Texas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m guessing that a very high percentage of people will continue to blame wind. And I’m guessing this splits pretty heavily on party lines.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this removes all accountability from the government. If your constituents are always arguing about something other than your governance (I.e constantly in some ideological battle), what incentive do you really have to govern well?
The US still does many things well. But I think the system supporting the ability to do things well is decaying.
I am libertarian and conservative leaning, although, modern day "conservatives" are far from conservative in any sense of the word. For example, true conservatives advocated for abortion rights, because the government has no business regulating what a citizen can do to their body.
TLDR; I will never side with a party that insanely denies climate change.
Point being, Fox News aren't the only ones like that, they are just the only mainstream conservative outlet like that.
If you come out of the sports team, we are the good guys mentality it's obvious this is tit for tat depending on who is currently in office. Many MSNBC viewers think the 2016 election was illegitimate just like Fox News viewers feel about 2020.
Ask the fans of a party about any election they lost and they will tell you the other team cheated going back a couple of decades. Interestingly we seem to have the safest and most secure elections on the planet should their preferred candidate win.
To be really clear here, if you think arguing over how to count an improperly bunched out ballot is the same thing as alleging without proof that China sent thousands of fake ballots to the US are equivalent, then you really need to stop and reflect.
You won't live to see Medicare for All, but AOC sure dunked on Ted Cruz on Twitter.
Democrats can end the filibuster if they wish, however if the emperor actually has no clothes like I and grandparent suggest that would make it obvious.
Yes. If the party that wins gets to drive then they will be responsible for the direction the country is headed in. After a few years, If people like that direction they will vote for them, if not they won't. The current system let's them blame the other guy every time they fail to do what they promised, the new one makes it clear that it just wasn't a priority for them.
One way to limit partisanship is to work together, another way is to have one party win and be accountable, knowing that they will be replaced if they don't perform.
Which brings us right back to TFA, with the govenor attempting to avoid accountability through what amounts to barefaced lies. If tactics like this are successful - and they seem to be unreasonably effective - then your alternative here will not come to pass.
Clinton opposition dossier v1.0
Further, many of the cable "news" TV stations (MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc) are largely opinion and analysis and not news anyway.
I encourage people to (a) Read their news as much as possible, including opinion pieces and (b) If you watch/listen to news, find specific news segments (e.g. your local TV station's new hour). Tune in for 30 minutes to an hour and leave it at that. Tivo it if that's an option for you.
There's no need to have a cable news channel playing all hours of the day.
You can see the partisan breakdown here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...
Also you can find many "blue checks" and their followers on Twitter who take MSNBC as scripture to a frightening degree.
I’m sure there are crazy and obstinate folks on both sides, but one side does this sort of thing much, much more often. Maybe their constituents who care about that stuff should change parties, or force their party to change?
People do now believe in what they want to believe in, no matter what the news or expert say. Needless to say, what they want very often ("coincidentally" of course) happens to match perfectly with the economic and policy interests of a few powerful people or corporations.
It's a waste of time and effort trying to rebut these people, because they deliberately try to stray away from logic (where they know they would often lose) and always attempt to move debate to a plane of emotions and feelings, where any kind of confrontation becomes basically impossible.
Now you can close yourself in a bubble without ever having to confront any view you do not like.
I think it's kinda like how technology hasn't changed the reasons behind wars, or their intrinsic nature, but has definitely changed their impact and their scale.
You can now lie yourself into and out of basically anything, without ever having to face the reality of what you are saying or suffering basically any consequence. I think that in one way or another, our society and political structures will have to evolve in order to take this into account.
“People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
With that said, this illustrates death gasps of a dying ideology. Let the market continue to do its thing and drive out fossil generation.
(disclosure: an extended family member comes from rural Texas oil money, so these are frequent heated discussions in our family)
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/court-upholds-f...
Trump could have made fighting COVID a great nationalistic crusade.... he might even have been reelected had he done so.
But he didn't like the news and picked his hill to die on despite the fact that there was no real political reason to do so.
Granted those families or counties that historically have depended economically on specific forms of energy, it's another story, but they're a relatively small segment of the population.
There are people who absolutely want other people to burn dirty coal because aligning themselves with the coal industry affects their bottom line in a positive way.
