It's the [Climate Polcy] Stupid!

[Cannucklehead]

6 minutes ago, Infidel Dog said:

Yeah, I was reading up on what it takes to winterize wind turbines too. Sounds like an expensive process. In more ways than one.

https://www.westernjournal.com/polar-vortex-proving-exactly-green-energy-disaster-americas-power-grid/

Might be worth rebuilding to winterize the vast network of Texas windmills though. I hear it costs about 900 dollars to charge up a Tesla in Texas today.

Be cheaper just to go back to coal though. And no, I don't believe Ercot's BS that coal doesn't work in the Texas cold spell either. That doesn't make sense. Coal works all over the world in much colder regions. As does natural gas for that matter without expensive renovations. Ercot didn't want to invest in back-up supply of coal and natural gas because the bulk of their investing was going to their new toy - windmills. And now they're going to have to winterize them.

Hey...remember John Kerry telling out of work Keystone people to find new jobs? Maybe he should take his own advice.

 

 

But this is not just about wind turbines going down. Natural gas and coal-fired power plants need water to stay online. Yet those water facilities froze in the cold temperatures and others lost access to the electricity they require to operate.

 

Because of the large amounts of water needed for a population like Texas they'd be looking at major overhauls.  

 

https://www.powermag.com/prepare-your-coal-plant-for-cold-weather-operations/

[Infidel Dog]

Frozen lines was Ercot's second excuse. The first time they came up with an excuse it was that they'd run out of supply for coal and natural gas. So take your pick of excuses. I know which one I pick.

Texas seems to be the only place natural gas is freezing up because of all of the water that is supposedly everywhere is Texas freezing up all the coal and natural gas lines. Ask Germany. Or any of the other European windmill hotspots that are all the time experiencing black of brownouts.

Apparently Germany is having a problem this year with snow covering their solar panels. I imagine there's de-icing tech for those too, but it doesn't seem to be helping.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Infidel Dog

[Infidel Dog]

Oh and concerning the climate versus weather thing.

This recent eastern cold blast isn't really a weather thing. It's been happening intermittently for awhile now. They blame the Polar Vortex. 

Want a good laugh. Some of your Thunberg level global warming scientists are theorizing Global Warming is making it colder when the Polar Vortex acts up.

[Infidel Dog]

42 minutes ago, Cannucklehead said:

 

But this is not just about wind turbines going down. Natural gas and coal-fired power plants need water to stay online. Yet those water facilities froze in the cold temperatures and others lost access to the electricity they require to operate.

 

Because of the large amounts of water needed for a population like Texas they'd be looking at major overhauls.  

 

https://www.powermag.com/prepare-your-coal-plant-for-cold-weather-operations/

Oh wait...so the excuse has changed again, has it? Now it's not frozen coal and Natural Gas lines. Now it's frozen water supply. What? They still can't make up their minds?

The first explanation still sounds the best to me. About half the wind Turbines that supply about a quarter of the energy to Texas froze up (I've seen pictures). This strained the supply of coal and natural gas energy and they cut back or went down. More stuff froze up making re-supply difficult to impossible and allowed Ercot to go eenie, meenie, miney moe for a new excuse as they got more criticism about the last one.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Infidel Dog

[Cannucklehead]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/texas-power-outages-alberta-1.5917052

 

In the end, many natural gas wells and other infrastructure froze in Texas and surrounding regions, limiting supply in this time of high demand. Other thermal assets, such as coal and natural gas power plants, also experienced issues with frozen water intakes, and some wind capacity has been lost to icing. 

 

Who's to blame?

It's only natural in the aftermath of a serious event like the Texas power outage is that people will be quick to seek and assign blame. Many are all too eager to find any excuse to reinforce their pre-existing notions about the unreliability of wind, blaming the outages on a dearth of wind power.

But answers aren't so simple, and it will take time to fully dissect this event.

What we do know is that wind performed, for the most part, roughly as expected: a small fraction of its maximum capability, but roughly in line with what the Texas system counts on for reliability purposes in the winter. 

Natural gas, oft-touted for its ability to provide reliability in power grids with large shares of renewables, was beset with struggles.

Freezing temps led to shut-in production in a system not designed for these temperatures. This resulted in a lack of gas supply and soaring natural gas prices — in some cases 100 times typical pricing. During the Texas outage event, over 30,000 MW of thermal power plants, or 35 per cent of thermal power capacity, was offline.

 

 

[Infidel Dog]

So sayeth the State Broadcaster of Canada.

I'm one to hear both sides. Somebody linked me to some smug MSNBC communist concerning this matter on another thread. 

As is usual with such types he was misinterpreting (otherwise known as lying about) what the right is being told about Texans energy problems dealing with the Polar Vortex. 

Let me help those restricted to corporate and state media. Here's what we're actually being told:

Quote

There are misleading reports asserting the blackouts were caused by large numbers of natural gas and coal plants failing or freezing. Here’s what really happened: the vast majority of our fossil fuel power plants continued running smoothly, just as they do in far colder climates across the world. Power plant infrastructure is designed for cold weather and rarely freezes, unlike wind turbines that must be specially outfitted to handle extreme cold.

