for their power .... and heaven forbid they have to start paying out as well as collecting bills from people.
The power production doesn't seem to be the only issue, the systems that manage the power distribution are not designed to deal with such cold temperatures also. Overall, they went too cheap and didn't plan for extreme cold weather that happens once or twice a decade.
We know wind power isn't reliable, that's why everyone has natural gas power plants to fill in the gaps in demand. But when a natural disaster creates temperatures thirty degrees below your minimum temperature, even those fail.
due to design, or operations flaws and one because of a natural disaster.
A natural disaster in addition to design and operations flaws, assuming you mean Fukushima.
Building anything critical below sea level in what is possibly the most known seismically active region on the entire planet [Ring of Fire] where earthquakes, tsunamis, and Godzilla happen regularly enough you know they will happen again is beyond incompetent. It's flat out suicidal.
Natural bodies of water are great sources of coolant as you don't have to transport to site as it's right there.
The stupidity/design and operations flaws were building the sea walls too low despite said feature being criticised and suggested for improvement. It never was.
The natural disaster was the fourth strongest earthquake ever recorded since records began in 1990.
To give an idea of the scale of such an earthquake:
it moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) 2.4 m (8 ft) east
shifted the Earth on its axis by estimates of between 10 cm (4 in) and 25 cm (10 in)
increased earth's rotational speed by 1.8 µs per day
generated infrasound waves detected in perturbations of the low-orbiting Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer satellite
So to summerise: It moved most of Japan closer to the US. The redistribution of mass resulted in an increase of how fast the planet spins. And was detected in space through sheer force of vibrating through vacuum.
So the 14 metre waves from the tsunami that hit the inferior designs of the power plant just fucked the place.
Per megawatt hour of power produced, nuclear has killed fewer people than wind just from the small number of people dying in manufacturing and mining accidents for wind turbines, because of the sheer amount of power nuclear provides.
That's one of the reason I hate the concept of battery farms that the greenists insist must go with wind and solar to be fully successful. So, coal mining = bad, but lithium, nickel, lead, or whatever they are mining up to go sit out in a field in the huge quantities necessary for utility grade service is totally ok? Are we not going to run out of these metals, they aren't "renewable".
That's not completely true - the Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey had to shut down one of its units in 2019 when suspended ice reduced the intake flow for the open loop of the reactor's water cooling system. Extreme cold weather conditions like the ones in Texas may or may not be sufficient to cause the same problem there.
Texas's weather conditions were not extreme in the slightest. They were "just winter" in many other places. Even other places that use wind and solar power on heavy government grants. They were built skimping on a lot of cold weather safeguards that would be 100% mandatory anywhere more north in order to cut costs to make the cost per megawatt-hour approach the concept of "reasonable" compared to alternative energy sources.
Alaska has power. Can you imagine it? A place where Texas' winter is like their summers. But they don't go dark for 6 months of the year because of iced mills and chilled pipes.
Not that I'm not pro-nuclear (I love nuclear) but I saw an unconfirmed report that even one of the reactors was down for maintenance and refueling. Of course that happens and wouldn't be a big deal if there were more than a small handful of reactors in the state. Just this whole mess is a culimnation of things a lot of which would have been avoided or at least made better if instead of building 30GW of wind there'd been some other type of plant built.
But you know can't build scary nukes. Coal is dead too, they are getting shut down all over the place as they get harassed by climate change activists in court. It's an open market here and if there's profit to be had it would get built, but the activists make damn sure to make it so much trouble they don't try.
Sometimes people have to learn things the hard way, even when the lesson is already painfully obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still don't realize that electricity isn't something you can afford to have be anything other 100% reliable.
I've learned from perusing garbage on Reddit that a lot of people have totally no idea about how any of electricity distribution works. But, since they are on Reddit they know everything about it and are 100% certain the issues are due to right wing politicians, deregulation, rich people, and capitalism.
I've been reading up on it a lot and find it rather interesting myself, perhaps since it's slightly similar to the work I do albeit in a different field of utilities. It's way more complex than most understand and wind power isn't the whole problem. Of course if you mention just one windmill is down they will remind you of this. Lots of lessons to be learned from this, one of which is that wind power is not perfectly reliable. That should have been obvious, and those forecasting it know that already. It's one of those things though where ok you forecast the windmills won't do shit, but there's no where else to get power to make up the difference, so well here you are.
Lol we could have had cheap universal energy 60 years ago if it wasn’t for hippies and democrats, who made egregious propaganda to scuttle and regulate nuclear power to death.
I would have added that the USSR was probably looking to also destabilize the US nuclear program in any way that it could considering how far behind they secretly were in nuclear weapons.
This angle of environmentalism was definitely funded by oil companies. They are the big funders of anti-nuclear propaganda.
