Starting to get worried. Interview with the San Antonio utility spokesperson said people who don’t have power shouldn’t expect it back for at least 48 hours. Very few hotel rooms to be found in areas with power.
I haven’t checked yet, but I’m sure there are a multitude of TX derpers who are basically saying “LOL Global Warming. If that was really happening it wouldn’t be so cold”.
There are turbines running in the Midwest right now. There have been turbines in the artic for decades.
The overarching reason why Texas is fucked right now is because the Texas grid is optimized for profitability, not up time, redundancy or any of that. That’s one reason why Texas has its own grid because federal regulations would require more redundancy, etc. One quote I saw that I thought summarized it was “Texas is designed to supply exactly the Mws needed and not Mw more.”
The turbines failed because they’re not winterized because that would cost money. The turbines only make up a minority of the electric power though. The coal plants and the gas plants have largely failed because their equipment isn’t winterized either. The capacity of the grid was optimized for a freeze as harsh as the 2011, and this one is worse so there was always going to be some rationing, there simply isn’t enough energy, but Texas being cheapskates made it worse.
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I don’t know the ROI details but it might not make sense to spend the money to winterize infrastructure there given how rare this kind of weather is in that region.
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Yeah, it’s entirely possible that this is the most +EV solution, given how rare this is.
Hard to say whether the motivation is that the shitty headline gets more clicks or whoever is in charge of the headlines doing a hit piece.
Also, I’m pretty skeptical about the frozen wind turbines.
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My friends in KC, MO are experiencing rolling black outs too. But California!
One was out for hours and couldn’t get gas heat because his Nest was offline. Seems like a leak.
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A lot of municipalties have set up locations to warm up. I am assuming Bexar County has done this as well. Do they have enough fuel to drive some distance to a shelter?
Uh, we’ll be calculating the ROI in human deaths this week.
Agree but not too be too harsh we do that with every single engineering project on earth. Nothing is built to a level where failure isn’t possible even though theoretically they could be. A trade off is made between cost and failure rate.
There’s no mutual aid compact for snow removal like there is for electricty. Also, Chicago got a foot yesterday.
I assume many people with propane have modern gas registers with electronic control panels.
Jesus fucking christ. I’d love to think this would wake people in TX up to how fucked their state is run, but I know it won’t which is really a fucking bummer.
I can’t believe we got 120% turnout and we got crushed. WTF TX.
Gas and coal plants having problems with freezing temps makes sense. Many of them boil water to run steam turbines. If the water freezes, that’s a problem. They probably had to drain water pipes so they wouldn’t burst.
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Yes. Have enough fuel. I’ve been searching for SAT warming sites or shelters and didn’t find any info. I will look again and also search Bexar resources. Thanks.
I won’t have any expectations for TX waking up until their entire political philosophy is based on something other than hating California.
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Sure thing. Keep me posted via private message if you want. I know the temps are a lot colder in DFW than SATX so that may explain why the warming shelter concept is more prevalent here. I went to college in SA so I have a lot of contacts down there still. I’ve been checking in with them and most are in the same boat as you describe. No one has generators that I’ve been able to contact. I’ll reach out if I make contact with someone with the means to provide heat.
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I’ve worked on a few turbine projects here and as I understand it the ones built in this climate are quite a bit more expensive due to winterizing than those built in warmer climates.
This is what has been reported:
https://twitter.com/ctraywick/status/1361715146176024578
How does an off-the-grid solar-powered house do under these conditions?
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