Dear Texans:

 

Dear Texans,

        I am genuinely sorry for those of you who have been victimized by some of the others of you. I know it doesn’t always get cold and snow a lot where you live, but it has done so before, and probably will again. I’ll give you a small consolation – you’ve been lied to, before and after this latest frontier clusterfuck, and  you may well be again.  

        Here’s what your stalwart Senator, Canadian Rafael Cruz, said a while ago, when California suffered rolling blackouts caused by over-reliance on intermittent energy sources (solar) without sufficient storage capacity to accommodate high demand situations such as the August heat waves and accompanying A/C demand,

“Ted Cruz@tedcruz (He doesn’t use his real name (Rafael) for the same reasons Chuck Norris refuses to go by Carlos)

Aug 19, 2020: California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.

Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

        This (rolling blackouts) was predictable and is an ongoing issue with solar energy, however Trump was POTUS in 2020, while Cruz slammed Biden/ Harris. The only issue was electricity, but Cruz implies they had nothing but sticks and rocks. The real problem with solar is several fold. There is a large carbon footprint involved in the manufacturing process, which somewhat offsets Solar’s low climate impact compared to other sources, excluding fossil fuels.  Solar is attractive in southern areas, but, unfortunately, the farther north we go, the shorter the daylight hours and in winter, when we need power the most for "green" heating, they are shortest. Battery technology is far from adequate in the foreseeable future to support metropolitan areas with solar, if ever. The California debacle proved it.

        The Walt Disney Company is just months away from generating enough renewable solar energy to fully power two of its four parks at the Walt Disney World Resort in central Florida. But... the energy from Disney solar farms will not actually go to Disney's theme parks, but rather into the local power grid. Why? So that when solar is inadequate, the power produced by the utility’s other modes is available – Disney don’t do blackouts!

        Now back to a Cruz update: When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time. In Texas, several factors come into play. The first “It almost never happens so why prepare?”  It turns out a lot of Texas electricity (just under 70%) is produced by burning fossil fuel. Not good for the environment, although natural gas is far better than coal, but gas lines can contain moisture which can freeze, causing disruption in flow, ergo loss of a generator. More seriously the compressors which move natural gas, unready for high demands, can fail (and some have). In a single-digit Texas temperature environment, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.      

        Additionally, wind turbines, which produce about 15% of Texas power, unprepared for cold weather (as they are across Scandinavia Denmark and the US northeast, where it gets colder, longer) can freeze and go off-line. It is of interest that Cruz and others at first singled out the loss of the minor amount from wind as the primary reason the grid failed.  
Here's another Texas horse’s rump:

Rep. Dan Crenshaw@RepDanCrenshaw

Feb 16, 2021

“To make matters worse, existing storage of wind energy in batteries was also gone, because batteries were losing 60% of their energy in the cold.

This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”

        But was that the problem? Hardly. In fact, what has seriously messed with life in Texas is not an engineering problem, nor is it “frozen wind turbines” blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service with essentially no state wide oversight or even requirement to maintain a position within a regulated state-wide power grid. Look again at the word “deregulation”. This was a large vertebra in the backbone of Trump’s attempts top make the federal government more “business friendly”, always at the expense of the rest of us. “Public Utilities commissions? Nah, we don’t need ’em.”

        In the absence of state level utility regulation and pandering to energy producers, Texas created a free for all where electricity prices, instead of being fixed and predictable were volatile. In a mild winter this lack of preparedness coupled with low usage could lead to very low utility rate even with a regulated statewide grid. Instead, under current  conditions, small producers were forced to buy kilowatt hours at demand-based prices which producers were free to charge. What might this look like, you ask?  One utility company, appropriately named Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills. Where does one go to “find another provider?”

        The train wreck that some Texan utilities markets have become Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power and several individuals have died.

        So, whine about “that danged gummint regulation” all you want. But this is why it is appropriate.

        Coda: there is another side to this story related to an industry with which I am more than passing familiar. Oddly enough, it places me on the “other” side of the “green” argument. Amidst all the hype about clean and renewable energy, one alternative is continually swept under the rug. The cleanest bulk power source is hydro (dams, lakes, turbines etc.) In Norway, with lots of high mountain lakes and streams, they produce all their power that way and, until recently, had some to sell to Sweden. In the USA, that entails large dams on rivers which are also transportation routes, and in some cases, like the Columbia and Snake interfere with Salmon runs. Hydro is great but grossly insufficient for the USA.

         On the other hand, the second cleanest mass power production mode is nuclear. NO, stop it, it just is, even if you don’t like it. Every other mode of power production has killed infinitely more people than the entire nuclear power industry in America, ignorant nay-sayers notwithstanding.

        The advantages of Nuclear power plants include being able to locate them in isolated areas, high power production when needed, low production when not, and, with present technologies, refueling intervals of decades. This doesn’t even include the even safer Salt breeders being developed by India and China while we twiddle our thumbs, scared by a movie (China Syndrome) and a “no one got hurt” incident (Three Mile Island).

        We are rightly concerned about Fukushima and Chernobyl, but in the case of the first, no such site design would ever be approved in such a location in the US and the second, Chernobyl #4, was a classic of Soviet era “pushing” to operate a reactor which should never even have been built. (Huge reactor design flaws and several serious breaches of protocol during simulated power outage safety test) I know, I know, “But what about the lasting effects of these incidents?”

        We’ve all seen or heard the predictions of dire consequences, and yet:  comprehensive investigations and assessments of TMI by several well-respected organizations, such as Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had no detectable short- or long-term effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.  It has been a 40-year Public Health study, the longest of its kind. The other two reactors suffered from fatal site design issues (Fukushima) which should have considered the possibility of the Tsunami which disabled emergency cooling pumps, and a dangerous, almost unthinkably unsafe, design at Chernobyl #4. Even so, More Americans who live within a 50-mile radius of a coal fired generation station have died and will continue to die of respiratory failures and cancers than died in both cases. In the USA, No one died at TMI either during or after.

        So, yes, Texas has had more deaths in four days of 2021 due to under-regulation and blatant neglect of reasonable supervision of their power grid, such as it is, than in 65 years of Electric power production in the US with Nuclear reactors.  And, by the way, in West Texas, around El Paso, where they are connected across state lines into the national grid, they had power all the time. Finally, remember, Rick (barely literate) Perry, former Texas Governor was Trump’s first Energy Secretary. Cue the crickets.