@lozen just to carry this part of the discussion across a few different topics about 'media bias', do you think CNN or MSNBC would do something like Fox is above on many News shows of launching a deliberate misinformation campaign to try and very deliberately mislead their watchers?

Bias or preference is one thing and all media does have that. Fox is blatantly creating propaganda lies.

lol @ Texas

Let's face it. The situation in Texas has made it crystal clear.
Red America is a third world country. Because Red state people have a third world mentality. But they remain oblivious to the fact because Blue America will just keep bailing them out and disguise all their horrible shortcomings.
Biden has declared a state of emergency and activated FIMA, like he should do, and hopefully the situation will get better soon. You can bet the house, if Trump was president, or any Republican, not just Trump, this would turn into a humanitarian catastrophe. Just look at Texas politicians right now and how they've reacted to the situation.
You know, I know this is controversial, but maybe we'd be better off without them. No, not maybe, for sure.

3 coal plants have been closed in the last decade in TX while their consumption rose by 20%. Obviously there are many things that caused this, but mandating unreliables that need to be back/propped up by reliables is issue #1. It adds strain on the reliables (gas, coal, nuclear).

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tex...erns-1/546540/

Is this the same Greg Abbott?

https://apnews.com/press-release/pr-...d5d470c187394f

This word...I do not think it means what you think it means.

In shifty's defence, many words he uses don't mean what he thinks they mean. Socialism, capitalism, racism, et al. Stanning for coal is another level tho

I meant etc not et al before some nit attacks

You have a complete lack of comprehension of the situation.

Gas and Coal make up the bulk of the delivery CURRENTLY today in Texas. Gas and Coal froze and shut down and failed.

You say 'ya but they had MORE gas and coal prior' as if that means that if they instead had more gas and coal today then this would have been less likely to happen. That is false. You would have just had MORE gas and coil frozen as they would have all not been winterized.

You are not making any argument that Texas would have been better off with more coal and gas and that would not have been the case. just because you are adding your own 'reliable' to them.

Additionally wind actually performed better relative to Coal and Gas during this crisis. Meaning the output achieved from wind proportionally was better than that of coal and gas during the surge and shutdowns.

While coal and gas suffered what could be called catastrophic failures ultimately causing the problems, wind was still chugging away, outputs were down but no where near as much as coal and gas.

Thus, in fact, Texas would have benefited having more diversification and wind power in the grid at this time and not less.

So what is being sold by the right is a pure fiction. Diversification of such critical infrastructure is always positive. When one area fails you hope the other does not or at least not fully or as badly and in this case that worked with wind.

hahaha... high post to Avatar correlation here.

Well done.

Isnt the biggest issue like California that all the transmission lines are above ground instead of buried?

They all failed due to the weather occurrence which was rare . Natural Gas was the first back up i saw on CNN

Republicans know that they have failed policies. But they don't care.
They all have, I'm assuming, big financial interests in old energy. And I'm talking about the people at Fox News and Republicans in general, not just Texas.
Probably through part ownership in companies or large stock holdings.
There's no money for them in New Energy. That's why they're using this as an opportunity to twist the narrative and mislead MAGA land to go back to gas and oil.
All they care about is their pockets.

Gas and coal are coming to an end (or as good as) in the not so distant future. In terms of the infrastructure one needs to build up in preparation for this, the work needs to happen today.

Which incidentally is what Grizy's excellent OP is all about, and well worth a read for those who missed it or forgot it.

Crying for gas and goal to return to past glory is like complaining about steamships in the 1920s. There might be a few good points here and there, but in the bigger picture there is no turning back, so it is just wasting one's breath.

Apparently Cruz left his dog, Snowflake, home alone when we went to Mexico.

https://nypost.com/2021/02/19/ted-cr...n-trip-report/

There is money for people, including the politicians and communities, in a Greening of the grid. Thus why Texas has been moving on it despite pretending to be against it.

But yes, the distributed nature or democratization of energy as more individuals (home owners) start to cover part or all of their needs means less money over all leaking to outside service providers as aggregators.

There is nothing like creating or giving licenses to a handful of Energy Companies to provide all the needs for the masses. Consolidating all that demand can make for massive lobbying payment streams and especially when they see change coming they need to fight against.

Just running to lunch but this article was posted in BFI as proof that in fact this Texas crisis was caused by GE renewables.

It raised my skepticism immediately due to the bias in the very first line suggesting that the smear attempt was by those trying to pile blame on Coal and Gas while absolving GE when in fact it was the other way around.

There was an immediate attempt to put all blame on GE and AOC that was responded to by fingers pointing to the culpability of Gas and Coal.

Texas Spins Into the Wind

And the Economic impact is....

RECORD PROFITS!!


Jerry Jones' Company Hits 'Jackpot' As Harsh Storms Send Natural Gas Prices Surging

...Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, appears to be one of the beneficiaries.

... the surge in natural gas prices was providing it with a major — albeit almost certainly temporary — financial boost. ...

"Obviously, this week is like hitting the jackpot," President and Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns said Wednesday...






--------------------------------



Classic when you couple that with this.

Abbott asks for federal aid with statewide disaster declaration, warns drivers to stay home



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Maximize profits by allowing them to not protect the grid... Privatize profits ....socialize losses.

Winning!

You lack understanding of how energy works. Incentives/mandates were made that caused an over investment in unreliables. This affects reliables because they are required to back-up unreliables which increase costs. To keep profits up and rates low poor decisions to not store as much capacity, upgrades, maintenance for reliables were made.

I think the both of you are talking around each other.

Both technology types can function fine in cold weather. There is no excuse to be found in blaming one technology over the other. There are good reason to use green tech or transition to green tech, but for the foreseeable future such tech will due to fluctuations in delivery need a baseline of sustainable power delivery that will generally have to fossil-fuel based or nuclear (some places, pending on geography, can use hydro), to cover demand spikes.

NO you are factually wrong.

This was not an issue of not enough stockpiled coal or gas and it running out.

If you had zero renewables and triple the amount of Gas and Coal on each site this issue would have still happened because it was about DEPLOYMENT. The equipment froze up as it was not winterized.

It would still freeze up if you had more coal and gas on site in storage areas.

I think this aligns with what I have been saying too. I am not suggesting that Coal and gas were the only things not winterized and suffering.


This is purely economics and profit driven for the energy companies.

They made more money for decades as they did not pile back profits to invest in costly upgrades to all their old infrastructure to winterize it. They took a gamble that the severity of any weather event would be less costly than the upgrades. They don't really factor in lives lost because they don't have to pay for that.

They also factor in if there is a really big event that the gov't will socialize those losses for them and likely invest money or give big incentives to THEN winterize everything in the rebuild/upgrade. So why pay for it up front?

There simply is no argument that 'if they did not utilize a portion of their energy budget on renewables then they could have properly winterized the coal and gas assets.' That would be like saying 'they could not make their nuclear assets safe as they put money into coal and gas assets'.

It is an asinine argument meant solely to Stan for Gas and Coal.

Not sure where to post this, I guess this is kinda all america thread here.
What do you guys think about these insane electricity bills we hear about in texas?
Do you guys think it's normal and it's just offer and demand?
My view is that it's absolutely nonsense and price should be regulated.
Then again, that's a foreigner speaking so I can't understand America #1 , glory of capitalism , etc..
Really curious what people think here.