Extreme winter events like this, now being seen more often in unusual locations, are EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago in a number of reports and research papers about the coming effects of climate change. Global warming and climate change doesn't just mean "everything is getting hotter everywhere all the time", it also means shifting global wind patterns and unusual weather that breaks previous 100-year records every 5 or 10 years.
And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?
Atmospheric co2 increase over time: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/2...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680
https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-low...
https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-...
If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world: The installed wind capacity in Texas exceeds installed wind capacity in all countries but China, the United States, Germany and India. Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state.
Not per capita, it isn't:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_North_Dakota#/me...
This is important given the shear size and consumption of Texas compared to other states.
The fact that states with notably high winds and 1/30 of the population are 3-6x higher in a per capita metric is predictable based on these simple approximations.
If this metric is adjusted for residential use, I would agree, but if this metric is a simple division of aggregate totals it seems of very little use.
The number of people residing in Texas is not a good indicator for how much energy various organizations operating in Texas are consuming.
It's like saying "Well Germany does X, but Luxembourg has better per capita stats!" Ya don't say... perhaps there's a reason! Maybe Germany should be more like Luxembourg
Because of how the states are divided, it becomes a compare "nearly pure rural" to "vibrant mix of major rural, suburban and urban" communities. Some states are just absolutely tiny by population and entirely rural. And it's just not an apples to apples comparison to compare one rural area with one rural/urban area. A better comparison would be just Texas's rural areas to Nebraska, without any of its cities.
When comparing apples to oranges this way, it's a roundabout way of saying "just be rural" or "don't even try to solve urban problems".
It’s essentially an approximation for normalizing production (supply) based on consumption (demand). It tells us (roughly) how stressed the grid is.
Ok.
So this person is taking seriously the idea of being a "leader in wind power", and exploring whether there's any merit to it.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/
Being ahead of the game on wind doesn't make everything else they do disappear.
Stance on petrochemicals isn't a single dial that turns back and forth and affects everything you do in unison.
The answer to the question "where else in the US?" is basically "everywhere else in the US".
Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind.
And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air.
The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.
'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil?
Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.
Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state.
They also dominate refinery capacity.
Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry.
Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.
And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.
They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.
Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion.
It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?
This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers.
If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary.
Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.
> Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy
> Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold
Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions.
People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.
> pump back hydro
Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale.
> other storage solutions >People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products.
There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible.
The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.
Only for a very weak definition of "prohibitive".
Let's say nuclear costs 10 cents per kWh if run at full load. If you use only those plants, averaging 2/3 output, your power costs 15 cents (plus distribution). If you plan for really high peaks maybe you average 1/2 output and power costs 20 cents (plus distribution). None of those costs are prohibitive. It's more than 9 cents (plus distribution) from coal but not that much more.
Prohibitive is something like trying to use batteries for long-term power balancing. A battery that's needed once a year or less could cost upwards of 10 dollars per delivered kWh.
Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult.
Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return.
So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two.
*(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)
Either that, or structure the grid so that wind and solar are used to power accumulative loads.
On/off in seconds as the sun fades or the wind drops to fill in for the missing power output.
According to that same page, most natural gas plants currently in use utilize a combined cycle system which takes significantly longer than more flexible, but less prevalent, combustion turbines.
Though maybe the point is moot: Even if the total environmental impact of natural gas is the same as oil, and leaving aside the geopolitical issues-- natural gas is still cheaper, so if you're going to choose between two bad options then you might as well go with the lower cost one. At which point you just invest in upgrading those combined gas plants to more flexible combustion turbines.
However, nuclear isn't completely out of the game here: It may have a very long cold-start time, but in the last decade there's been progress in making it capable of load-following instead of just baseload, especially when it's planned, e.g after sunset. There's certainly other environmental factors there, but if we're worried about decreasing CO2 ASAP, nuclear should probably be part of the conversation.
An underutilized nuclear plant may still be a necessity instead of a luxury if we're running out of time on CO2 emissions. In this case, making economic sense may run counter to long term human interests.
Many are built to operate < 10% of capacity, so simple single stage instead of more efficient CCGT, because it's insanely cheap peak power compared to alternatives.
There are a few industry stakeholders... energy producers, petroleum, energy infrastructure, etc. Each has different drivers and motivations. One of the issues with all of these businesses is that maximizing return in capital investment is about cost control, and the interests of the operators of power plants and electric infrastructure don’t always align.
