Very Cold Weather In South 2/10/21

[GeorgeParker]

There appear to be a number of factors. There is a lot of electricity generated by wind power in TX, and a lot of that capacity is down due to the wind turbines not working due to icing. Apparently the TX utility companies haven't winterized their equipment like they should have. As a result, the natural gas equipment was freezing up. The drop in pressure took the power plants offline...

Power plants in the northern US and Canada are built and winterized to withstand weather like this. Power plants in Texas are build to keep working in the "coldest normal winter" instead of having the extra insulation and heating capacity they would need to keep functioning in a northern winter. The result is it costs less to build the Texas gas-powered and coal-powered power plants than building the northern plants, but when 30-year low temperature records are being broken, a lot of Texas power plants have to shut down.

The right-wing propagandists are already shouting from the rooftops that the Texas electricity crisis was caused by Texas relying on wind turbines instead of coal and gas. But ERCOT has acknowledged that most of the non-functioning power plants are gas or coal powered, not solar or wind, and unfortunately that fact will never be heard or believed by any of the anti-environment people who endorse right-wing policies.

[Tradd]

So the Austin newspaper is wrong?

https://www.statesman.com/story/news...on/4483230001/

[GeorgeParker]

So the Austin newspaper is wrong? https://www.statesman.com/story/news...on/4483230001/

No, the newspaper isn't "wrong". They're just lying by giving you lop-sided information.

Read this story in the same paper: https://www.statesman.com/story/news...de/6764069002/ Especially the part that says:

"The cold weather is a contributing factor to the widespread power outages affecting millions across the state, as generators fueled by gas, coal, wind and nuclear sources were knocked offline by heavy snow and near-zero temperatures amid spiking demand for power. Nearly half of Texas' installed wind power generation capacity went offline Monday because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators."

It says right there that all sources of electricity were affected, and another news report quoted ERCOT as saying most of the generators that were shut down by the weather were conventional gas or coal-fired generators.

Methinks someone at that paper has an ax to grind. It's supposedly a left leaning paper, but not all people who lean left like wind turbines. Some left leaners consider them noisy bird killers and want everything to be solar or whatever.

[JaneV2.0]

Scandinavia has lots of wind farms; Texas cuts all the corners it can to avoid paying for good infrastructure.

[GeorgeParker]

So the Austin newspaper is wrong? https://www.statesman.com/story/news...on/4483230001/

An Excerpt From: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02...rbines-frozen/

Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the lost wind power makes up only a fraction of the reduction in power-generating capacity that has brought outages to millions of Texans across the state during a major winter storm. An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, had been lost from thermal sources, which includes gas, coal and nuclear energy.

An Excerpt From: https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-real-reason-for-texas-rolling-blackouts-1846279110

Texas is really going through it right now. More than four million people are still without power in Texas Tuesday morning after a serious winter storm jacked up energy prices across the U.S. and froze key infrastructure in the state. Like clockwork, reports of frozen wind turbines in Texas have given conservatives a new scapegoat in their unending battle to smear renewable energy. But the real story is much more complicated than that.

An Excerpt From: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/

Failures across Texas’ natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the most significant cause of the power crisis that has left millions of Texans without heat and electricity during the winter storm sweeping the U.S.

Nuff said. Point made imo. Trumpist Republican politicians in Texas are screaming that no more wind turbines should ever be built in Texas and that this is all the fault of Big Brother federal government pushing states to install renewable energy sources instead of gas, coal , and nuclear generators (and that's hogwash.)

If anyone wants to keep debating this please start a new thread in the political forum and leave this thread for weather comments. Thanks.

[pinkytoe]

I am getting first hand accounts from relatives and friends in central TX. Total chaos and miscommunication like a dystopian nightmare. DD was just advised to begin rationing water as lift stations are failing. It is 45 degrees in their house and the power goes on and off every hour. Broken sewer pipes everywhere, flooded houses and exploding transformers. I am not convinced this is a once in a lifetime thing. Weather is changing and infrastructure will have to as well.

[JaneV2.0]

I am getting first hand accounts from relatives and friends in central TX. Total chaos and miscommunication like a dystopian nightmare. DD was just advised to begin rationing water as lift stations are failing. It is 45 degrees in their house and the power goes on and off every hour. Broken sewer pipes everywhere, flooded houses and exploding transformers. I am not convinced this is a once in a lifetime thing. Weather is changing and infrastructure will have to as well.

Politicians have been kicking the infrastructure can down the road for decades; it's past time to reverse that.

[KayLR]

If anyone wants to keep debating this please start a new thread in the political forum and leave this thread for weather comments. Thanks.

Perhaps it should be up to the original topic poster to decide the course of the thread. You are free to ignore this one as you wish.

[catherine]

It is a really crazy scene in TX. I've been following it on the news, and I can't believe the impact this storm has had on people in the state.

[GeorgeParker]

Perhaps it should be up to the original topic poster to decide the course of the thread. You are free to ignore this one as you wish.

Please scroll back up to post #1. I am the original topic poster. So my request for the political aspects of this subject to be split off into separate threads is both logical and proper.

Doing so will help keep this thread on topic by separating the political reactions from weather and infrastructure aspects. There will inevitably be gray areas where those subjects overlap, and it's up to each individual poster to decide if what they want to say is on topic or off topic since many threads on SLF wander all over the place anyway.