Welcome to the 3rd World - Rolling Blackouts Continue

a reply to: Phoenix

Yep
$1000 megawatts and $300 mmbtu gas when people are on rolling blackouts is obscene imo.

originally posted by: shooterbrody
a reply to: Phoenix

Yep
$1000 megawatts and $300 mmbtu gas when people are on rolling blackouts is obscene imo.

Welp there goes the $1400 stimulus right into the pockets of the fat cats lol.

But you can keep a hundred.......oh wait they said winter wheat got hit better save it for food.

a reply to: Phoenix
They have to pass it first, but yes home electric and gas bill will be huge as those costs will be passed on.

originally posted by: ArMaP

Also, considering that in all of Portugal's recorded history (almost 900 years) we had only 3 hurricanes, the last one, also the strongest, had a record 176 km/h wind gust and made some damages, and 61 people had to be relocated because of damage to their homes, we don't need that much to worry about hurricanes. Where I live we didn't have any problems.

Kind of my point with Texas....This last week they hit a temperature that was 5th lowest in recorded history, and the over all week was the lowest in 70 years...So maybe not 900 years, but damn, really you want them to engineer in basically a 100 year event? Also, the big deal was the wind turbines that froze which provide 25% of their energy in "green energy" that failed...funny how nuclear is also green but not politically correct it seems and wouldn't care whatever the temp is...lol

The reality is no real deaths due to loss of electric power just inconvenience...1 from slipping on ice and 1 homeless in Dallas out of about 8 million living in the area.

originally posted by: ArMaP
Just to get an idea, anyone knows how much electricity does a common home in the US uses per month?

I live in Washington near Portland, my house is 1430m and I pay about 150 electric bill and 80 gas per month... Other places are much different...

Down here in South Africa we have have this problem too.
But here it's not due to a single weather event.
It is due to the longterm and large scale corruption by an incompetent socialist government.

Why is it that every time I drive or fly over a wind farm, there are maybe a couple spinning, but the rest are not?

Like yesterday, 10-15 knot winds, 1 turbine spinning, the other 100 or so were not.

a reply to: ketsuko

Why didn't Trump fix this while he was in office?

Failure of governance?

originally posted by: Xtrozero
So maybe not 900 years, but damn, really you want them to engineer in basically a 100 year event?

It depends, how long is one of those power plants supposed to last? If we are talking about an event that may happen once every 100 years and we are building something that is supposed to last 25 years then it has 25% chance of being affected by one of those events. To me that's too much of a chance for not considering it in the plans.

Also, the big deal was the wind turbines that froze which provide 25% of their energy in "green energy" that failed...funny how nuclear is also green but not politically correct it seems and wouldn't care whatever the temp is...lol

What I saw in that article was that several of the gas, coal and nuclear plants failed, and that was the big problem.

Nuclear energy is not considered "green" because of the radioactive waste it produces. If we were talking about nuclear fusion, then that would be "green".

a reply to: Alien Abduct

originally posted by: Bluntone22
a reply to: ketsuko

The only green energy that's reliable today is hydro and nuclear.
Some day people will understand that.


I've always been a big nuclear fan

Even Obama made favorable comments about the new generation of smaller, safer nuclear reactors. They would be a great way to address greenhouse gas emissions while providing a much denser form of power that can be located almost anywhere, as opposed to wind and solar. The thorium-cycle reactors are most intriguing, with the potential to provide thousands of years of clean power for the world.

The entire infrastructure of the country is out of date.

Take roads and bridges for example...there are more people who use roads and bridges then those who contribute taxes for their repair and maintenance.

So it puts things like roads and bridges in the red.
They never get enough money, always falling behind...there is no money for updates.

And it comes down to budgeting....do citzens want their taxes to go to bridges and power grids or sent to other side.

Do you want your taxes to make sure you have clean water or to set up a humane dentition center on the border.

And we vote accorifngly...Democrats will never provide funds for infrastructure over foreign countries or illegal aliens

a reply to: Bloodworth
You are not wrong.
That is an issue that needs attention.

originally posted by: ketsuko
This is why having diversified power grid generation capability is so important. Right now, most of the US's green energy generation capability is frozen solid during a period of the highest demand experienced ever in decades thanks to the worst string of freezing, sub-zero temps since the '80s. For the record, I was a kid then and lived through that string too.

Here's live updates for rolling blackouts in the KCMO area.