Scenarios where you cannot burn gas do not benefit gas drillers. But gas drillers have nothing to due with reducing capital spending that makes infrastructure resilient to unlikely/infrequent risks. That’s all about pipeline and utility operators, who want to keep that dividend rolling.
Coal is almost dead and there is minimal oil for electric generation. Hawaii burns oil more than Texas.
I think there are 2 nuclear power plants .. one is Comanche Peak which is south west of DFW, not sure of the other.
edit: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=TX#tabs-4
(click the electricity tab)
Is this a tautology or this counterfactual removes texan capacity from United States total?
China: 236,402 MW
United States: 105,466 MW
Germany: 61,357 MW
India: 37,506 MW
Texas: 28,843 MW
Spain: 25,808 MW
The general public still does not get that climate change is a frickin problem that needs to be addressed asap.
But the science that global warming will cause more extreme cold events is on much more tenuous grounds.
From the epa
"Although the United States has experienced many winters with unusually low temperatures, unusually cold winter temperatures have become less common—particularly very cold nights (lows). Record-setting daily high temperatures have become more common than record lows. The decade from 2000 to 2009 had twice as many record highs as record lows."
The planet is not heating up uniformly, poles are heating up more than the equatorial regions. This of course means that the temperature gradient between the hot and cold realms is not as steep as it was. Net result? Weaker jet streams.
Now it appears that moving heat from the equator to the (northern) high latitudes was only a part of the equation in keeping these latitudes temperate. Confining the freezing polar vortex to the pole was another.
I'm sure there are others, and the population at large is going to learn about them in some very instructive ways in the future.
I mean I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, there were kilometers of ice on my country.
FWIW a better phrase would be "climate destabilization".
And to your other point, it must be emphasized that oil and coal companies knew about it 40+ years ago, and chose to fund opposition research and disinformation instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_co... Exxon knew since the 1970s
http://www.climatefiles.com/coal/mining-congress-journal-aug... Choice quote from this article in a 1966 coal journal:
> If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result. Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London.
Frank Luntz brags (exaggerates) about changing the vernacular to benefit the GOP/deniers - we should do the same to scare people into accepting and understanding the current reality.
"Global warming" always referred to an on-average increase in warming on a global scale. The term wasn't the issue, it was people intentionally deciding they didn't like it for political reasons.
It's also important to remember that this isn't a gradual phenomenon - there are certain break points that, when we'll reach, we won't ever be able to go back. And by all accounts, unless we significantly change the global economy literally today, there is no chance that we won't reach those breaking points in 50-100 years. And even if we did today, there's a good chance it's too late.
The mess we're leaving for our children to fix should make all of us feel deeply ashamed.
Like most prophecies by religions do.
C - catastrophic - there is no evidence in the historic temperature record that anything unusual is happening.
A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.
G - global - not local.
W - warming - see above.
In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.
There is no evidence in the historic temperature record that the Earth has ever been this hot in the past million years.
> A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.
The human contribution to CO2 and other greenhouse gases is not small, it is almost the entire quantity. There is very little contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from non-human sources (of course, methane from cows for example is a human source).
> G - global - not local.
Not sure what you mean here.
> W - warming - see above.
see above.
> In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.
The brainwashing propaganda from interested science deniers is not better informed than the practically unanimous conclusions of all the earth's climate scientists.
The Earth is headed for catastrophe, both ecologically and geopolitically. Sea level rise is already above initial predictions, and that effect alone will displace the 300 million people currently living in one of the lowest plains by the sea in the world, in Bangladesh. The coming migrant crisis at the confluence of India, Pakistan and China, three nuclear power with an uneasy relationship, would be cause for serious concern alone.
Of course, the ever increasing droughts and extreme temperatures (including >50C wet-bulb temperatures, which can kill healthy adults outright) in those same regions makes them a literal hotbed for social and political upheaval like the world has never seen.
You are simply deluded if you think everything is fine.
This is what really keeps me up at night. Nevermind the direct effects of 4+ degrees of warming if we fail to stop it - we'll start WW3 long before the temperatures hit that.
So that's why the key here is strong international organisations. We need to co-operate both to have any chance of making the changes that need to be made to keep warming within survival bounds, and to keep discussions open so when conflicts do arise, they are less likely to result in war.
