Quote:
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
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.
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.