TEXAS FOLKS - Time to react.

[Sarg]

Folks in The Texas areas ..... especially those on wells ...... they predict your temperatures will be in the single digits. Time to stockpile water and drain exterior piping. I've been told the piping down there is only about a foot under ground.
Remember to turn off water supply to your outdoor spigots and open them up.

 

[Tuttles Revenge]

I've seen a lot of bad things down there.. lots of water freeze leaks. Rolling blackouts don't help that either. Friends had the power go out 3x.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[TJanak]

We definitely are not prepared for this. Here in Rockport we got down to 18 degrees last night and it's 20 right now, so near record but manageable for us. Drain exterior water lines and cover exposed bibs and water wells. Central TX is currently around 0 degrees in an area that normally sees upper teens for lows. There will be so many busted pipes.

What's worse is the failure of our power grid. Now people who were prepared to protect plumbing by using heat or running water cannot. And so many people without power for 24 hours or more and freezing. From the Houston area: https://spacecityweather.com/the-po...ZLzT1zLAnDMGSHG4XCluKlvJxE69qOTj9OjIHOE4V_Om4

 

[Valveman]

Texas might as well be California. I live in an area in Texas where I can see thousands of ugly wind generators blocking the beautiful skies we used to have. There is also a huge solar plant I drive by for 10 minutes it is so large. But my power is off and my water is frozen. Ugg! When the wind is blowing the wind generator people sell electricity for about $25 a Megawatt. The spot price on electricity today is $9000 a MW. The multitude of wind generators that are subsidized by the government like 70% and get paid $23 a MW extra subside for the electricity they make is unbelievable. During the windy summer they even sell electricity at a negative rate. They will pay $9 a MW for someone to take there electricity so they get back the $23 government subside. Now the natural gas co-generation plants cannot compete with negative rates, and many have closed down. So, we have rolling blackouts where they shut your power off for a few hours at a time, which lets the water freeze up and other inconvenient things happen.

This is ridiculous in an area with so much extra natural gas. The burn off flares light up the night sky so much that from space the rural areas of Texas and North Dakota look like New York city. Natural gas co-generation plants are even cleaner than what has to be done to manufacture, maintain, and recycle all those wind generator parts. Wind generators cost so much to install and maintain the electric rates are 3-4 times normal rates, and that is even with the subside. Stop the government subsides for things that do not work and let the market work out which is best. There are hundreds of acres of old wind generator blades piled up that will never be recycled. Get ready to pay more taxes to clean up these sites when they finally get added to a superfund project. It will be a few more years before people realize those signs on the entrance saying "these blades are scheduled for recycling" is a lie, and nobody is ever going to show back up to take care of the mess.

Green energy doesn't work! That is why you have no power this morning.

 

[Jadnashua]

When you have excess electricity, or any energy source, we need to make better ways to store it when that source is not available. One of the consequences of climate change is more adverse, radical weather events that all of the flaring of NG doesn’t help.
Making hydrogen with the excess energy is one way..if you have an elevation change, you can pump water up and when needed let it turn a turbine on the way back down later to fill in. The waves and currents in the ocean can work and a new tidal turbine was just installed off a Japanese island that is making a megawatt per day. Lots of room for more and it’s out of sight.

Columbia River between Washington and Oregon

 

[Valveman]

When you have excess electricity, or any energy source, we need to make better ways to store it when that source is not available. One of the consequences of climate change is more adverse, radical weather events that all of the flaring of NG doesn’t help.
Making hydrogen with the excess energy is one way..if you have an elevation change, you can pump water up and when needed let it turn a turbine on the way back down later to fill in. The waves and currents in the ocean can work and a new tidal turbine was just installed off a Japanese island that is making a megawatt per day. Lots of room for more and it’s out of sight.

I agree energy storage is the problem with “renewables”. There are not enough raw materials in the entire world to make enough batteries to store the energy needed for just a day or two of cloudy, cold, or hot weather. Making hydrogen is great but put too much of that in one storage vessel and you can have a huge explosion. If you made a man-made lake on top of every hill in the country, it still would not be enough to make the energy needed for just a day or two of use. Wave and tidal generators have the same problem. How do you supply power during a changing tide? Would also need so many of those there would be no place left for a boat in the ocean.

Natural gas is flared off just to get to the oil. There is so much natural gas being flared off we could supply everyone free energy. It would require lots of pipelines to get the gas where it is needed, and lots of storage tanks to keep from having to flare off all the excess. We could be burning the clean natural gas to make electricity instead of flaring it off just to get rid of it with much less impact on the environment.

However, for this to work we need leaders with a little common sense instead of ridiculous political ideas.

 

[wwhitney]

Texas might as well be California.

Climate change affects all of us.

Now the natural gas co-generation plants cannot compete with negative rates, and many have closed down. So, we have rolling blackouts where they shut your power off for a few hours at a time, which lets the water freeze up and other inconvenient things happen. [. . .] Stop the government subsides for things that do not work and let the market work out which is best.