CO2 from burning fossil fuels and burning plants has a different isotope mix than does CO2 from other sources. We can use this to tell how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from that kind of burning. There aren't enough wildfires or other natural sources to account for more than a small fraction of it.
Hence, we can prove that most of that type CO2 comes from human sources. And that type account for most of the increase since pre-industrial times.
A: The enormous consensus based on available evidence contradicts you here in your implication that human contributions are irrelevant. Natural sources have also been balanced out by natural sinks. Humans are both destroying natural sinks and releasing more of our own. The issue is also not whether we "own" a majority of the emissions, it's about upsetting a delicate balance. Chaotic metastable systems do not necessarily need a big push in order to have a massive impact. Sensitivity to initial conditions is very high.
G & W: you're not expressing your criticism here. Global average temperatures are rising. What is you dispute with that?
Your last point: I'm not aware of alternative theory for the observed changes that fits available evidencr, while on the other hand there are plenty of research papers like the following: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770. Whether or not there is smoking-gun level proof, available evidence fits the theory.
Earth's climate system is an energy matrix, a complex interoperation between co-operating systems, all driven by energy, all "seeking" lower energy states at the expense of other systems. Some of that energy does indeed go into warming (melting ice, sea temperature rise, ...) but a huge chunk just makes these energetic systems more energetic because of a lack of suitable energy sink.
Put a glass beaker full of water on a lab-stirrer, and you're going to get the occasional splash, but replace the 9v battery-driven motor with a Harley Davidson (you know, to force way more energy into the system) and you're going to get a whole lot more splashes. Splashes are bad.
Forcing energy into immense, complex, non-linear dynamical chaotic systems that literally govern our existence on this planet is not a good idea if you want to continue to exist on this planet. All you're doing with "global warming" is giving these systems far more phase-space to explore, and we just don't have the knowledge or experience to predict what some of the solutions those systems can explore will do.
I still feel it ought to have been christened "energy death of the planet" or similar (akin to the heat-death of the universe". Something that the tabloids could grab hold of and point out disasters as we creep, seemingly inexorably, towards a tipping point we may not recover well from.
[sigh]
That's exactly what it used to mean. But then it wasn't warming and they had to revisit.
Some numbers: Global warming happening 71% (-1 from Avg), Caused by humans 56% (-1 from Avg), Support regulating CO2 72% (-3 from Avg), Expand offshore drilling 57% (+5 from Avg)
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
There has not been increase in cold weather events in Texas. Rather, the shift to energy producing technologies that are more susceptible to going offline in cold weather is why Texas is now going offline more often.
Back when people burned coal for electricity, it was a lot dirtier but did not suffer the issue of windmills freezing. Attempts to politicize this issue and hijack it for whatever crusade you are waging means that the Texas grid wont be made more reliable, and this is going to be a growing problem in other areas that are beginning to rely more on energy sources that are subject to being disrupted by cold weather.
And we set records all the time. Many of them set in the 1800’s when climate change wasn’t an issue. Setting a record is hardly proof.
> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas
This is a ridiculous statement.
Follow the money. Who funds it? Primarily Houston headquartered oil and gas companies. Or if not headquartered in Houston, with very significant operations in texas and its oil industry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-...
What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?
Expect them to? No. Wish for it? Yeah, definitely. And then hold them accountable for the decades of gaslighting while they knew that was the case. That’s kind of the role of a government. How is GameStop stock more controversial than climate change denial? GameStop is ephemeral, climate change is existential.
The easy thing is to say “bankrupt the fuckers, kill the orgs!” and I feel that. I want to see them suffer for the path they’ve put the whole planet on. The responsible societal thing to do though is probably to mandate renewables, stop petro subsidies, and make them eat the cost for the switch if they (the orgs) want to stay alive. We have the evidence; it’s public knowledge now even if not widely disseminated.
They’re adding renewables, but not fast enough because there is still profit to be made in petro even though it fucks us further. That has to stop ASAP. Governments are the place where that happens.
It matters A LOT. The anti-climate change propaganda is one of the biggest roadblocks to meaningful climate action. In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had withdrawn from climate accords or forced the EPA not to talk about global warming. These are lunatic acts, much crazier than the than Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Sure, it's nice that they're planting a few wind farms. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the real changes required if we are to stop global warming from completely dooming our civilization. Building wind-farms would have been a solution if it had started 40 years ago.
