AND- AND- these are the absolutely dumb motherfuckers that push energy poverty onto everyone else. Ah poor baby you had to chop wood. This is what energy poverty is you shithead.
They are just government dependent pussies. This Colorado City mayor said it best.
No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice!
I've been to Colorado City and maybe he still quit or whatever, but it's super rural area and I have no doubt a lot of his people agree.
I'm right in the middle of it, was prepared, and was also lucky enough to have no issues. Still, I'm learning from the situation anyway and just improving on it. I'm putting solar panels on my shed, about the cost of a decent small generator except I can use it all the time to run exterior floodlights, inside lighting, charge tools, run a fan, whatever. If the power goes out I run a cord inside and can pretty much run some lamps and a tablet indefinitely and don't have to be in the 19th century. A small generator would just sit and require maintenance and still wouldn't run a heater or AC unit. Sometime this summer or fall I'll buy a little propane heater, I actually was considering one for camping anyway. Weather hits next year or twenty years from now and all I have to do is top up food and fuel supplies and I'm good until they run out. If I never need the stuff, they provide me value in other uses and aren't a sunk cost.
But yeah, you can't even ask anyone else to have some cans of food around without the government or I'm sure you're racist or something.
The only pushback I'd give is that those of us who are renting don't really have the option of updating our house to make it more independent. Even with a generator, you have to have the right equipment on the home to make it work. And a lot of landlords won't update one thing because they are grandfathered in and would have to bring the whole house up to code.
Totally fair, I was more rambling on about my cool projects. I actually wanted some of this stuff a year or so ago irregardless of the weather situation.
My main point that may have gotten lost in my rambling was disgust with the people I saw who were already apparently on the brink of death after 24 hours because they just couldn't be bothered to try. Not only should they have done better before, but look to improve the situation next time around. I've actually been through similar albeit slightly warmer when I lived in an apartment. It wasn't quite as aspirational as my current plan, but it was a different time in my life. I was never hurting for food then either. Maybe it's just I'm from the South and we knew when a winter storm comes to have food and don't count on electricity or transportation. It was always a joke that people would go stock up on bread, milk, and eggs whenever they said the word "snow" on the news.
I wonder what that mayor would say about citizens who chose to "swim" by constructing their own 100 KW backup generator w/ 10,000 gallon propane tank for their block without pulling the appropriate permits. Or if someone chose to drill their own hand-pump well on their property for an emergency source of water without those permits (or possibly water rights). Would he take a laissez faire position as he is here, or would he bring the hammer of the government down on them?
They cause a crisis, then they blame something else for that crisis, and claim doubling down on the solution that caused it will prevent it from happening again.
What causes a lack of homes to be built? Rent Control.
Lack of homes leads to massive homelessness.
The Left blames Capitalism, white people, & Climate change for homelessness
The Left's solution to homelessness is... more Rent Control
Put simply, this market created a larger disaster when the freezing weather hit. Because the function of the Texas power industry is to provide cheap electricity, it has no incentive to make costly preparations to its infrastructure for comparatively rare cold weather.
That's a lie, again.
They always pull this shit.
Government subsidies and programs demanded massive spending on green energy that was already not useful in much of Texas, but because you wanted your friends to get cushy jobs, you pushed it anyway. They were mandated to take over more of the electrical grid than they could handle, and then they made the systems without redundancy so they could pocket the tax-payers fucking money. Just like literally every Leftist program.
If the market had been left to it's own devices, those green energy platforms would not have been made in the first place because there's no good reason to intentionally build structural weakness and unreliability into the system.
Instead, what you would have had was non-green energy having enough power in reserve to support any outages on demand; and a faster recovery for what outages there were.
A coal fired power plant doesn't just seize up and need to be rebuilt if it snows to much.
Yeah, with Texas deregulated market the windmills would have been useless without the subsidies. Anyone who can fund and build an appropriate power system can connect to the Texas grid to do business for the most part. Why do the windmills work as a business case? Because if I understand correctly they not only get a subsidy to put them up, but they get a subsidy for every kWh they generate from the feds. They are a profitable endeavor because we the taxpayer pay them their profit. Otherwise, well around here it's generally Natural Gas. Coal and Nuclear would be also but they are also beaten down by politics.
The cold weather failures were all-in-all due to the lack of winterproofing. My understand is while the windmills took it the worst there were issues at the natural gas and the nuclear plant. The thing is I'm still not convinced there should be winterproofing. The thing with engineering is conditions are a factor in designing a project. Why don't we all drive an MRAP around? Clearly they provide more protection against explosives. If there aren't explosives then they still work and you're protected anyway. What, they cost more, are slower, less efficient, heavier, and would cause more damage to the roads? The conditions of driving on a highway in the US currently don't warrant protection against explosives. It's no different with winterproofing power plants. There hasn't been this type of weather event covering the entire state (this is a key factor) in 100 years. Wouldn't the better solution for a 100 year event that lasts a week be to educate the public on how to deal with that one week?
Wouldn't the better solution for a 100 year event that lasts a week be to educate the public on how to deal with that one week?
There's that and not make an infrastructure exclusively dependent on that green energy. However, the Left keeps making demands, not only to build more windmills, but to tear coal power plants down.
Yeah just in the past few years a small handful of coal plants in Texas have been permanently shut down. It was around 6,000 MW of capacity if I recall. That might have been helpful.
It's everywhere too, there's a couple I read about in Arkansas that are being planned to be shut down in the next 10 years. The reasoning I could find as to why is they were massively losing money because of judgements and/or settlements from court cases brought up by green activist groups. So not because they are old and require too much maintenance or whatever, but because they are getting sued to death.
That's pretty standard policy for the Left in regards to lawfare: create burdensome regulations with harsh fines, then file endless lawsuits until you ban the companies from operating entirely.
