The failure of wind and solar should have been apparent to even a blind man after what California went through this past summer. High winds shut down the windmills and clouds shut down solar power.

edit: Unless those were more bureaucratic bovine scat lies to escape culpability.

Posted this before but this is a good place to post it again. This follows the days and the output of the producers as the storm progressed,

I'll repeat myself but the graph tells an interesting story. The wind dropped out on the 8th and gas started climbing on the 8th, nuclear and coal pretty much remained constant, then all three started dropping on the 15th. I don't know if it was so much rolling blackouts, problems with production or just line failures throughout the grid. We still have allot of people without power due to line failures. Another interesting thing is how many times before the storm wind was the top producer.

If you look Gas picks up when wind falls, wind picks up gas falls. Wind is never steady, drops at nigh normally just like solar

I’m no wind/solar fanatic, but it’s ridiculous how many people who know better or should know better, want to point to these as central to the problem. North of the Mason Dixon line, turbines seem to do just fine in their cold winters.

Until responsibility is accepted as non-winterization of assets by the asset owners, whatever the production method, we’ll be here again.

Charlie

We have to remember energy production is an “on-damand” type situation, so normally as one falls another picks up and if one picks up another will fall. There is quite a bit if redundancy built into the system for peak usage/production times. Where we got hurt is the cold limited the “peak” production just as peak demand hit.

Had natural gas production been able to keep up we probably would have been fine, but as we could see that dropped by over 10MgW right at the onset of the cold weather. I do not know what the peak demand was ever, since we never were able to get it supplied, no one will ever know.

The water used for cooling the turbines in the gas and nuclear power plants started freezing on the 14th, was when all hell broke loose. By then the wind was shutdown, and then the others had to reduce output.

How come Norway, Finland and Sweden can run wind generators year around? Because theirs are also made for cold weather operations. Somewhere some engineers forgot that every so many years Texas gets as cold as a well digger's hiney.

The fix, a few trillion in nuclear, gas and coal power plants, that can sit there and wait until the well digger's hiney get's cold the next time.

It is an interesting debate for sure. If we just lost capacity for a few days, that’s one thing. If we really almost burned up the entire grid, that’s quite another. I want the facts. The real facts. Not politicized facts. It’s hard for me to believe any RRC info is not politicized, just as it would be hard for me to believe any wind/solar propagated info is not politicized. This seems like the job for an unbiased commission-if such a thing can even exist any more.

So how could that statement that no NG plant went offline be true? Is it a lie? Is it misleading (did they technically stay online but drastically reduce capacity)?

Fake? You guys calling fake so fast may want to rethink your statements too
Follow the links...The info on the OP is in the links
https://twitter.com/christianfortx?lang=en

This week, our grid failed us when temperatures reached historic lows and people needed electricity and heat the most. Like many of you, I have been without power since early Sunday morning. Read more: https://bit.ly/2NAxh7o

https://mailchi.mp/397afd37c4e4/texas-energy-news-13353971

This week, our grid failed us when temperatures reached historic lows and people needed electricity and heat the most.


There were almost 4.5 million customers without power during the peak of the outage on February 16th. As of today, there are still close to 3 million Texans without power.

Like many of you, I have been without power since early Sunday morning. Like many of you, I still have no estimate of when I will have electricity again.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, manages about 90% of the state's power for 26 million customers.
 ERCOT has stated there were 45,000 megawatts offline. ERCOT is overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Their recently elected chair and vice chair for the board of directors do not live in Texas and live in Michigan and California respectively.


Around 5:00 last Friday, the Governor issued a disaster declaration in advance of the severe weather predicted to impact all 254 counties of Texas.

My agency, the Railroad Commission of Texas, acted swiftly to ensure we did everything within our authority to free up natural gas for Texas families and electrical generation facilities. At 6:30 that night, we conducted an emergency open meeting and passed an order requiring gas utility systems to prioritize “human needs customers” such as residential homes and hospitals. The goal was to reduce the use of natural gas for industrial needs to ensure Texas families had access to electricity and heat as temperatures dropped.