Today, the only option is to stop most non-renewable plants, and most factories that rely on their power. We need to produce a fraction of the goods we are producing today (not talking about the US specifically, this is a global problem), with all the human costs that will entail. I'm not holding my breath for any of it.
The solution wasn't building wind farms, it was finishing the nuclear build up like they had originally planed, just like how France did. But that was killed by self proclaimed environmentalists of that era.
Actually, yes, I would be perfectly happy if the oil industry was not run on full 'free market' capitalist principles, and they acknowledged climate change is real.
An article contrasting the Alberta and Norwegian oil industries.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/c...
If oil and gas companies are so opposed to renewables and have the money to work against them, how did Texas - which is where those companies should have the most control - become the #1 producer of wind power and the #2 producer of solar?
What are the possible explanations?
Both in dollars and cents and in PR value being able to push back against environmentalists and climate change advocates. But you can be assured, global climate be damned, no drop of oil or natural gas will be left in the ground until it becomes unprofitable or unless regulatory changes force the issue.
I mean, everyone loves the stories of how car companies single handedly ripped up all the street car tracks but apparently they couldn’t stop Tesla from eating their lunch despite teetering on the brink of insolvency for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
The accuracy of answers about the source of a virus was very much dependent on the level of openness and cooperation from the jurisdiction in which the virus originated. Climate change, on the other hand, does not have a single geographical source, and therefore the IPCC is less limited in the information available to it.
Similarly, I suspect that the WHO's early mistakes or inaccuracies in assessing the dangers of the virus were due to the fact that most of the early cases and mortality data were being collected in a single jurisdiction.
But you've hit on a problem: can we maintain global cooperative institutions in the face of an expansionist hegemonic power like China? I don't think we can, because anything controversial and it gets ripped apart.
The US and allied countries have their own national organizations, but even the EU is compromised on a number of issues, such as creeping fascism (Poland and Hungary) and the inability to take action against member states, or even coordinate in a pandemic. Even NATO is compromised by expansion to include such countries, and Turkey as well. So I'm questioning how useful large group multi-lateralism is for an organization like the WHO.
Edit: And I just scanned the last week of posts and can't see mention of anything like that. You're confusing with user koolba.
So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.
If official, peer-reviewed reports from international agencies are "wrong or lying," what better sources would you recommend?
Or more importantly..
If they're wrong, why aren't any of the groups involved catching these errors and correcting them?
If they're lying, you're suggesting a multi-decade, international conspiracy spanning thousands of people that threatens humanity as a whole where the watchdogs are either complicit or not competent enough to catch. I hope you have something to back that up.
This doesn't require some complex conspiracy, just some natural amount of wanting to tell people (heads of state) what they want to hear, some amount of funding and promoting less alarmist research, some amount of feeling like they have a duty to avoid extreme rhetoric etc.
I hope it's clear, I'm not claiming that I know all this for a fact. But it is how international organizations seem to operate in general. You would definitely not expect a major international inter-governmental organization to present a position that would be called extreme position, even if that extreme position may be right.
Anyway, your attitude is unscientific. If there were no unusual weather events for 5 years, it wouldn't "prove climate change wrong". By the same token, it's moronic to say "look, climate change!" every time there's an unusual weather event.
It's a scientific fact that many places in the world are now seeing weather extremes that have literally not been recorded in their past 100 years of data, on a rapidly increasing basis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53140069
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066882
but I'm sure that you'll be happy to tell me that the United Nations and the BBC are both extreme left-wing partisans.
I think pointing to a weather event and saying "look climate change!" is dumb. It's not statistics. No matter how steep your line is, it doesn't prove "X weather event would not have occurred if not for global warming".
All I responded to was this comment which was nasty and added nothing to your post:
> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?
To that end, what evidence of weather patterns would you have to see to believe less in the global warming model? Would years of "less extreme event days" make you believe in the global warming model any less?
One cold spell does not disprove global warming. While Dallas might be experiencing abnormally low temps, Jacksonville's seeing uncharacteristic highs (86F today).
[0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
If you spend 30 seconds googling you'll see that communities in the high Canadian arctic, alaska and greenland have been setting new temperature records on a regular basis. And the subsidence and melt of coastal permafrost in some areas is increasing at a rate that will soon look like a hockey stick curve on a chart.
