Those are necessary in Texas. When a Texan pulls his head out of his ass, he knows what his name is.
Now that Texans have been victimized by the fossil fuels and pro-deregulation interests, what’s interesting now is how they respond in the voting booth. If you’re a Texan and didn’t like freezing your nipples off for a few days, well, whaddya gonna do about it? I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m preaching to the choir on SDMB, but what about your neighbors?
Back to voter suppression. Voting machines use electricity now, right?
Vote Republican, because Hillary and Soros conspired to bring down the power grid using windmills. Yes, many voters are that fucking stupid.
Double down on oil and gas. It’s clear they needed more to burn, right?
I have no love for Texas and I’m not trying to defend what has happened but is Texas’ power problems any worse (overall) than, say, California’s? Shit happens; is one solution obviously better than another?
Hey hey hey! Don’t go dragging us into this!
California’s had very similar problems and for similar reasons.
But I wouldn’t just write this off as “shit happens;” it “happens” because we allow powerful corporations to put their interest above public interest and public trust. And we keep electing the same fucking idiots over and over again, who are either corporate fanboys who take their hush money or do nothing about the problem.
Solution? Vote straight ticket liberal democrat. Problem solved (maybe).
Well, different problems but at least ones not based on maximizing corporate profits above all other considerations.
My initial reaction was to think Texas was quite good as far as wind power implementation compared to the other states, so I went to the EIA website and had a look.
Looking at non fossil fuel electricity generation ( not total energy consumption, so not looking at heating oil and gas etc) and the data represents the energy generated, not the installed name plate capacity, we can probably a good average picture energy source, but not the whole story.
Note this is annual data from 2019, and I’ll probably look at installed name plate capacity later.
Anyway for the US as a whole, 37% of electricity generation came from NOT oil and its derivatives, coal, or natural gas. The top states were VT,ME, WA NH ID SD all above 70%. NY at 63% CA at 57% , TX was way down at 27% with FL and 16% and down at the bottom is RI and DE, although I guess given the size of those states it’s probably not a meaningful comparison. WV KY IN UT WY are all below 15% , and I guess are also large coal producers.
Looking into the data Nuclear and Hydro form quite a big chunk of those renewables, so if we drop them out as they are both well established forms of non fossil fuels and are quite hard to implement even if the states wanted to*, and looked at the more recently economical renewable power generation sources wind, solar, biomass and wood the picture changes some. ME IA KS VT OK ND are the top 6 above 25% , VT and ME both have a significant wood and wood derived products for electricity generation which was surprising to me. CA in 7th at 24% and Texas makes it to 15th place with 19% and average US at 10%
Anyway my take away is that Texas is not completely terrible in implementing the renewable sources of energy that it can, certainly can improve but obviously spending some cash on winterization of renewable and fossil fuel generation capacity and connecting up to the rest of the grid so it can access source such as hydro would be a good idea as well. I’d also say that a mix is absolutely required, wind and solar output did drop , with or without winterization and nat gas generation is an excellent source for managing demand surge.
*. Yes I know there are many ways to look at the data and taking out nuke and hydro isn’t the only way and obviously states that have a lot of nuke and hydro wouldn’t bother to implement other sources so the ranking doesn’t tell the one and only definitive story, and obviously not everywhere is suitable for wind or solar so it’s a complex picture.
California would seem to be the counterpoint to that, wouldn’t it? I know Cali isn’t all Democrats but I don’t see any evidence that Democrats are any better at this than Republicans.
California has its problems, but they are not the direct result of the intended conditions of the party in power.
When fires caused PG&E to shut down chunks (small ones) of the state, it was because they fell behind on mandated maintenance, not because they decided they didn’t want to do it because it wasn’t mandated.
And California’s prior big, widespread energy crisis was artificially caused by Texas energy brokers, not bad management.
We have our problems. I think PG&E should be taken over by the state. But our legislature did not set us up to fail the way Texas’s did.
Yes.
Here’s the thing - Texas utilities were told TEN YEARS AGO to winterize their shit. They didn’t.
Meanwhile, states north of them keep their grids running in far worse weather than what Texas saw. Why? Because they winterize their shit.
This was a preventable disaster.
IF the utilities had winterized the result would have been spotty outages, as happens in, say, Minnesota during an ice storm instead of this widespread fuckup.
The people who decided to put bucks over human lives should, in my opinion, be up on manslaughter charges for every death during this fuckup. I am heartily sick hearing bullshit like “they did their best” or “nothing more could have been done” when it’s obviously lies, gaslighting, and more bullshit.
No, Indiana is NOT a coal big producer (just one tiny corner down by Appalachia in the SE of the state, only about %5 of the annual US total produced), it is a big coal user. Even so, energy from coal has dropped from 90% in 2010 to just under 60% in 2020 so already Indiana is heading towards alternatives.
Indiana is also investing heavily in wind and solar these days AND we winterize our shit so it doesn’t freeze solid in winter. We had nearly no wind and solar in 2010 and now were up to about 14% power generation from renewables in just 10 years.
I don’t know the exact details of what happened here, but the private corporations are only responsible to the extent that they failed to do what they were mandated to do by state regulations. If regulations and enforcement weren’t there, it’s 100% on the incompetence of the government.
Socially responsible private corporation who try to do the right thing are a bonus, but the public interest must rest on clear and well enforced government regulation, not voluntary goodwill. If clear regulations are not in place, then “good” corporations who try to do the right thing will be outcompeted by other “bad” corporations who don’t. So we cannot let anything depend on whether private corporations are good or bad - only on them following the law. The idiots who want to remove all regulation don’t understand markets. Fair and beneficial competition in the private sector depends not on the absence of regulation, but on clear well enforced regulation that is the same for all market participants.
Nowhere did I limit responsibility to corporations.
If the people responsible for this fuck up were the elected officials crying “DEREGULATE!” then put them on trial for manslaughter. MAYBE if we held not just corporate executives but elected officials responsible for the consequences of their decisions they’d make better decisions.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear there - I didn’t intend to imply I was disagreeing with your comment in any way in quoting you, I was expanding on it.
And I probably sound pissed as hell - which I am - but not at you.
I do think the call the deregulate and cripple government oversight is the root cause of this disaster, but that’s the “25 words or less” explanation, the actual situation is complex in the details.
To be fair, we have no trouble at all generating all the power we need.
We just have a problem with it bursting into flame and destroying cities every now and then.
That’s good going and the data I looked at was 2019 and a lot can change.
I did some trawling through average wind speeds in the areas where some of the big wind farms are in Texas and it looks like they maintained 15mph winds and above which should have kept the wind generators at nameplate productivity during the 15-18th feb, other data would indicate that they did not produce at expected rates , so that would indicate that it was a winterization and infrastructure issues that kept wind from providing power to the grid rather than ‘there was no wind’
Barring some bizarre wind direction problem