Jackson Jambalaya

Fisackerly better damn well shut off his neighborhood FIRST.

It is too late to buy this time. But everyone should have a coleman propane heater or a “Buddy” brand heater for just these type situations. Coleman propane canisters keep for a long time. You can get a room really toasty when the power is out.

Why are electric monopolies allowed? Why can’t I choose my electric provider?

Just another sign of the third world country we're becoming.

Good thing I bought this nice 20kW Kohler natural gas whole house generator.

Can someone please explain to me how the the big push to electric vehicles is gonna work? I know of no big changes planned by Entergy or other power producers to meet that demand. And carbon zero? Who believes that. It's a conspiracy to reduce mobility. One power supplier? Sounds like a monopoly to me. Better watch your backside folks your being sold down a dead circuit.

We keep getting these revelations demonstrating just how dependent we are on uncertain technology. What's our response? More and more dependency. It's coming and IT won't be pretty. I just hope I'm already gone when IT hits.

Seems to me that everyone running AC units on 100 degree days would be much worse on the electrical grid than this. What gives?

@9:30 um... I'm not sure we can fit five different power lines from five different utilities in my neighborhood. I'm pretty sure there would be complaints about the aesthetics of all the power lines everywhere...

Jackson's water and Entergy's power; both apparently run by incompetent "leadership".

WAPT said the Entergy blackouts happened between 7-9 pm tonight. Glad that wasn’t my house.

What are we really doing here? Bailing out Texas and its failure of an electric grid? I guess they'll wait to secede until this last storm blows over.

Nuclear is the only non-fossil option for electricity generation that scales. 'Green' power is about subjugation and control.

Bingo 10:40pm. This is what an interstate grid (MISO) gets baby brother.

9:54

What are you talking about?

Of course an elected official is blaming plants in other states. If its in other states, why are we allowing blackouts here?

I agree with the third world comment. Once all of our cars are sucking on the grid, we'll have blackouts all year round.

So we now see what happens when you quit focusing on your core competency (producing and moving electrons) and instead get distracted with a sideline business (broadband). Presley started us down this track and bullied the utilities to play along. The Legislature should immediately reject allowing the investor owned utilities (MPCo and Energy) to get into the broadband business. They should launch a PEER investigation into why with a nuclear power plant in the state we can't produce enough power to keep the lights and heat on.

With blackouts across Texas, many are wondering: what happened?


Leftists are cheering a “red state” having energy problems.
Here’s the truth about what happened.
Summary:


A mix of over-subsidized wind energy and under-investment in gas power means we didn’t have enough base load energy for a massive spike in demand.

Also, Texas infrastructure isn’t designed for once-in-a-century freezes.

#1 - Frozen Wind Turbines:
West Texas had wind turbines that had to be de-iced. The little energy that power regulators planned on being supplied from wind was now gone.

We have almost 31GW of wind installed on the grid, but on Monday we couldn’t even depend on 6 GW working.
To make matters worse, existing storage of wind energy in batteries was also gone, because batteries were losing 60% of their energy in the cold.

Bottom line: renewables don’t work well in extreme weather. Never will.

This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it. https://www.forbes.com/.../texas-outages-put-reliability.../

#2 - Nuclear also got too cold: We only have 4 nuclear units in TX, near Houston and Dallas. One of the reactors near Houston turned off due to a safety sensor freezing. No problem with the reactor. But the lack of the sensor forced the plant to shutdown, as a precaution.
(On another note, this shows how safe nuclear is. Lots of safety precautions.)

#3 - We don’t have enough Natural Gas online:
ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we lost the ability to get it transported. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so they froze.
Every natural gas plant stayed online. The “downed” plants were due to scheduled maintenance.

Gov. Abbott made the right call in diverting all natural gas to home heating fuel and then electricity for homes. Gas and coal brought a stable supply of energy, but still not enough.
Why don’t we have extra gas power when we need it most?
Because years of federal subsidies for wind has caused an over reliance on wind and an under-investment in new gas and nuclear plants.

Bottom line: fossil fuels are the only thing that saved us. They are *base load* energy.
If we were even *more* reliant on the wind turbines that froze, the outages would have been much worse.

This raises the obvious question: can we ever rely on renewables to power the grid during extreme weather?
No, you need gas or nuclear.

And subsidizing investment in wind has pushed gas and nuclear out. Now we live with the consequences.The push to decommission baseload power sources like natural gas would be disastrous when trying to keep the lights on in Texas.

I’ll be joining my Texas colleagues in getting to the bottom of what happened. We can do better, even for once in a century events.

In the meantime, stay warm, stay safe, and stay strong.

