What trickery is this? Abbott requests help from Biden’s gummint?
Requesting help from an illegitimate government for tests and treatment for an imaginary hoax of a disease?
Ahhh… here’s the barb:
Abbott is also asking for more shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments, saying that “the Biden administration has cut supplies of monoclonal antibody treatments and testing kits when they are needed most.”
Greg is blaming Joe for the uptick in cases (of the imaginary hoax disease) in Texas by saying Joe is withholding tests and treatments. Right.
So if numbers continue to go up (and they surely will), it will be Biden’s fault, and if they come down it will be in spite of Biden’s efforts to make Texans get sick and die, but Greg wouldn’t let him get away with it. Gotcha.
The two most powerful people overseeing Texas’ electric grid sat next to each other in a quickly arranged Austin news conference in early December trying to assure Texans the state’s electricity supply was prepared for winter.
“The lights are going to stay on this winter,” said Peter Lake, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, echoing recent public remarks by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Two weeks earlier, Abbott had told Austin’s Fox 7 News he “can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
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Well I can guarantee one thing: the lights will absolutely stay on in the Governor’s Mansion.
But guess what:
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The messaging has projected a level of confidence about the grid that isn’t reflected in data released by ERCOT [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] or echoed by power company executives and energy experts who say they’re worried that another massive winter storm could trigger widespread grid failures like those that left millions of Texans without power in February.
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Tell me it isn’t so!
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When Brad Jones took over as ERCOT’s interim CEO in the spring — after the previous CEO and many board members resigned after the grid catastrophe — he began by promising that ERCOT would be more transparent with the public and state leaders.
“My guarantee to you is that we intend to communicate more clearly than we’ve done in the past,” Jones said during his first public hearing with lawmakers. “To remove industry jargon, to speak to you in ways that all of us can understand.”
In recent months, however, ERCOT has been nearly silent on social media and its leaders have barely spoken publicly. People familiar with ERCOT’s operations say the organization has needed to receive approval from the governor’s office for most of its public communications, a stark contrast to how the grid operator did business in the past.
Every spring and fall, ERCOT releases a report assessing potential scenarios for the grid during more extreme weather. And the organization’s technical experts typically brief reporters on the assessment to help translate complex electricity jargon into plain language that the general public can understand.
This fall, that briefing never happened.
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My bold.
It’s especially hard to stand up straight and speak clearly when the guy with his arm up your butt is in a permanent seated position.
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Nearly three weeks after promising the lights wouldn’t go out this winter — and after Lake echoed him in the December press conference — Abbott’s team arranged for several energy companies to meet with the governor.
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I believe this is absolutely the best way to fix this problem: meetings with the Governor. The more meetings the better! Especially if they serve really great coffee and pan dulce. That’s the ticket!
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“No one can guarantee there won’t be [power outages],” Abbott said Tuesday, just over two months after he promised the lights would stay on this winter.
Abbott and other officials at the press conference warned that the winter storm could cause “treacherous” driving conditions due to snow and ice.
Two hours before Abbott’s Tuesday news conference, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s main power grid, held a conference call with dozens of entities in the Texas power system and told them that gas suppliers have already begun notifying electricity generation companies that some of their expected gas supply will not arrive this week during the freezing weather, according to people on the call who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the call publicly.
The Texas natural gas system’s ability to perform in the cold has been in question since last February, when the winter storm caused power outages and equipment failures that choked off much of the fuel supply to many electricity generators when they needed it most to produce electricity.
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It’s too bad Abbott, the Legislature and members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas can’t be required to endure the same conditions as the worst affected in the state. I’ll bet they’d figure out a solution in no time.
Maybe I’m just in a particularly sour mood, but this story strikes me as hilarious.
Yes, it’s terrible, but there’s just something about the specific combination of demented components that makes it feel like the perfect exemplification of the stupidities and insanities of our times.
Nah, crypto miners have money. Abbott would never attack or alienate anyone with the potential to give him a bribe campaign contribution. That’s why the story here is how he’s asking nicely for their help.
This is the Republican ideal for the regulatory state – having to beg individuals and businesses to take actions that prevent widescale catastrophe because the government is toothless to actually require their compliance.
Okay, I admit it: I’m clueless. So someone 'splain and straighten me out.
There’s no real “mining” involved here, right? No digging in the ground with picks and shovels, no backhoes, no hard hats. This is virtual currency, not even real paper. This “mining” has nothing to do with the power grid. That’s what makes this funny, right?
In case you are curious, the largest bitcoin mine in the US is in Texas, and this is it:
It’s basically an enormous server farm and you can see why it uses all the energy it does. They’re competing against other miners to do transactions, so they have to be big and fast.
What Abbott is asking them to do, essentially, is not make money.
Yes, we turn massive amounts of electricity into ones and zeros that may or may not have value.
A nearby paper mill shut down and was sold to a cryptocurrency mining operation. One of the reasons they bought it is to get the power supply. They’ve requested 85 MWs/month to start and an additional 220 MW/month. Using the sample from that article, that is roughly enough to provide electricity to nearly 80,000 commercial and residential customers.
Is it worth it? Nope. Abbott is correct in asking them to turn off their operations but will they do it? Probably not. Too bad TX is so stupid they cannot figure out how to legislate (that is true of all Republicans).
The way it’s supposed to work is the increased demand for electricity will lead to building more power plants, which will stabilize supply during peak usage. And the miners, being socially conscious and so forth, will voluntarily reduce their usage in periods of high demand.
The idiocy is just all around. Power plants can’t be built overnight. And even if they could, it’s Texas, so the plants (and the natural gas supply pipes) won’t be winterized even if they could. And even then, why would a company build a plant that would guarantee prices will drop? Better to have occasional shortages to boost profit margins. And why would miners voluntarily cut usage? And even if they would, how are they to be notified to do so in an emergency situation?
The market solution in such cases is clearly to let people freeze rather than spend money that will only come into play perhaps 10 days a decade. And to let miners continue making money, so they can fund more power plants that won’t come online for at least a decade and won’t be winterized even when they do. That’s why we have government regulation in the first place. We recognize the free market can often put a rather low cost on human lives, so we intervene to avoid those situations.