That's a good plan if all forms of energy pay for the costs of their pollution. But for some reason a carbon tax has been something to avoid. So as a second best measure, subsidies for less polluting energy forms have been used instead. It's certainly possible to mess up subsidy design and cause market distortions like what you describe.

This is ridiculous in an area with so much extra natural gas. The burn off flares light up the night sky so much that from space the rural areas of Texas and North Dakota look like New York city.

That's presumably because the infrastructure to capture that natural gas, and the pipelines to connect it to the distribution system, were judged too expensive to be worth it. So it would take some work and investment to capture that natural gas.

Natural gas co-generation plants are even cleaner than what has to be done to manufacture, maintain, and recycle all those wind generator parts.

For any reasonable definition of "clean", and a balanced comparison of the lifecycle effects of both options, I would expect the opposite.

Green energy doesn't work! That is why you have no power this morning.

More like green energy doesn't work the same and the planning for dealing with that proved inadequate. Sounds a bit like CA's rolling blackouts this summer, inadequate planning for the consequences of climate change (bigger heat wave than ever seen previously).

Cheers, Wayne

 

[Reach4]

Climate change affects all of us.

How long has that been going on?

 

[wwhitney]

FWIW, this article says that most of the generation knocked offline in Texas by the cold weather was thermal (e.g. natural gas). [Behind a paywall, but I could read it in an Incognito window.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/climate/texas-power-grid-failures.html

An excerpt:

"The problems compounded from there, as frigid weather knocked out of service power plants with more than 30 gigawatts of capacity by Monday night. The vast majority of those failures occurred at thermal plants, like natural gas generators, as plummeting temperatures paralyzed plant operations and soaring demand for natural gas nationwide appeared to leave some plants struggling to procure fuel. A number of the state’s power plants were also offline for scheduled maintenance in preparation for the summer peak.

At times, the state’s fleet of wind farms also lost up to 5 gigawatts of capacity, as many turbines froze in the icy conditions and stopped working."

It goes on to say that wind turbines in colder climates are equipped with measures for freezing, icy weather (e.g. heaters on the blades), but those in Texas were not.

So I don't think we can blame wind turbines for this blackout.

Cheers, Wayne

 

[Jadnashua]

Fifty percent of homes in TX heat with NG, most of the rest with electricity usually supplied with NG fired generators. The demand was so great, and the supply pressure could not be kept up in many areas plus, unlike places that see the extreme temperatures on a more regular basis, TX utilities did not design much cold capability into their plants.
As to tidal, it works just as well when it's coming in as going out. Some of the recent wave generators are using the waves to compress air and use that to run an air turbine to generate electricity.
We've had over 100-years to try to develop electricity grids, and less for NG pipelines. Give it a little time to figure out how to do renewable optimally.
Where I live, the utility stores NG in big tanks. You don't think those can't or won't make a big boom?
Given working in a gas/oilfield or putting up a solar array or wind turbine, my preference would be the later. Cleaner, safer, and the field won't have a definite end once depleted.
Excess electricity could make hydrogen that could be used locally to power a generator, or be shipped in the pipelines no longer needed for NG.

 

[Valveman]

If you add up the raw materials and energy needed to mine, manufacture, transport, install, maintain, and recycle all those wind turbines there would be very little difference in the carbon footprint for a wind generator as for a gas generator. Just like the all electric cars. You have to drive one for 50K miles before the carbon footprint equals a gas engine car. After 50K miles there is only 17% difference in the carbon footprint. That doesn't include recycling all those Lithium Ion batteries which will be an environmental nightmare.

Sure the gas turbines might have been frozen and the gas supply slow from the cold. But that is because they have just been sitting there idle for too long. Texas switched from a base load design to taking whatever the wind turbines could supply. Now there is no base load infrastructure to handle the load when the wind stops blowing or it gets too cold to run them. Wind generators sound like a good idea because the wind energy is free. However, there are so many expensive moving parts and pieces in a wind generator they are expensive to operate even though the energy is free. It still cost 3 to 4 times as much to make electricity with a wind generator as it does with a gas generator even though the energy is free. People don't see a smoke stack coming off a wind turbine, so they think it is clean energy when it is just as big a carbon footprint as a gas generator.

I would sleep well living close to a NG tank farm. But I would hate to live anywhere close to a single tank of hydrogen being stored. I am all for clean energy. But you should read the fine print on how those wind turbines work, not just the political hype being put out there. Solar plants have a lot less moving parts and will have a better cost to output ratio, but storage is still the big issue.

All this talk about clean "renewable" energy and stuff won't make any difference if we don't address the real problem which is over-population. You can't save enough energy, grow enough food, supply enough clean water, or deal with the garbage from 7 billion people as it is. There is no way we can survive with twice as many people on this planet. But nobody wants to talk about population control. I am not talking about killing off any of the existing people, just teach people not to screw the planet into oblivion, which is what we are doing. Any talk about saving the planet is useless if we don't confront the real problem which is over-population. There won't be any food to eat, water to drink, air to breath, much less any fuel for infrastructure if we don't address the population problem first.

