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.