Evergy Announces Emergency Rolling Blackouts

[WuDrWu]

I’m getting tired of the excuses “once in a lifetime” events. Katrina was once in a lifetime, Harvey was once in a lifetime, now this. We have to recognize that weather patterns are shifting and need better investment/maintenance in our critical infrastructure and have better planning for these once in a lifetime scenarios.

Probably an impossible question to answer, but as consumers (and I'm not in Texas so) what is the acceptable increase in power cost to prevent this from happening again. Are there projections on what it would cost to winterize the system at an amount to protect from any freeze, say -50. that's got to be an amount in the hundreds of billions of dollars, at least.

What do you think consumers are willing to pay?

[pie n eye]

pie n eye is not wrong in that this was a multi-level failure caused by a once in a century cold snap. Some facilities were down for maintenance before the summer surge, the natural gas pipes in TX are not insulated and froze. The windmills froze.

What we do know is that windmills are not the solution to this specific problem.

My intent with this post is not to enter some prolonged debate about renewable energy vs. fossil fuels.

To say flat out that “windmills are not the solution to this problem” as though the freezing temps only affect windmills is incorrect. Windmills, like fossil fuels, can be and are winterized in places that experience extreme cold weather more often than Texas.

Windmills, natural gas, nuclear, etc all ran into problems because of the extreme cold weather event and lack of winterization. It’s not a problem unique to windmills and they can be winterized the same as all the other energy sources.

The lack of winterization of ALL of their energy sources is one of the main issues that caused the problems we’ve seen in Texas. There are several other outside the scope of this conversation.

[pie n eye]

On an ocean crossing, if the wings of your aircraft were efficient massive solar panels then theoretically you could fly with, say, 10% less fuel than otherwise required to get across the ocean. So on a normal day -- ignoring the lifetime cost of the panels -- you can get across the ocean with less cost. But what happens if the solar panels fail? You'd be asking for something from the fuel system that is simply no longer there.

Your comparison is flawed from the start because it appears to assume that the air plane’s fuel system, which represents thermal energy in the Texas situation, is infallible.

In reality, both the fuel system and the solar panels on the plane failed.

And, as it turns out, they failed because the independent airline didn’t de-ice the plane before takeoff, something they would have been required to do per FAA regulations but were allowed to operate outside those regulations for some reason.

What’s worse, other airlines have teleportation decides that can send their passengers to and from other planes in an emergency but this airline decided they didn’t need one of those.

[SB Shock]

Root Angry got banned for two posts about Rush, one of which was a Mark Twain quote. And I’m the one who was triggered? Nah.

I just don't get all the anger and hatred against a radio host. Nobody has to listen to him?

I used to listen to him, but fell away about a decade ago because his message of don't just accept the "spin" has made me more data driven. I rather look at the raw data and the experts on that data for the understanding, then depend on the media (including) rush telling me what to believe.

It is like this "cold" crisis. The energy crisis we have just suffered. is not about climate change or wind farms narratives that are being pushed by different side, it much more complex, and there seems to be some big issue on how we are managing, developing, maintaining and prioritizing our energy needs. It will also demonstrate why there is need for certain amount of regulation. If corporations always choose to what right then you wouldn't need any, but ERCOT going to have regulators doing a full anal probe on their decisions during this crisis.

Also, how many people in Kansas had heard of SPP.org? - but this organization decides who in a 14 state area gets electricity.

[wufan]

My intent with this post is not to enter some prolonged debate about renewable energy vs. fossil fuels.

To say flat out that “windmills are not the solution to this problem” as though the freezing temps only affect windmills is incorrect. Windmills, like fossil fuels, can be and are winterized in places that experience extreme cold weather more often than Texas.

Windmills, natural gas, nuclear, etc all ran into problems because of the extreme cold weather event and lack of winterization. It’s not a problem unique to windmills and they can be winterized the same as all the other energy sources.

The lack of winterization of ALL of their energy sources is one of the main issues that caused the problems we’ve seen in Texas. There are several other outside the scope of this conversation.

This is a bit of a straw man, but since you don’t want to get into it...

[CBB_Fan]

46,000 MW of generation was offline in Texas the last time I looked. 15,000 MW of that is wind, the 30,000 being coal and gas. Half the state's energy producing units went down on the 16th, but only 13% of those were windmills. The biggest issue was the lack of insulation on the gas pipelines, which also shut down coal and nuclear plants which need natural gas to keep the plant at an effective temperature. The other issue was a lack of any deicing or heating to turbine components for the windmills, and the cold reducing battery storage by 60%.

The primary factor for whether an energy source survives the cold is whether or not that source has been winterized. In the 2014 winter vortex, coal and gas plants froze and wind energy helped carry some of the load. Wind power does have a limit where it isn't really economical to run, but that limit is around -22°F, lower than Texas has ever gotten but a factor for North Dakota and Canada in the coldest winters. Many major power plants in the Northeast plan for temperatures from -40° to 120°F.

See “Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February 1–5, 2011” published in August 2011: “the lack of any state, regional or Reliability Standards that directly require generators to perform winterization steps has left winter-readiness dependent on plant or corporate choices.” That report detailed similar issues in 1989 and 2003, showing that the 'once in a century' winter event is instead happening 'once in a decade'.

[Dan]

Probably an impossible question to answer, but as consumers (and I'm not in Texas so) what is the acceptable increase in power cost to prevent this from happening again. Are there projections on what it would cost to winterize the system at an amount to protect from any freeze, say -50. that's got to be an amount in the hundreds of billions of dollars, at least.

What do you think consumers are willing to pay?

i have no idea what the answer is, but from what I gather, some of the outages were simply due to not having the right maintenance plans in place. They typically prepare for increased loads over the summer and do a lot of the maintenance during the spring to prepare for it, they need to re-think these types of activities and assume Texas can also have high loads in the winter.

[wichshock65]