It is unfortunate you included the last paragraph in your comment as the rest of the comment seemed legitimate, but the issue in Texas had nothing to do with renewables, they were not scheduled to meet much of the system demand and the cause of the outage was numerous other plants not able to run due to the cold.

Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points

I had the same impression. Quite sad that this anti renewable propaganda bit taints the entire post.

>Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough electricity during the cold.

Please, quit spreading this false/fake BS information. This is not what happened in Texas. You're willing to do the research on the support of your point of nuclear saftey, but then you got very lazy with this statement and did not research this clickbait level comment.

> Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths [...]

Question: in which sectors do we currently optimise for minimum deaths (above anything else)?

In general, automation that reduces human control - self driving cars and amusement park rides.

Uhm, healthcare?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_... Yeah because only fuel is highly radioactive...

Texas failed to secure their electrical grid, that has nothing to do with renewables. We got renewables running in far worse weather conditions.

Capitalism and greed killed those texans.

You're making my case that people can't be trusted with nuclear, even though the tech in and of itself could be safe.

Renewables also cost numerous deaths for other reasons.

Hydro is the cause of the by far most lethal single power plant related failure (the Banqiao dam failures).

Rooftop solar causes more deaths per unit of electricity delivered from installation related accidents alone to be uncompetitive with nuclear.

Generally the more construction that is needed for a given production method, the more deaths, and that tends to go in the favour of nuclear given the sheer amount of power generated once a plant is operational.

Large solar installations may win out over nuclear in terms of safety, but it's hard to get good data.

If Capitalism and greed failed here wait 'till you see what centralised control of an economy can do. Free actor based economies need some regulation and fail pretty spectacularly at times. Centralised economies however, they cause death and destruction at a level only war and plague can rival. The problem is, greed drives people in both systems.

Ok, i'll bite. You know nothing about the operational details of power grid infrastructure in Texas and what lead to the problems encountered.

Here is a good video explaining what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM

Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his entire series about power grid (well, actually all his videos are great). )

How is that video inconsistent with j-pb's comment?

The video describes what happened, and summarizes the cause as:

> Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude.

The video addresses only what happened, and (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true that there are "renewables running in far worse weather conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can be winterized.

j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold weather preparedness from 2011?