Kind of like the anti-vaping propaganda that keeps getting funded by tobacco companies.
Yeah, it's really sad and pathetic that even a place like Texas with enormous amounts of suitable land, locations that would likely welcome the economic boost, etc. and it only has a whopping two Nuclear plants. Comanche Peak is one of the newest in the country having come on in the mid 90s of all things. Area around it is great for camping and hiking and you'd never even know the plant was there. You can't even see it most of the time from a distance.
The Simpsons did more damage to nuclear power than the hippies could ever have dreamed of causing.
No, The Simpsons was just showing off anti-Nuclear sentiments that had been going on for 30 years.
I work in a small municipal power plant and the big driver of all of this is a natural gas shortage. The cold went so far south that a bunch of extra furnaces are on and its putting a huge extra load on the gas grid. Then a bunch of the natural gas wells are in the south but not set up for this cold of weather. The well heads are freezing solid.
Due to the green energy push we have been replacing coal power plants with natural gas. There is no gas to keep them running.
The wind turbines are having 2 problems. The lube oil in them down south is meant for warmer climates and is too thick to function in this cold. Then all the ice on the blades has them out of balance and if they can warm them up enough to get them to turn. The turbines will just tear itself apart.
Finally solar dosen't work well with ice and snow on the cells.
I wonder how many people are gonna die in the attempts to repair.
Hm. Is it possible that the sudden demand could help fuel a recovery in natural gas production? I know that the oil price drop did major damage to the sector.
As you say, they know windmills are not reliable. So why didn't they have a contingency for this event?
Because rolling blackouts is the contingency. The people pushing renewable energy want us living without electricity. The lower our standard of living goes, the better off "mother Earth" will be.
Sort of. Rolling blackouts are the contingency so that the politicians can campaign on "equitable power distribution" while resolving absolutely nothing and pocketing money from energy commodity traders like California did with Enron. Enron's traders were causing brown outs on purpose.
Probably not wrong there. The funny thing is the "rich" will just start buying batteries, solar panels, etc. and the "poor" will all just deal with it. Since everything is class or race to them they will have to stop that.
They're not so hot on food distribution either, in my experience.
I kind of think of it as "water that you can't ever store".
Britain's electrical grid basically fucking dies every day around 6:00 because almost the entire country turns on a fucking kettle. The sheer amperage needed to boil that much water basically drains the fucking grid at max capacity for 10 minutes, and they have to pull as much power from continental Europe as they can just to cover the load.
Then, they have to turn all that shit off. It's a fucking nightmare. All because the brit bongs want their tea at exactly one specific time.
I mean if you played fucking SimCity 2000, you'd know that Wind Power is a good supplement to mainline power solutions (natural gas, coal, etc.) but it should not be your primary source.
Every renewable power source right now has some sort of drawback. Solar requires acres upon ACRES of fucking land to gather the kind of energy that nonrenewable energy can make. Wind is subject to shit weather (surprise) and also is extremely bad for flying animals (shishka-bird).
On top of that, you need batteries to store power when solar power/wind power is unavailable. That also takes a shitload of land as well. Texas may have room for that but shitholes like New York and urban California doesn't.
You'd think these leftists would like having a solar power farm with accompanying batteries built in their backyard?
Yes, but Cities Skylines doesn't factor that in... so.
From what I understand there was a two part problem with the entire thing. The first was how houses weren't really designed for anything past a certain point. The houses didn't have the insulation, and design that a house actually needs to be properly fit, but the prices still went up because of demand.
The second is that the last power station was made in '79. Life the Universe and Everything now has a question for the answer of 42. They didn't make any back ups, or new stations, and nothing could keep up with the demand from all of the new residents.
Pull in an ice vortex, and everything is screwed.
If you want a lot of entertainment - go to the Austin subreddit and look at all the leftists foaming at the mouth and whining about why the State isn't properly taking care of them and demanding that the problem isn't the wind turbines but the evil big box stores sucking up all the power (because the roads are nearly impassible and the big box store owners can't get to their stores to TURN THE LIGHTS OFF!) and if there was only some equitable way to determine who got power when it runs low...
Oh and they're sure the rich people's houses all have power as they tweet from their cellphones in the middle of austin high rise apartments downtown.
To be fair, it looks like a lot of the non-green power generation in Texas was also built under the assumption that it would never get cold. However, the communists are never fair when they start their screeching, so as far as I'm concerned it's completely the fault of frozen wind turbines.
Agreed. There is lots of important nuance here, but it is also important to make the watermelons take a fucking L because they won't do it unless they are forced to.
All science identifies this. It is a known problem. There is no question. Batteries are not efficient enough to mitigate this. The Left is intentionally cherry-picking science and using """"""experts"""""" to explain away what is patently obvious.