Certainly a decreasing average global temperature would do it. However, we are seeing a consistent upward trend in the global average[1] even if some regions have lower than normal temperatures.
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
a nitpick, but an important point:
this is 100% not what was being said 20 years ago - thats why its called global warming and not the destruction of global weather patterns. thats also why all the sources you linked are less than two years old.
the initial alarmism really shot itself in the foot by making specific predictions (ice caps melting, sea levels rising). we still arent even remotely close to being able to model the global weather system today. it really delegitimized the movement and slowed humanities reaction. they had to do this awful, awful position change and say "well, we were 100% wrong about all the predicitons we made but we're still right!" it helps explain how we ended up the way we are.
Checks notes, checks on venice and miami watches day after tomorrow, looks at Texas from hurricanes to ice
Which of the predictions are looking like they're not progressing?
Really, out of all ways the climate change will negatively impact the world, sea level rise in the amount we are actually going to observe it is really rather minor problem.
It should have only been named climate change, drastic wheather change or something incorporating your naming of shifting wheather patterns.
One problem with the Texas outages is everyone seems to be trying to cast it in terms of pre-existing viewpoints on environmentalism. None of them really fit. Clearly, the Texas outages weren't really caused by wind farms and attempts to tie them to that require quite indirect arguments of the form, "if they hadn't built wind farms they'd have built more gas plants instead". There might be something in that line of argument if developed further, e.g. if it's easier to 'winterize' gas plants than wind farms. But it's not there yet.
At the same time, trying to tie this to CO2 increases is also reaching. People who keep ignoring the poor track record of climatology look increasingly like the true "climate deniers". Here's just one fairly typical example of a prediction, an article from 2011 by a professor of atmospheric sciences:
https://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Texas-is-vulne...
"It is a particularly appropriate read as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011. While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer's unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011."
And from the article we're reading now:
"The earliest report I could find was from the 2011 winter event in Texas[14]. A very strong cold front hit Texas (and other parts of the south central US) bringing temperatures below freezing for over 4 days and winds over 30 MPH."
Maybe the difficulty the US has in funding winterization of the power grid is because professors keep telling them the future will be really hot and really dry all the time? Obviously if you're generous enough to these sorts of predictions then you can find ways to argue they're "nearly right", but it's too often taken to an extreme that leads to unfalsifiability. No matter what happens to the weather, it's always because of CO2.
As in, FUD only ends up defeating arguments because every dire prediction is bound to fail. You get real change by showing people what the benefits are to every day life not based on some biblical level type hysteria.
Texas is one of the leaders in wind and solar so I am not sure where you are coming from other than succumbing to the unfortunately common parroting of facts that don't apply to the situation.
So summary, Texas and the nation need to have a common and joined grid management program but for reasons of providing stability and growth. Don't lead off with telling people they have to have it because of climate change as too many will tune you out and for good reason, the conversation tends to hysterics and theater more than reality.
To me that doesn't justify the choice to be disconnected.
So let's say they might not have made up the entire loss...so what?
Making up for some of the loss would help wouldn't it?
That seems like using perfection as a justification to make worse choices...
The whole disconnected grid wisdom or lack of it seems unrelated to me as far as if winterization is being done well enough generally.
If anything, it might be a blessing to the other states, that they are not connected to Texas at present. Consider the northeast blackout of 2003:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-fiv...
Texas is not shutting down train lines in Canada. We didn't implement our own winterization guidelines and now we face the consequences. That's how it should be.
The justification for Texas's grid goes back many decades and can't be assessed on the basis of an event like this -- that's recency bias.
Why is this the case? It seems like if Texas was connected they'd be able to pull some of that missing 45GW power which might be enough for an hour of electricity every 8 hours which would be a total game changer for a lot of homes.
Yes. At the peak, Texas wholesale electricity spot-prices went up by 10,000% - 10x is child's play. What would have happened was non-essential use in California would have been priced out by desperate Texan households who'd pay almost anything to keep residences heated.
Energy companies absorb the fluctuations, except for that one company that thought it was a great idea to pass-though prices to the customers. It was a great idea when the prices were low, but many of their customers will likely experience sticker shock on their next bill.
Arguing that the problem couldn't be entirely fixed, and ignoring the possibility of ANY help seems as I described, demanding perfection to ignore any possible improvement...
As far as a possible collapse of outside systems, the other connected systems seem to have done well enough for now.