If you have an update string to add for you area, please do so. Knock on wood, we haven't experienced a blackout yet, but that may be due to being in the same area as a hospital, so we may luck out. Others have lost power randomly and suddenly for between 30 and 60 minutes at a time. I understand this is going on all over the Midwest.

Things are a little more complicated than just frozen windmills. The natural gas infrastructure in Texas has frozen too. Between the two, the power grid is stressed to breaking. Sure would be nice if we balanced our energy portfolio a bit with some coal and nuclear, wouldn't it?

More than 2.5 million people in Texas are currently experiencing rolling blackouts as temperatures remain in the single digits in many parts of the state. The Lone Star state is currently short of electricity because half of the Texas wind fleet (the largest in the nation) is iced over and incapable of generating electricity. Additionally, the natural gas infrastructure Texas has become so reliant upon has also frozen up.

Texas’s experience highlights the perils of becoming overly reliant upon wind, solar and natural gas because these energy sources are not as reliable as coal or nuclear power during extreme weather conditions.

Look, no one is against the greener sources of energy where and when they work, but no one wants to sit in -15 degree weather freezing their butts off, either because the windmills can't turn and the natural gas won't flow. Sometimes, you need to have some fallbacks to keep you going.

Everyone in the thread attacking "Green Energy" when the major problem in Texas right now is the with the largest power grid in the state North American Electric Reliability Corp does not have anything to do with green energy or wind turbines. It is driven primarily through natural gas.

The picture of what went wrong in Texas is incomplete. But while some wind generators did go offline as turbines iced over, the state's largest grid,the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the shortage was driven by a failure not of renewable sources but of traditional "thermal" sources: coal, nuclear and especially natural gas. Energy experts said that gas lines supplying gas-fired plants may have frozen or that supplies to the plants may have been limited as gas was prioritized for homes that rely on gas for their heat.

originally posted by: Hypntick
There's part of the problem. TX doesn't have the nuke infrastructure that other states have. We have seven reactors in SC and five across the border in NC. Given the size and population of TX compared to even the three other states mentioned, it looks like nuclear is highly under-represented in the marketplace. As for "green" technologies, it's not even close to meeting a peak demand situation like this one.

Another reason to take a ball bat and wack Jane Fonda up alongside her head.

a reply to: DoubleDNH

I'm surprised shes not got the blame yet.



The weather is the weather, blame no matter where it lies, the weather will do what it wants, one way or the other.

originally posted by: ArMaP

Nuclear energy is not considered "green" because of the radioactive waste it produces. If we were talking about nuclear fusion, then that would be "green".

Then electric cars are also not green, those batteries are rather nasty to make and dispose of. Even wind and sun energy has its environmental issues, its all political in the end. If they truly wanted to cut CO2 we would have a lot more nuclear plants, but even China are still looking at building 100s of coal plants... Tech will fix a lot of this like fusion, but you can't rush it or jump into it before its matured. Even the car that replaced the horse that was an environmental disaster too took decades.

I was listening to timcast and he was saying the lost of the 25% wind power with everyone using electricity to heat for a week is what really hurt Texas, not to mention 1000s of power lines down due to wind and ice. As I said before, when I lived in NY we used oil to heat the house, they don't need that in Texas when a cold day is 15c, but they got as low as -18c.

originally posted by: ArMaP
Nuclear energy is not considered "green" because of the radioactive waste it produces. If we were talking about nuclear fusion, then that would be "green".

Nuclear waste can be kept at a minimum through the use of breeder reactors. Because of the "nuclear scare" of the late 70's early 80's breeder reactors were the first to go. If we had kept on the path set before the scare, we would only have 15% of the nuclear waste that we have now.

We're in a transitional period moving from traditional synchronous generation to non-synchronous renewables. This makes maintaining the frequency (balancing the grid) inherently more challenging in the short term due to reduced inertia, impacts on short circuit levels, and fast-response to fault events.

It's being addressed via smart grid technology, grid forming technology, and large-scale storage.

The Tucker Carlson narrative just displays a complete lack of understanding and research into how the energy grid works.

a reply to: ketsuko

Why are you blaming wind turbines for a problem in a state that runs predominantly on fossil fuels?

Gas pipelines freezing over. Grid failures due to low temps, and yet you're trying to make turbines the issue?

comptroller.texas.gov...

70+% comes from non wind sources.

I realise actual facts and reality are hard for you, but really, you need to get in to the real world.