 

[TJanak]

We have to get permission from the feds to bring online additional generation because they are concerned about environmental impacts.

https://www.kvue.com/mobile/article...ange/269-53ab63e2-8dcf-4485-8b9b-be6ad75316b4

And the price increase issue is becoming apparent. We are on AEP (lines) not a co-op, so we are in a deregulated market and can choose our electricity provider. I received an email from mine on Monday morning offering customers $150 if they canceled their electricity plan THAT DAY and went with another provider. Why do you think that is? I have a 36 month fixed rate plan and they figured out Monday morning how serious this was going to be and I believe figured out they were going to be losing massive amounts of money considering what they were going to have to pay to for electricity during a scarcity event such as this. Looks like they were correct. Now it remains to be seen who will cover that cost increase. But we all know the answer.

Pad is poured for a whole house generator but haven't purchased one yet. Plan to before hurricane season. I have two 250 gallon propane tanks currently and will likely purchase a 500 or 1000 gallon and keep my 250s as backup. The time has passed for self preparedness.

No gasoline to be found around here either. WTF, I don't even want to go anywhere. 100+ cars in line at the propane supplier yesterday and today. We've all become too reliant on others. Me included.

A follow up about our retail electrical provider offering us $150 on Monday to switch to a different retail provider. And a follow up to the PUC/ERCOT document I sent on granting an exception to commission rules for electricity pricing.

Surging Texas Power Prices Promise Both Doom and Riches
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-power-prices-may-enrich-some-bankrupt-others

 

[Valveman]

What I get from that is we are all going to be paying as much for electricity as California. "Scarcity" pricing really? In a state with enough energy to supply the entire world? Wind turbine politics don't work any better than the wind turbines themselves. What good does it do to have free energy for 360 days a years if in the last five days we pay more than we would have for a years worth of gas generators? Not that the first 360 days was really free, because the American taxpayer paid every dollar for purchasing and installing those wind turbines. If we had the money back we spent on those wind generators we could have bought 50 years worth of natural gas and nobody would be out of power this morning.

Makes about as much sense as adding 10% ethanol to our gasoline. Adding 10% ethanol to gas causes a 10% loss of fuel efficiency. Ethanol is energy negative just like wind turbines. Seems common sense has gone the way of the Dodo bird.

 

[wwhitney]

If you add up the raw materials and energy needed

I think we're going to have to disagree on that one, both on generation facilities and on cars. Unless one of us can point to a study with data on the question, we'll each have our preconceptions.

Sure the gas turbines might have been frozen and the gas supply slow from the cold. But that is because they have just been sitting there idle for too long.

No, it's because people running the natural gas infrastructure in Texas never planned for the current weather conditions, and so they made different choices than those running the natural gas infrastructure in, say, North Dakota. As a result Texas had cold temperature vulnerabilities not present elsewhere. As an unsubstantiated example, I heard that the allowable water vapor content of natural gas in Texas is much higher, and that in the current conditions it condensed out and froze in equipment.

Cheers, Wayne

 

[Reach4]

What I get from that is we are all going to be paying as much for electricity as California.

I signed up for "realtime pricing". When prices go up, I shut things down. I save significant money on average. My point is that that behavior helps better use the available power. If you pay the same rate pretty much all of the time, you probably use a lot more power during times of shortage.

I am not to the point of shutting down my fridge, and putting the frozen food outside. There is a price where I might consider that, but so far we are not close to that.

 

[Valveman]

Well my freezer doesn't have any power so I had to put my food on the back porch. Saving a ton on energy cost today because I can't get any.

Here is an article on electric cars. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tilakd...s-of-clean-electric-vehicles/?sh=2e9b4a6e650b

As with anything you have to look hard to find accurate information on wind energy. Most of the facts are being hidden as it is not politically correct to give out facts about stuff like this.

 

[wwhitney]

For some more recent information on lifecycle analysis of EVs vs ICEVs, how about this from the IEA, which I believe has a pro-fossil fuel slant, if any:

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statis...of-an-average-mid-size-car-by-powertrain-2018

Cheers, Wayne

 

[Valveman]

"The reality is that wind energy’s expansion has been driven by federal subsidies and state-level mandates. Wind energy, cannot, and will not, meet a significant portion of our future energy needs because it requires too much land."

https://www.city-journal.org/wind-power-is-not-the-answer

 

[Reach4]

"The reality is that wind energy’s expansion has been driven by federal subsidies and state-level mandates. Wind energy, cannot, and will not, meet a significant portion of our future energy needs because it requires too much land."

In farming areas, they farm the land under the turbine blades, and work around the towers.

Climate change affects all of us.

This kind of thing is why you renamed "Global Warming".

When did climate change start?

 

[Valveman]

Even if every farmer and rancher had wind turbines on every available inch of property, there still would not be enough turbines to supply the power needed.