Isn't this just more argument for perfection. Sure, if they completely and fully winterized every single plant, it wouldn't be a problem. But what if they did more than nothing to winterize but less than 100%. Then imagine they were connected as well. If they had simply done better at multiple things, they wouldn't have to be perfect at any one thing. And it certainly doesn't excuse them making terrible decisions on multiple things.
Sure, if everything in my house is 100% fireproof, I don't need a fire extinguisher. Sure, if everything in my house is made out of kindling, a fire extinguisher is going to be inadequate protection. But if I build my house out of relatively fire retardant materials and I keep a fire extinguisher, I am likely going to be ok. Perfection is the enemy of good, and is no excuse for just settling for outright bad.
Exactly. I'm not sure that even the new NERC regulations for winter weatherization go far enough. They seem to bring NERC standards closer to Texas'.
The engineering side like to focus on the difficulty of stabilizing a grid with a lot of renewables. But this isn't really TX's problem since we have all these NG plants that spin up a few times a year and make their entire yearly operating budget.
But there is also financial destabilization because the wind generators are putting a lot of financial pressure on the entire system. None of those NG plants would have wanted to miss out on the last couple days, but they did because they are also operating at fairly thin margins because the wind has fairly low capital costs and just pumps energy into the grid when it feels like it, even when they aren't actually making any money.
If the price of NG goes up much, this will become completely unsustainable.
Frankly, I think what we need is a power demand tax/fee. If your a generator and you can't supply energy during peak demand times you get hit with say a 20% generating fee that get transferred to the energy sources that do. That would force the intermittent sources to at least pay for part of the peaking and base load capacity that has to deal with the intermittent sources flooding the market. It would also strongly discourage market manipulation by "accidentally" having a bunch of generation capacity offline at the same time.
What is a vastly more interesting question is what is the most perverse set of incentives the proposed system could result in, or what are ways the new system could fail, sometimes you never understand these until implementation, and only at that point is it discovered that most problems are not simple.
Your entire proposition is founded on the axiom that the free market is the ultimate good in running efficient systems, but the free market is reactionary (a way to fail) and the free market makes distinctions between owner class people, intermediary class people, and customer class people (misaligned incentives are a way to fail).
Fundamentally there is a disconnect between who pays for a water pipe that bursts and who pays to weatherize power plants, so you end up with a terrible set of incentives. Unless every owner of a burst pipe can successfully sue the power company for losses, I can't see a situation in which the free market would win over a well planned/regulated system.
We went to the moon. We built nuclear subs. The world runs on American technologies which are a major output of our institutions. We are one of the few countries with clean water running into our kitchen faucets. Strong, responsible, accountable institutions have proven to make this country great.
There are multiple potentially valid ways to do better than last time:
- Guide the free market (your solution)
- Regulate customers (pipes must be insulated/buried)
- Regulate the producers (all power plants must be weatherized)
- Give regulatory authority to experts (like regulation, but lighter weight, and much more easily changable)
- Nationalize infrastructure
I tend to think the best way to assure system wide stability is to reintegrate the generators+transmission+retail portions to avoid all the perverse incentives. You know, the old public/CoOp utility model. Plus, the more you can keep politics and MBAs out of it, except to provide some guiding principals (aka lets try to reduce carbon, and keep costs low) the better off its going to be.
But realistically, politics in TX, so a solution that can be passed by the government is going to involve some kind of free market adjustment. Usually that is just to raise the power cap (now at $9000) further, but as recently proven it doesn't do crap either.
I said elsewhere let the engineers run it, but people assumed I was just talking about engineers, when really what I should have said is keep the decision making close to the people on the ground. If the plant operator thinks his plant needs some maintenance/etc he better not get overridden. Same with other bits, when the lineman noticed a problem with a pole, or an engineer runs a wind loading simulation and discovers a problem, if gets resolved rather than ignored.
Texas (like other states) relies on gas plants for electricity plants (about half of them) and is also a gas producer. The increased demand on gas because of people heating their homes contributed to shortages. This then leaad to issues with gas production sites in texas that need power. This was then aggravated by pipes icing up (water vapor in the gas). That's a cascading failure. Wind power was also affected of course but not nearly as much as the gas supply issues.
Texas needs to reconsider its over-reliance on gas and diversify its grid. Ice proofed turbines are a thing. Solar is still a relatively minor part of production in what is obviously a state that has plenty of potential for that.
