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Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

I've heard there is a good tech for backup generation in cases like that -- gas turbines. Not the cheapest one, but not too expensive either -- it could stay offline for months, and spin up in just a couple of minutes. Wondering what's the state of that in Texas.

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It's the gas turbines and power plants that failed to come online due to frozen gas pipelines...

That's simply an issue with winterization. It's nothing inherent to their operation during a winter snow storm. Russia runs all kinds of gas and nuclear power plants in cold parts of Siberia that regularly get this kind of weather.

This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.

You put the answer right in your post. Russia regularly sees weather like this. This is a rare/ record breaking event in Texas.

Antarctica has wind turbines [0]. Arguments that renewable can't be winterized are wrong.

[0] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/rossislandwindfarm...

Those turbines also stop spinning when they freeze -- same as the ones in Texas.

Those turbines are on permafrost so its safe to say they can still spin at the temperatures Texas is seeing this week.

Edit: It's also worth noting that the wind turbines in Texas are producing a good amount of energy despite cold conditions there.

Your statement wasn't false owing to being a tautology since everything keeps moving until it freezes - hence the word. However, those wind turbines continue operating in far less gentle weather then what hit Texas. There is, of course, a temperature[1] at which everything stops moving and operating, but well designed engineering can push that down pretty far.

1. If it's not higher - it'll be at 0K since that's what absolute zero means, an absolute lack of generally useful energy.

> That's simply an issue with winterization.

Wait I'm not sure I'm following the plot.

This entire disaster was caused by the fact that none of the power generation in Texas is winterized. Then natural gas turbine power was suggested as an emergency fallback. Then it was brought up that natural gas had frozen in all the already existing infrastructure. You're suggesting that you simply winterize the emergency natural gas turbines?

Why don't they just winterize the normal power infrastructure?

> This is something unlike current solar and wind technologies. Which can't be "winterized" in the same way.

Solar, sure. Put some snow on it and it doesn't work. But wind works everywhere. Cold, ice, snow, doesn't matter.

> Solar, sure. Put some snow on it and it doesn't work.

I'm late reading this tab, but solar power works better in the cold and slightly better in snow once you clean the panels off - snow can be very bright, that's why you need snow goggles.

Our failures were with natural gas and coal. Un-winterized gas turbines freeze if it's cold enough.

Un-winterized anything freezes if it's cold enough. The nuclear power plants and windmills shut down too. The issue is that nobody spent money winterizing everything because they never expected it to get this cold there. It's an issue of how much you want to spend preparing for the worst, not an issue of what type of power source you use.

Nuclear went offline due to faulty metering equipment, was manually checked and brought back online.

Some of the windmills froze, while others did not, and yes that was due to a lack of winterization (despite repeated recommendations to do so).

But natural gas comprises more than 50% of our power sources, and was also not winterized, and we lost a huge percentage of our power as a result.

So among our un-winterized power sources, natural gas fared the worst, which is relevant when deciding, for example, where to spend winterization money in the years to come.

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