The Republican Party of Texas is highly anti-regulation when it comes to energy sources. Much of the party constituents' money is tied up in oil and gas. They were completely fine with people losing property and time if it could be used as a political wedge issue to get more donations.
I lost all the food in my house because I was without power for a week in the recent ice storms. Several of my pipes were damaged despite my best efforts to mitigate the issue. My work week was completely disrupted, and I was forced to scramble to keep my family and family pets warm.
I wasn't remotely alone. There is still no effort by the state to winterize the state's energy grid. Turns out that once your home costs past a certain point out here, you're probably running gas and they start to include generators too.
It's a textbook display of the narcisissm of small differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
Outside of a few places (i.e Hawaii) oil is not burned for electricity, so in that sense there isn't really a trade off between coal and oil in that way.
When electric vehicles become broadly prevalent, then the tradeoff will exist, but only if we haven't done the job of deploying enough renewables by that time.
This is, sadly, very much untrue.
Climate change, and particularly the way our energy sources affect it, have become so partisan that I have seen people with strong right-wing leanings express the desire to burn the dirtiest coal they can, as dirty as they can possibly burn it, largely to "own the libs".
Ideology or party?
Wind and solar don’t provide dispatchable electricity and will always need a backup plant.
“Jim Robo, chief executive of renewables giant NextEra, made the same point on the company’s January earnings call to discuss the company’s 2020 results: "There is not a regulated coal plant in this country that is economic today full period and stop when it’s dispatched on any basis, not a single one, OK."
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/04/14/solar-and-storage-are...
http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Power-Sector-...
In any case, spent uranium, solar and wind is the way forward regardless.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...
> “It’s very rare for weather issues to shut down a nuclear plant," said Brett Rampal, director of nuclear innovation at the Clean Air Task Force. "Some equipment in some nuclear plants in Texas has not been hardened for extreme cold weather because there was never a need for this.”
> According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the shutdown of the nuclear reactor was caused by a disruption in a feedwater pump to the reactor, and that caused the plant to trip automatically and shut down early Monday.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
> Rowland said Feb. 16 the unit shut "due to cold weather-related issues in the plant's feedwater system." Weather conditions did not impact the 1,312-MW South Texas Project-2, which operated at 100% early Feb. 15-18, according to NRC.
> Rowland said the unit shut at 5:37 am CT Feb. 15. STPNOC said in an event report filed with NRC that the unit tripped at 5:26 am due to low steam generator levels. "The low steam generator levels were due to loss of Feedwater pumps 11 and 13," according to the report.
> About 25% of U.S. power plants can start up—going from being shut down to fully operating—within one hour, based on data collected in EIA’s annual survey of electric generators. Some power plants, especially those powered by coal and nuclear fuel, require more than half a day to reach full operations. The time it takes a power plant to reach full operations can affect the reliability and operations of the electric grid.
https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/7394/why-doe... goes into it a bit more.
I generally that it’s a poor design decision to build the steam engines on the outside with no weather protection.
[1] https://archive.is/cTZV4 / https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-texas-went-dark-the-state-pa...
The core issue is whether to winterize the infrastructure or not, in 2011 North Texas was effected by rest of the state did not have to endure cold front, that was thought to be once a generation thing. (Remember the cold snow superbowl in DFW in 2011?).
Heck, once energy distribution fails because cables have broken, even no-fuel-input needed for the duration of the storm plants like nuclear can't supply consumers.
The only electricity source that delivered with 100% capacity, minus a short outage of one reactor due an unfortunate sensor problem, was nuclear.
Nuclear power has - by far - the highest capacity factor of all sources of energy and if you don’t want to risk power outages in winter, your best bet is more nuclear.
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
> TP Nuclear Operating Co.'s 1,312-MW South Texas Project-1, which automatically shut Feb. 15 amid bitter cold, connected to the grid at 9:07 pm CT Feb. 17 "and is currently ascending to 100% power," company spokeswoman Vicki Rowland said Feb. 18.
> The unit, located in Bay City, Texas, was operating at 36% of capacity early the morning of Feb. 18, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a daily reactor status report.
> Rowland said Feb. 16 the unit shut "due to cold weather-related issues in the plant's feedwater system." Weather conditions did not impact the 1,312-MW South Texas Project-2, which operated at 100% early Feb. 15-18, according to NRC.
The reactor was offline for just a few days and the shutdown is more a result of the rather unfortunate decay to build the steam turbines on the outside with no weather production.