@10:15 um... That’s not how it works. There is one set of lines and the costs are shared. Other states have done it and utility customers have their choice of providers that feed electricity into the grid.

The problems Texas is having are due to their going all in on wind and other green power, at the expense of reinvesting in and upgrading the more reliable and consistent fossil fuel powered systems. These problems will get worse during extreme weather events as we move ‘forward’.

Mine never materialized. I feel cheated. The kids were all away at friend's houses leaving me and mama alone. I had a quilt spread out on the floor in front of the gas logs and a chilled bottle of wine waiting for a power outage that never came. I ended up having to simulate the damn thing with the breakers.

President Harris, along with VP Pelosi, will fix all of this with the all new "People's Democratic Power Collective." They will have their own personal power company called "The Ruling Class's Green Power Collective."

7:21, so your lights were off for only a couple of minutes then?

"Seems to me that everyone running AC units on 100 degree days would be much worse on the electrical grid than this. What gives?"

Physics.

I believe TX (ERCOT) is segregated like the western US is segregated from the east @ the continental divide. In other words, the power is not synchronized; the only major interties are high voltage AC to DC to AC. I think the amount of power we can ship to that part of TX would be very limited

https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/status?end=20210217T07

"Why are electric monopolies allowed? Why can’t I choose my electric provider?"

hum, Texas did this a few years ago (deregulated)...how's that working out? Oh, and their electricity still costs more than ours.

Do the solar panels work with snow on them? Ha
I also saw where wind turbines froze up.

@6:13 Texas is a state ran by Repubs and the oil and gas industry. Texas Repubs want to be political and blame the turbines when their whole grid system was not prepared. The blame in Texas begins and ends with Abbott. Strange that Midwestern states of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa where wind turbines exist have not had these problems during frigid weather because they are prepared for frigid weather. Texas did not.

@6:13am - The wind turbines seem to do just fine in North/South Dakota and Canada in the cold. I guess don’t be cheap and prepare your subsidized turbines for the occasional cold?

The bigger issue you failed to mention is Texas is disconnected from surrounding states’ grids. The grid is contained completely within Texas borders because Texas didn’t want to deal with pesky federal regulations. Well, this decision has consequences. Texas cannot draw surplus from other states and must generate everything in-state. Literally the only state like this. I guess it’s good for when you guys secede or something.

But yeah, blame it on the wind and dems. So yeah, sure, the cure for weathering these increasingly extreme weather events is to ramp up use of the fuels that contribute to the increased frequency and severity of said weather events.

February 16, 2021 at 9:23 PM
Honestly everyone should have a natural gas generator. I'm lucky enough to have purchased a house with one that was installed shortly before the previous owners passed away. Unfortunately it needed to be serviced and I didn't prepare well enough to get it maintenanced. They're actually not as expensive as I would have thought. An 18 kW generator is in the neighborhood of $5,000

6:13 am You are, like many apologizers who rationalize their failures,very articulate.

But, you choose not to focus on the impact of isolating the Texas grid and the impact of deregulation. You do know or should ,given your claimed expertise, that a State can buy excess energy from other States.

Nor do you deal with why the grids in all States are woefully undermaintained and replaced in a timely fashion.

Perhaps, you are very young and naïve and don't know that once upon a time businesses of all types ( including utilities) were expected to do what every smart homeowner has to do, maintain, replace and repair before the structure is so damaged, the costs are higher.

It's been sad to see that plant and equipment maintenance, repair and updating,customer loyalty and satisfaction,and research and development are no longer standard responsibilities of the corporation or business. Now it's the problem of taxpayers and your customers to " invest" in the future of your business,not your stock holders or executives.

As a Nation, we've have fallen into the Rabbit Hole and unlike Alice, trust the Cheshire Cat.

6:13. Dont know if u know what ur talking about, but it sounds good! Problem is nobody can get president harris and vp aoc to listen and look at the facts.

OK, lot to cover here..

First, 9:30, if you like what's going on in Texas right now go right ahead and choose your electricity provider. Instead of 1 hour rolling blackouts for a couple of hours in MS, you'll get 36- 48 hours of no service when you need it most. Texas deregulated it's electricity market 20 years ago and has had at least 2 of these major winter events that resulted in blackouts (if you recall, one of them was around the Super Bowl that was being held in Dallas). Texas does have cheaper electricity than MS most of the time (unless there is a price spike), but one reason for that is there has been a lack of investment in its power grid. For more info just Google John Wilder, ex CFO of Entergy and CEO of TXU electricity in Dallas. He was a big driver of deregulation back in the day, got rid of a lot of hard-working utility workers in several states and made millions when TXU was sold. I'll be his power did not go off.