It appears that ERCOT, Texas’s grid operator, was caught off guard by how soon demand began to exceed supply. Failure to institute a managed rolling blackout before the grid frequency fell to dangerously low levels meant some plants had to shut off to protect their equipment. This is likely why so many power plants went offline, not because they had failed to maintain operations in the cold weather.

Yet these operational errors overshadow the decades of policy blunders that made these blackouts inevitable. Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/18/texass-blackouts-are-the-result-of-unreliable-green-energy/

[Cannucklehead]

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/

 

Oh ok, whatever you say ID.  

[Infidel Dog]

And here's what a different Texas paper was saying when the crisis began - before all the minimizing of Wind's part in the Texas energy crisis became a leftist news necessity:

Quote

Nearly half of Texas' installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators. 

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-winter-storm-freezes-texas-wind-turbines-hampering-electric-generation/4483230001/

So that's half of a quarter of the energy supply that went down. Natural Gas, coal and nuclear had to pick up the slack. They couldn't. They weren't prepared. More stuff froze up. Solar wasn't even in the picture. What was available had already been taken out by a snowstorm.

I heard it described this way. "Two handfuls of wind energy went down. One died of frostbite. No problem, right? It's just one hand."

So now Circle-back Psaki tells us her boss is going to send Diesel Generators as a fix. Notice he's not sending more windmills.

Edited February 19, 2021 by Infidel Dog

[Infidel Dog]

And as previously noted, this isn't just happening in Texas.

Here's what's happening in Germany:

Edited February 19, 2021 by Infidel Dog

[Cannucklehead]

Cite?  I can't find anything on power outages in Germany.  I did find this:

https://m.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-germanys-power-grid/a-47730394

Initial investigations suggest that its origins were not nefarious: a Swiss construction firm working on a road bridge had apparently failed to check certain underground plans and cut through a 110,000 volt cable. 

[Infidel Dog]

That story is from 2 years ago.

Here's a more recent one:

Here's another one from yesterday:

"Germany's millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and its 30,000 wind turbines are doing nothing as the freezing weather has no wind resource to keep the turbines operating. Instead, the solar and wind units are drawing power from the grid powered mainly by coal to keep their internal workings from freezing up. Despite Germany being the poster child of Europe's renewable future, the country's Energiewende--transition to wind and solar power--is not working. The Germans have found that dependable, dispatchable coal can work in any weather and is the savior during these cold months. The plan is that Germany will have to rely more on natural gas from Russia, coal power from Poland and nuclear power from France, importing power along huge cables, instead of building a huge fleet of batteries to back up its intermittent renewable power."

https://energycentral.com/news/institute-energy-research-coal-rescues-germany-its-renewable-folly

 

This one below is a week old but it's saying more or less the same thing:

"This year, the coldest weather in a decade arrives in western Europe. Bitter cold and snow sweep across western Europe including Germany, Great Britain, and France. Germany faces a sober reality as millions of its solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless. The freezing weather has rendered its 30,000 wind turbines to idleness. It is not just the wind turbines. Solar panels covered with snow are also rendered useless. You may call it “coal comfort” as a total collapse in the wind and solar output leaves freezing Germans desperate for coal-fired power."

https://worldnewsera.com/news/startups/germanys-green-energy-failure-germany-turns-back-to-coal-and-natural-gas-as-millions-of-its-solar-panels-are-blanketed-in-snow-and-ice-tech-news-startup/

 

 

Edited February 19, 2021 by Infidel Dog

[Infidel Dog]

You might be having trouble finding things if you're using Google. They don't like to tell you what they don't want you to know.

[Cannucklehead]

https://m.dw.com/en/new-energy-storage-facilities-in-high-demand-in-germany/a-56610380

 

Strange, I've heard differently.  

 

Shrugs 

[DogOnPorch]

Texas Snowpocalypse Freezing News Update!

 

[Infidel Dog]

I liked Texas broadcaster, Dana Loesch's response to Beto O'rourke and AOC virtue signalling about raising money for Texans.

"That's great..." she says, "I will consider that a down payment on the 20 billion tax payer dollars that people used to build wind turbines instead of properly winterizing the existing infrastructure and insulating gas pipes. 

 

[Infidel Dog]

10 hours ago, Cannucklehead said:

https://m.dw.com/en/new-energy-storage-facilities-in-high-demand-in-germany/a-56610380

 

Strange, I've heard differently.  

 

Shrugs 

Yeah DW is an aggregator of European news. Sometimes if Google likes one of the stories they find they'll allow you to know about it.

That one seems to be one of those, "Yeah, solar and wind have problems with intermittent stoppages but 'boy O boy' just you wait until we get improved battery technology."

So yeah, we can wait but in the meantime Texas should take Dana Loesch's advice and stop slipping billions to Friends of Democrats to subsidize a so-far failing technology at the expense of proven ones.

[Infidel Dog]

On another matter it looks like Bill Gates wants another title. There's big competition for this one but Bill's surging into the lead.

Bill Gates = World's Biggest Climate Hypocrite