Additionally, it should strongly consider connecting to the rest of the country. If only to enable the export of the ample supplies of wind and solar it can produce normally. It's just good business sense. Then, it should probably start incentivizing people more to do sensible things like putting solar on their roofs, installing batteries in their homes, insulating their houses, and consuming off peak power (e.g. by charging their EVs). All these things collectively should make blackouts a lot less likely.
But that choice is purely ideological, not practical.
It's interesting to read your proposals because of the eco-targeted nature of them; but I think most Texans are going to interpret this differently. Forget batteries and solar panels; they're going to get generators and use diesel.
But if they had winterized that number would be a lot lower
In Austin, they had to turn off power to ~40% of all customers pretty much as soon as the shortage began. Once they had done that, they could not implement rolling blackouts without also affecting critical infrastructure like hospitals (the granularity of the electrical grid is finite, apparently).
The result was that some people had power the whole time (or nearly so), and others had nothing for ~3 days straight. Obviously it would be preferable for everyone to have intermittent power 1/N of the time than for 1/N to have nothing at all for the duration of the shortfall.
I'm not sure how expensive it is to weatherize the grid but I would imagine it to be very expensive.
It is less expensive to weatherize the grid so it can remain mostly functional in extreme events than to have tens of millions of households buy and maintain generators so they don’t freeze to death because the actual power grid was not properly built and maintained.
That isn't really what's needed. If I understand the problems with the gas supply in these events, the issue is the wellhead freezing off due to the high water vapor content in the gas.
It's good the power grid is heavily regulated.
The tldr is texas isn't often covered with sleet and snow and has made great strides in renewable energy. Now that one ice storm has hit everyone is acting like every moment of the past ten years should have been spent preventing it when in reality it requires heavy regulation and taxes. Texans don't like taxes.
FERC was almost completely cleaned out when Trump came to power so the entire set of regulations is backed up by a few years.
In reality "winterizing" gas pipelines is an unsolved problem in technology and the more manual way required digging up thousands of miles of people's land and property to use tax money to put in new pipes.
Try going to a texans property and telling them the state wants to increase your taxes to dig up a gas line and replace it with a new one....
Texas has wanted to retain the ability to secede from the union and having their own power grid enables them with that independence but it is hard to tell without looking at a layout of the power grid if being connected to other states who were also freezing would have helped, which is a good time to add that having a layout of the power grid requires special levels of as needed access upon which bypassing is a felony atleast.
As someone who stared at the east coast power grid everyday for 5yrs doing power analysis and reliability studies on it, I never had access to the Texas power grid, but I'm amazed how many people on the internet act like they do.
As a full disclosure I'm an Electrical Power Engineer who specializes in wind and solar, electrical power grid and substation design and worked in electrical energy markets and power flow for four years after working for a renewable energy startup. I went into this field because I care about renewable energy, but I have also learned the system is heavily gained and renewable energy sources have their flaws like for example you know ice can kind of freeze solar and turbines over, as well as pipelines.
It's been very hard to have objective and we'll informed takes in this field with people who aren't working in power grid stuff because they assume if I have constructive criticism on how renewable energy policy could be better or has previously incentivized corruption then I am an evil republican who wants gas and oil to rule the world and we all die due to global warming.
Now is also a good time to mention the concept of global cooling. Due to this and not global warming Texas is probably in for a lot more cold weather and it makes sense to assess what "winterizing" power sources actually means, instead of just demanding it without any understanding of what that would entail what it would cost and whether Texans are willing to put their money where their mouth is given they are typically hands off when it comes to massively coordinating with state and local regulation more than they need to.
Might I ask what major climate science organizations are endorsing this concept? Or are you talking about increased localized extreme weather, both hot and cold, due to global warming?
* Texas's power providers were not adequately winterized.
* The regulatory standards of the larger grids would not have caused them to be so, even if they were subject to them.
* Nearby states suffered outages due to the cold as well, even though they're connected to the larger grids.
* It is unlikely that Texas could have made up the loss in generation power -- estimated to be as much as ~45GW at times -- by drawing on the other states. States near to Texas don't generate nearly as much power and power is not like sunshine, diffusing evenly over the grid from every point.
Texas regulators and indeed other regulators need to pursue more rigorous winterization in the southern states.