They do the same shit with Climate Change. No one with a brain thinks we have 12 years to live. We will however have immigration problems and food/water instability as this century progresses.
Again, the way to use wind and solar is for small-scale turbines servicing each property, backed up by already-existing centralized megaprojects (whether fossil fuel, hydro, or nuclear). Not everything that achieves the same result is meant to be handled in the exact same way, and two things that should be handled in different ways can actually complement each other, but humans get caught in that false either/or bullshit. It could still be done, of course, and the failed "green" megaproject land reclaimed for the wild (or farming), but it would take the sort of thinking that just isn't available right now. But hey, we've had public pushes and PR for stuff like replacing your old asbestos with the pink stuff, upgrading to modern furnaces from old gas burn boxes (those are fun), getting rid of leaded gas, etc. But no, they want to keep everyone "on subscription" for their power .... and heaven forbid they have to start paying out as well as collecting bills from people.
It's a shame Trump got removed from Twitter. He had some real good tweets bashing wind power
The power production doesn't seem to be the only issue, the systems that manage the power distribution are not designed to deal with such cold temperatures also. Overall, they went too cheap and didn't plan for extreme cold weather that happens once or twice a decade.
We know wind power isn't reliable, that's why everyone has natural gas power plants to fill in the gaps in demand. But when a natural disaster creates temperatures thirty degrees below your minimum temperature, even those fail.
Nuclear doesn't fail.
Technically speaking, the biggest nuclear disasters we've seen were due to design, or operations flaws and one because of a natural disaster.
But, if you want to convince people, ask them the last time they've heard of one of our many nuclear powered US Navy ships blowing up.
A natural disaster in addition to design and operations flaws, assuming you mean Fukushima.
Building anything critical below sea level in what is possibly the most known seismically active region on the entire planet [Ring of Fire] where earthquakes, tsunamis,
and Godzillahappen regularly enough you know they will happen again is beyond incompetent. It's flat out suicidal.So what was the reason for them building it near there?
Did they literally run out of fucking land or something?
Natural bodies of water are great sources of coolant as you don't have to transport to site as it's right there.
The stupidity/design and operations flaws were building the sea walls too low despite said feature being criticised and suggested for improvement. It never was.
The natural disaster was the fourth strongest earthquake ever recorded since records began in 1990.
To give an idea of the scale of such an earthquake:
So to summerise: It moved most of Japan closer to the US. The redistribution of mass resulted in an increase of how fast the planet spins. And was detected in space through sheer force of vibrating through vacuum.
So the 14 metre waves from the tsunami that hit the inferior designs of the power plant just fucked the place.
In fairness, that could have been an issue in Japan. It's quite small and dense.
And has lots of steep mountains.
And combined they still killed less than your average damn failure.
Per megawatt hour of power produced, nuclear has killed fewer people than wind just from the small number of people dying in manufacturing and mining accidents for wind turbines, because of the sheer amount of power nuclear provides.
That's one of the reason I hate the concept of battery farms that the greenists insist must go with wind and solar to be fully successful. So, coal mining = bad, but lithium, nickel, lead, or whatever they are mining up to go sit out in a field in the huge quantities necessary for utility grade service is totally ok? Are we not going to run out of these metals, they aren't "renewable".
That's not completely true - the Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey had to shut down one of its units in 2019 when suspended ice reduced the intake flow for the open loop of the reactor's water cooling system. Extreme cold weather conditions like the ones in Texas may or may not be sufficient to cause the same problem there.
Texas's weather conditions were not extreme in the slightest. They were "just winter" in many other places. Even other places that use wind and solar power on heavy government grants. They were built skimping on a lot of cold weather safeguards that would be 100% mandatory anywhere more north in order to cut costs to make the cost per megawatt-hour approach the concept of "reasonable" compared to alternative energy sources.
Alaska has power. Can you imagine it? A place where Texas' winter is like their summers. But they don't go dark for 6 months of the year because of iced mills and chilled pipes.
Alaska has entire wind farms that operate through out winter. One of those windfarms is actually on an a small island surrounded by ocean water.
Not that I'm not pro-nuclear (I love nuclear) but I saw an unconfirmed report that even one of the reactors was down for maintenance and refueling. Of course that happens and wouldn't be a big deal if there were more than a small handful of reactors in the state. Just this whole mess is a culimnation of things a lot of which would have been avoided or at least made better if instead of building 30GW of wind there'd been some other type of plant built.
But you know can't build scary nukes. Coal is dead too, they are getting shut down all over the place as they get harassed by climate change activists in court. It's an open market here and if there's profit to be had it would get built, but the activists make damn sure to make it so much trouble they don't try.
It does when you fucked up the maintenance Then people start dying of Leukemia at an alarming rate.