Nuclear plants have no problems with arctic temperatures, just look at Russia (Pevek, Kola NPPs).
This is a standard government cover up. You fucked up and just blame some bystander. The actual problem never gets solved and people will attack the bystander. You end up with a net loss.
The "best" case scenario in (left and right) people's heads is that one side will magically "win" but naively thinks that'll happen without violence. That they can convince the other side to change their minds by just making moral arguments. Not acknowledging that each side has fundamentally different values (tradition's tension with progress for example) that they use to make moral judgements. I'm just hoping i have the ability and foresight to go someplace quiet when everything kicks off. Maybe that'll bypass the whole conflict, maybe just allow me to have a few extra weeks of peace.
And would-be centrists presenting it as if this is equally the fault of both sides is a significant contributor to the problem.
The "right" has collectively decided that reality doesn't matter if it makes them look bad or disagrees with their increasingly-extreme dogma, that other people's lives are less important than rich people's money, and that democracy is bad if it means they have a harder time getting power. Oh, and that Nazis are good, actually.
There are certainly elements of the "left" that are unhelpfully unwilling to compromise, but they're not even in the same zip code as the problems with today's American right wing, and painting them with the same brush makes it much harder to approach genuine solutions to these problems.
And yet, that mindset will not convince them to change. it'll just make things worse and eventually the unstoppable force will meet the immovable object.
"There are certainly elements of the "left" that are unhelpfully unwilling to compromise, but they're not even in the same zip code as the problems with today's American right wing, and painting them with the same brush makes it much harder to approach genuine solutions to these problems. "
Sounds like an argument for solving problems at the most local level possible. Something that the right used to champion and the left is fundamentally against. But also where there could be common ground if people wanted to actually solve problems instead of "dunking" on people and scoring more partisan points.
Party loyalty is the biggest scam ever. Only an idiot would align himself along any party line. No, politicians exist to bow down to us and serve us. We don't exist for the sake of our political parties.
I only like Biden because current macroeconomics dictates that what he is doing must be done. Here, I'll admit that Trumps trade war was a good idea in the short term because it increases domestic employment and inflation until you reach a point where it makes sense to stop the trade war. His tax cuts happened with awful timing because they go against what macroeconomics dictated at the time.
Considering the inability to rely on politicians to do things that must be done at all costs, yes I mean things where there is no room for negotiation and the decision has been forced upon you we still routinely see politicians refuse to to do them for no gain whatsoever. If anything they come up with fake explanations to repair the mental imbalance. We have decided that certain bad things are ok and let them happen in the real world, therefore we must create a positive fake narrative which balances out the negative impact of the bad decisions we have made so that we end up net zero mental impact on the population. Absolutely fantastic.
Come on central banks, just skip the dumb politicians and do the damn helicopter money. Yes, we could have gotten modernized infrastructure (may even include green investments for climate change prevention as a completely unrelated bonus) for free but who cares.
This is a key paragraph that the author waves over without elaboration. Wind power makes up 25% of the power grid. When winter storm hit wind production collapsed and the load all shifted to natural gas which couldn't sustain the load.
Here is a thought experiment, if that 25% of the grid had been coal power plants instead of wind would the grid have still failed?
This kind of policy benefits solar and wind power, which are not reliable (without storage), but it hurts the consumers when abnormal weather hits.
And with how the Ercot energy market works, being unreliable can actually be profitable, since it drives the prices of what you are producing up past the generation shortfall.
Quite the mismatch between what behavior is needed, and what is rewarded.
† https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM
EDIT: Accuse wind and solar of not being reliable on HN (even with the storage caveat), and you're punished. But it's true. It happened here. Wind turbines were shut down. Solar panels were covered in snow. They didn't have storage attached to make up for these shortfalls.
Even a nuclear power plant went down due to problems with its water supply.
If the generator can profit off unreliablity it also means a grid storage provider can profit off reliability and undercut the generator.
Energy storage entities would only really profit in extreme circumstances where the prices are driven up so high - where production has decreased to the point where the grid is in danger of destabilizing.
The rest of the time they'd be operating in the margins, picking up the solar and wind excesses to sell later. Given the investment and operating costs (battery farms, taking over hydro (or constructing new hydro), etc), I doubt it would be worth picking up given the current incentives.