391–400 of 597 posts
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People make similar choices all the time... Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead." Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.
You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!
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Just about every Texas building has air conditioning which is blasting for those 100 days of summer where it's often above 100 degrees. I'm surprised that a few days of cold is a bigger load than the crazy heat of summer.
I'd think it's the difference between cooling 30F (100->70) vs heating 60F (10->70)
Edit: Now that the sun is up and shining through our windows, the duty cycle of our (natural gas) furnace has dropped way off. I'm pretty sure our energy usage today will be less than on a 100 degree day.
Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
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I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.
https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due to the content, but for being so simple they convey a great deal of information in a way that few other media have done in decades.
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You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!
Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.
It's curious that the current tide of public opinion reckons that we're all going to be in EVs in 10-15 years, when the grid nearly collapses under the weight of everybody plugging in a heater and turning on Netflix at the same time.
Savvy grid operators are deploying large battery installations to meet demand spikes, mitigating some of the issues around that. Also the amount of solar and wind energy installations is only going to increase going forward, so no worries. Still, plenty to do.
ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market. Combine this with a large dependency on wind(unreliable) and you see problems. This is not the first time has happened. Summer of 2019 saw a heat wave with no wind that lasted a week. Energy prices were way up. https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c... Ps - I just checked the prices for northern Hub - day ahead was over $6,500 and re…
From what I understand, it's not that there is no wind. 50% of the Turbines have been shut down do to icing. The also have some NatGas suppliers that suffered freezing damage. So it's a combination of things that are adding up. I'm in North Texas and I can't remember temps this low in the last 30 years. It's about 13 degrees (- 10 C) at the moment and it looks like it is going to get a lot colder in the coming days.
What I don't understand is that it sounds like the utilities were unprepared for the cold because the windmills and gas lines froze up. But the same tech is used in Canada fine because it sounds like they plan for the cold and have equipment options designed to deal with ice, etc. So, you might immediately think - ah, climate change strikes again! But then I hear this is only a low temp in the last 30-40yrs. Who does…
Half the houses don’t even have gas heat - because it’s never been needed. What we have here is asking to a earthquake hitting the Midwest - sure it’s known it could happen and there are plans for it - but they’ve never been tested.