91–100 of 1001 posts
As I post this, demand is 99+% of supply, and the outside temps are dropping.
is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…
Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly does it show that? From my understanding Texas has an awful(below 20%) percentage of renewable sources.
TFA says it’s grid is mostly natural gas and wind. There seems to be lots of misconceptions in this thread and not a lot of information. Nuclear would have been fine throughout this.
Choice quote from the article: “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
Which confuses me, as it follows a statement about how energy has been deregulated. Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter" storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-unheard-of peaks.
Not being allowed to charge actual cost of production strikes me as something that would come of price controls, which are a kind of regulation, not deregulation.
Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.
Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures. All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.
Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.
Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment. Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment. Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
Hopefully that's 5C and not 5F.