Broadband has nothing to do with this. The broadband effort in MS is just getting started and has zero to do with power generation.

Now, the power grid. Another problem here is that Texas to a large degree "walled off" its grid, also known as ERCOT. This was so it didn't have to listen to no federal gubmint, which regulates interstate lines and not intrastate. So, it can't get help from other states as easily as we can in MS. More on that from the Texas version of Mississippi Today (and you can believe or disbelieve accordingly) here:

https://www.texastribune.org/2011/02/08/texplainer-why-does-texas-have-its-own-power-grid/

Finally, wind power. Texas gets about 10 per cent of its power from wind and, if you have ever been to west Texas, you would think that's a good place for a few thousand turbines. But the reason they didn't work this time is not just because it was cold. Canada, for example, has wind turbines that operate just fine. Texas was just unprepared for a weather event such as this one. Here is a good article from an Austin TV station. It points out that wind did fail, but so did natural gas and nuclear, which provide way more power:

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/system-wide-failure-energy-expert-says-outages-could-have-been-prevented-at-a-cost/

Gov. Abbott is right to call for investigating this situation. I'll be curious to see if people can get past their talk points (fat cat capitalists vs. liberal/socialist/soros/green wacko commies). Meanwhile, if you have friends in Texas, ask them if they'd like to go back to the regulated monopoly with oversight like we kept in MS (we did get close to deregulation) or stick with the system they have now.

Nice cut and paste job, 6:13. Too bad it's mostly bullcrap.

@8:53am - Bless your little heart.

... the cure for weathering these increasingly extreme weather events is to ramp up use of the fuels that contribute to the increased frequency and severity of said weather events.

Link?

Nice cut and paste job, 6:13. Too bad it's mostly bullcrap.

Prove it.

Mine's a 16 KW Generac natural gas and works great. Have used it one time for four hours without a hiccup. Still worth the price. We were out of the black out zone, guessing, so it never fired up last night. Several neighbors on the visit while power down list with elderly and those with very young ones.

So I gather from this article is that Winter can be cold. I'm spit balling, but I assume Summer is Hot causing the use of AC Units which can also, I've heard from a friend, can also cause rolling black/brown outs. Damn, need to get Congress right on this season thing.

I don't get it. There are tens of thousands of electric customers who have no power at all due to the storm which means they are using none at all. Seems to me that there aught to be excess electricity.

So Punxsutawney Phil was right.

Our house is all-electric and we have a gasoline generator that we use to power the refrigerators and freezers and other things we consider essential during a power failure. It's a pain in the a-- to roll the generator out of the garage, gas it up, and plug in extension cords running all over the house, especially in the middle of the night in a storm. Is it possible to install a generac whole house built-in generator if we add a propane tank to the back yard?

@8:46 AM you can't have a debt fueled budget deficit economy driven by a nation of consumptive gluttonists and be proactive at the same time. Forcing a new national love for greenery upon the masses doesn't change our fundamental imbalance problems. Our national treasury is as upside down as PERS is in Mississippi.

Greenland also uses a lot of wind turbines. they don't freeze up there. did someone just get the 'acme' brand do-it-yourself turbines and have wily e coyote install them?

#2 - Nuclear also got too cold:"....

Straight from the Texas BS pipeline.

That is cut and paste by 6:13.

That is from Dan Crenshaw's Twitter.

Is it possible to install a generac whole house built-in generator if we add a propane tank to the back yard?

Yes, functionally, though your specific local governing entity may have requirements, restrictions and/or prohibitions on tank placement/size.

@10:50 - yes.

Texas had a warning 10 years ago for its energy operators to winterize their facilities. They didn't do it because no one had the authority to force them to do it. As a result, millions suffered and some died. I think it's really that simple.

The disappointing thing is that the commissioner issuing the press release blamed it on other states. Either you are paying attention or you are not, and clearly you never asked Entergy if this could ever happen. Now you are sitting there making excuses.

42kW Diesel backup here, sure you gotta take care of the fuel but if you have heat pumps you are gonna need the capacity for the electric strips. It's running now and was on for 36hours during one of those Greek letter storms. Propane burns thru a 150(120max) gallon tank in no time

@6:13 He lies about the turbines. They were producing MORE power than anticipated. You can lay the TX failure directly at the feet of the thermal (natural gas) plants that failed to winterize.

@6:15PM You need to recalculate your propane usage. I have a 320 gallon propane tank that will run my Kohler 20 kW generator for days. Unfortunately, I live at the end of a rural electric line that often times experiences 24 hour plus outages.