California has rolling black outs constantly. *crickets*
Texas has rolling black outs after several decades of green power policy triggered by once a century weather. A million think pieces are published.
Kindly eat shit, Vox.
AND- AND- these are the absolutely dumb motherfuckers that push energy poverty onto everyone else. Ah poor baby you had to chop wood. This is what energy poverty is you shithead.
They are just government dependent pussies. This Colorado City mayor said it best.
I've been to Colorado City and maybe he still quit or whatever, but it's super rural area and I have no doubt a lot of his people agree.
I'm right in the middle of it, was prepared, and was also lucky enough to have no issues. Still, I'm learning from the situation anyway and just improving on it. I'm putting solar panels on my shed, about the cost of a decent small generator except I can use it all the time to run exterior floodlights, inside lighting, charge tools, run a fan, whatever. If the power goes out I run a cord inside and can pretty much run some lamps and a tablet indefinitely and don't have to be in the 19th century. A small generator would just sit and require maintenance and still wouldn't run a heater or AC unit. Sometime this summer or fall I'll buy a little propane heater, I actually was considering one for camping anyway. Weather hits next year or twenty years from now and all I have to do is top up food and fuel supplies and I'm good until they run out. If I never need the stuff, they provide me value in other uses and aren't a sunk cost.
But yeah, you can't even ask anyone else to have some cans of food around without the government or I'm sure you're racist or something.
The only pushback I'd give is that those of us who are renting don't really have the option of updating our house to make it more independent. Even with a generator, you have to have the right equipment on the home to make it work. And a lot of landlords won't update one thing because they are grandfathered in and would have to bring the whole house up to code.
Totally fair, I was more rambling on about my cool projects. I actually wanted some of this stuff a year or so ago irregardless of the weather situation.
My main point that may have gotten lost in my rambling was disgust with the people I saw who were already apparently on the brink of death after 24 hours because they just couldn't be bothered to try. Not only should they have done better before, but look to improve the situation next time around. I've actually been through similar albeit slightly warmer when I lived in an apartment. It wasn't quite as aspirational as my current plan, but it was a different time in my life. I was never hurting for food then either. Maybe it's just I'm from the South and we knew when a winter storm comes to have food and don't count on electricity or transportation. It was always a joke that people would go stock up on bread, milk, and eggs whenever they said the word "snow" on the news.
I wonder what that mayor would say about citizens who chose to "swim" by constructing their own 100 KW backup generator w/ 10,000 gallon propane tank for their block without pulling the appropriate permits. Or if someone chose to drill their own hand-pump well on their property for an emergency source of water without those permits (or possibly water rights). Would he take a laissez faire position as he is here, or would he bring the hammer of the government down on them?
They always do this.
They cause a crisis, then they blame something else for that crisis, and claim doubling down on the solution that caused it will prevent it from happening again.
But have you tried REAL communism? Didn't think so....
I bet if Texas seceeded they'd also have less power blackouts as they keep their energy production for themselves.
The rugged individualists weren't the ones having problems.
Power outages shows that California and leftism are a mental illness.
That's a lie, again.
They always pull this shit.
Government subsidies and programs demanded massive spending on green energy that was already not useful in much of Texas, but because you wanted your friends to get cushy jobs, you pushed it anyway. They were mandated to take over more of the electrical grid than they could handle, and then they made the systems without redundancy so they could pocket the tax-payers fucking money. Just like literally every Leftist program.
If the market had been left to it's own devices, those green energy platforms would not have been made in the first place because there's no good reason to intentionally build structural weakness and unreliability into the system.
Instead, what you would have had was non-green energy having enough power in reserve to support any outages on demand; and a faster recovery for what outages there were.
A coal fired power plant doesn't just seize up and need to be rebuilt if it snows to much.
Yeah, with Texas deregulated market the windmills would have been useless without the subsidies. Anyone who can fund and build an appropriate power system can connect to the Texas grid to do business for the most part. Why do the windmills work as a business case? Because if I understand correctly they not only get a subsidy to put them up, but they get a subsidy for every kWh they generate from the feds. They are a profitable endeavor because we the taxpayer pay them their profit. Otherwise, well around here it's generally Natural Gas. Coal and Nuclear would be also but they are also beaten down by politics.
The cold weather failures were all-in-all due to the lack of winterproofing. My understand is while the windmills took it the worst there were issues at the natural gas and the nuclear plant. The thing is I'm still not convinced there should be winterproofing. The thing with engineering is conditions are a factor in designing a project. Why don't we all drive an MRAP around? Clearly they provide more protection against explosives. If there aren't explosives then they still work and you're protected anyway. What, they cost more, are slower, less efficient, heavier, and would cause more damage to the roads? The conditions of driving on a highway in the US currently don't warrant protection against explosives. It's no different with winterproofing power plants. There hasn't been this type of weather event covering the entire state (this is a key factor) in 100 years. Wouldn't the better solution for a 100 year event that lasts a week be to educate the public on how to deal with that one week?
There's that and not make an infrastructure exclusively dependent on that green energy. However, the Left keeps making demands, not only to build more windmills, but to tear coal power plants down.
Yeah just in the past few years a small handful of coal plants in Texas have been permanently shut down. It was around 6,000 MW of capacity if I recall. That might have been helpful.
It's everywhere too, there's a couple I read about in Arkansas that are being planned to be shut down in the next 10 years. The reasoning I could find as to why is they were massively losing money because of judgements and/or settlements from court cases brought up by green activist groups. So not because they are old and require too much maintenance or whatever, but because they are getting sued to death.
That's pretty standard policy for the Left in regards to lawfare: create burdensome regulations with harsh fines, then file endless lawsuits until you ban the companies from operating entirely.