Unfortunately, demand continued to outpace supply. On the morning of February 14th, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness warned: “We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas. At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units.”


Many, including myself, have warned for years about the dangers of relying too heavily on unreliable, intermittent forms of electric generation like wind and solar to meet the energy needs for thirty-million Texans.


The issue isn't the existence of renewable energy, but that it has displaced reliable generation (coal and nuclear), not through natural market forces but through massive subsidies and punitive regulatory policies from progressives in Washington D.C. In 2009, “coal-fired plants generated nearly 37 percent of the state’s electricity while wind provided about 6 percent. Since then, three Texas coal-fired plants have closed… In the same period, our energy consumption rose by 20 percent.”


ERCOT was notified over a decade ago that Texas power plants had failed to adequately weatherize facilities to protect against cold weather. A federal report that summer recommended steps including installing heating elements around pipes and increasing the amount of reserve power available before storms.


Instead of spending our resources making our grid more resilient, policy and spending has focused on mandating or subsidizing wind and solar to expand their presence on the grid.


The takeaway from this storm should not be the failure of fossil fuels, but the failure of leadership at ERCOT and the dangers of relying on intermittent, unreliable forms of energy like wind for a quarter of our energy needs.


It shows as clear as day that the goal of 100% renewables by 2035 is unrealistic and attempts to get there will only increase suffering and harm Texas families during adverse weather conditions.

Had Texas been using 100% renewables, we would have had 100% blackouts.

I support Governor Abbott in making ERCOT reform an emergency item this legislative session. I am thankful that Speaker Phelan and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick have quickly called for legislative hearings on this matter as well. We must ensure this never happens again.

My thoughts and prayers continue to be with the families across our state without power, our linemen, energy producers, first responders, doctors, hospital support staff, essential workers, and everyone else helping Texans get through this difficult situation.

Stay safe. Stay warm.

I can make anything sound like a crisis.
Take this example:

He cheated death - only 6 feet separated him from having 16 head-on high speed collisions on just a one mile stretch of road!
Translated: He met 16 cars on the highway coming to work this morning.

Was it really a crisis where we almost lost the entire grid? Or just a bad situation that disrupted our lives for a few days?

Are you applying for a job as a liberal reporter?

I cant speak to any kind of “truth” in the energy sector since i am not in that sector, but my guess is the productivity was just drastically reduced, and no NG plant went offline.

Just look at the increase in NG production as demands warrants, it nearly triples all the way up to 45Mwh and then when the real cold hits it drops down 10Mwh to around 30-35 until they could get proper winterization done/patchwork conpleted to get the plants producing where they were needed to keep up with demand. If nothing else changed and we are no longer in an energy crisis, we have to assume the NG productivity was the reason we are back in the black...but again, that is just a guess. I am sure we got a little more out of nuclear, but wind and solar wouldn’t have given much more.

I'm i missing something? What is mail chimp?

Mail Chimp is like Constant Contact, used to send email to list subscribers/followers

I suspect that also. Which is also exactly the kind of technically true but highly misleading stuff I would expect from the RRC or anyone associated with it.

Just as I would expect the opposite from a press release from the renewables folks.

Why isn't it on his railroad commission website? I can't believe mail chimp.

After reading that I'm even more confused, Snakes post looks like a combination of two twitter posts or am I seeing things.

No it is combined, it’s highlights

Highlights of what? Put it on your website.....

Good luck finding that unicorn.

Kind of like Once upon a time.... and they lived happily ever after... Another fairy tale to fit the agenda...

More THFisms. Denouncing social media while posting Twitter feeds.

Its not about fake news. It’s about posting things that may not match, be verified or attributed to the source.

Here I thought Trump made everyone a Twitter expert. Looks like most of the original post was paraphrasing from his Twitter page/feeds.With that said RR website note is close to same.

Same message, invest in fortitude not a promise of magical night winds

Sorry but if I need a Captain crunch decoder ring to understand what he's said, I ain't buying what your selling....

Like I said I didn't see it on his website. I think it qualifies as fake news.