Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjabbwjwkbbs | Hacker News Reader

The Texas point hurts your argument and you'd be better off leaving it out.

As you pointed out the reliable energy failed, but it was all due to bad regulation and lack of enforcement. IE if Texas had never put up a single windmill they'd still have

Texas, last time I lived there, windmills and all, didn't have high energy prices. Many Texas energy experts do claim windmills do help prices more than hurt them (not an expert myself but living in Houston and working with energy companies this came up a lot).

View on HN

Indeed, the governor of Texas blamed the green new deal/windmills for the power failures. I was quite surprised to learn that my state, governed by Republicans for most of my life, had implemented any sort of green new deal.

Nevertheless I learned, much to my surprise, that most of the state's natural gas system (which supplies the majority of energy for electrical generation and lots of home heating) had frozen. I (naively) thought that would be impossible since methane doesn't even turn into a liquid at any temperature ever to occur on Earth, but it turns out there's plenty of water mixed in hydrocarbon deposits.

I suspect the governor knew (or could easily have been told) all this, he just thinks he leads a state full of fools, and after a lifetime of observation, I'm inclined to concur.

There's also an aspect where pieces of infrastructure control systems (valves etc) can freeze over externally, and some systems will have cooling system that can't run at too low temperature - Essentially, you have either not enough heat entering the cooling system and the system freezing itself, or the system cooling the heat exchange materials too much thanks to increased efficiency from cold air - freezing the system again. Happens for example when you install in a server room a too powerful HVAC system that can't "dial down" low enough to actual heat that your room gives out, freezing the HVAC heat exchanger resulting in cooling system downtime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com