Texas’ Drive for Energy Independence Set It Up for Disaster
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“ The crisis could be traced to that other defining Texas trait: independence, both from big government and from the rest of the country.”
Funny. I thought it was traced to a freak statewide ice storm that caused less disruptions than the annual blizzard season in the Northeast [1] or the perpetual wildfires (or whatever cause) in California [2].
[1] one example affecting hundreds of thousands that wasn’t even newsworthy: https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/new-england-sta...
[2] see eg, https://deadline.com/2020/08/california-the-largest-power-ou...
Just off the top of my head, two things you should keep in mind in your future efforts to understand cause and effect:
- any event/effect can have multiple causes
- causes can be proximal, distal, or collocated
I see.
So, the regular power disruptions and blackouts in California and the Northeast are caused by these regions’ “independence, both from big government and from Texas.”
From WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-11613...
By the numbers, we lost wind energy, tried to make up for it with natural gas, and weren't able to do so, because we had become too reliant on wind. In other words, there is a strong argument that our power issues here in Texas may be blamed, not on "Texas' Drive for Energy Independence" but on the Federal Government's drive for replacing fossil fuels. I'm not against green energy, but it's quite clear that wind is not ready or consistent enough to switch to, and likely won't be until we have large-scale energy storage mechanisms (that are not burned in order to retrieve said energy). Just by the numbers mentioned above, it's quite clear where the lack of power generation last week came from, and it wasn't simply a matter of not being connected to other grids. Other grids may have helped, but the shortfall came from wind.
The linked article makes mention of windmills icing up, and that there are ways of preventing that on Texas windmills, and that is true. And it also makes mention of the fact that the storm we just had truly was a freak storm, and not something that we really could have expected. But nevetheless, the article is nakedly hideously political, with the even-handedness being little more than a fig-leaf of their agenda: namely that the "'Republic of Texas' ethos" is "a devastating liability" in their formulation.