re: Snow day

Nope they probably wouldn't have helped. They wouldn't have been winterized and would have also likely gone down. Wind power is only 10% of the power in Texas and it's actually performing better than ERCOT anticipated. It's not why we are getting boned no matter how much Perry, Abbott, Cruz and all the other bought and paid for shills try to pretend.

We've already had this happen twice and both times frick all was done to prevent it from happening again. It's only going to get worse as more and more people move to the state causing an even bigger strain on our woefully outdated and under-prepared infrastructure.

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Ten years ago, plunging temperatures forced rolling blackouts across Texas, leaving more than 3 million people without power as the Super Bowl was played outside Dallas.

Now, with a near identical scenario following another Texas cold snap, Texas power regulators are being forced to answer how the unusually cold temperatures forced so much of the state’s power generation offline when Texans were trying to keep warm.

To start, experts say, power generators and regulators failed to heed the lessons of 2011 — or for that matter, 1989. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl Sunday blackout a decade ago, federal energy officials warned the grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, that Texas power plants had failed to adequately weatherize facilities to protect against cold weather.

A federal report that summer recommended steps including installing heating elements around pipes and increasing the amount of reserve power available before storms, noting many of those same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years earlier and had gone unheeded.

“We need better insulation and weatherization at facilities and in homes,” said Michael Webber, an energy professor at the University of Texas. “There's weaknesses in the system we haven't dealt with.”

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quote:

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In truth, virtually all forms of power generation in Texas suffered outages during the cold snap, with early reports showing gas plants sustaining the most failures, Webber said. Early Monday morning, ERCOT issued a news release saying generation “across fuel types” had gone offline, amid reports of wind turbines covered in ice and natural gas wellheads freezing up.

“All the fuels and technologies have their weak point and they’re all failing for different reasons right now,” Webber said. “And it’s happening as demand is setting record highs.”

The outages are likely to turn into a political test for Abbott, who as governor is responsible for appointing the PUC, which has oversight over ERCOT.

In November, ERCOT Manager of Resource Adequacy Pete Warnken assured the Legislature that the agency had studied a range of extreme weather scenarios for the coming winter and had determined, “there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers."

But ERCOT only sets best practices for generators, unable to force them to better protect their equipment from the cold. State Rep. Gene Wu described it as,” trusting producers to use profit motive to maintain production.”

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LINK


This is 100% b/c those in charge were too cheap to properly set up out infrastructure to deal with a harsh winter. It has zero to do with wind power. Period. End of story. Anyone in our state government telling you that is a liar who needs to get booted the frick out of office b/c they are clearly bought off and give no fricks about you and your family.