Recipe for disaster was 10+ years building, with many warnings
Bad State and Federal policy, set the focus on unreliable solar and wind, and defunding natural gas and coal generation
The Governor of Texas Wins awards for wind energy generation
Setup billions in tax abatement for unreliable wind and solar, with no transparency or votes by Texas citizens authorizing the use of tax dollars
Build less than 50 % of the dispatchable generation needed to replace unreliable wind.solar .etc over the past decade.
ERCOT started emergency curtailments too late and then curtailed power to natural gas suppliers which removes gas generation, compounding the problem
The source of all this is the anti human low reliability policy of ‘saving the earth’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Teja5YNCo Why You Should Love Fossil Fuel
No town, county, state, or country has ever been able to operate with even 50% green energy (Wind or Solar)
Climate change predictions are always wrong
1989 – UN predicted mass problems by 2000
CO2 is Plant food and green
In 2021 we are safer from climate/weather impact, due to high energy reliable fossil fuels
Why renewables can’t save the planet Why Nuclear is green and a primary solution. According to Lancet Study, Nuclear power saves lives every year.
No plan to deal with waste solar panels in 25 years – severe toxic metal problem that does not go away with time.
Renewables are mass dense fuels (wood dung, wind solar) and unreliable
Fossil and nuclear are energy dense and reliable
Going green to more solar and wind increases CO2 emissions
Going Solar and wind kills bats and birds that impact the global environment and could cause more death for all life forms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oo2CeEkn40 Renewable energy: What’s going on with the electrical grid?
John Hargrove climate channel on youtube
https://energytalkingpoints.com/texas-electricity-crisis/ Texas ERCOT specific points.
- After years of inaction on, and even hostility toward, attempts to strengthen and secure Texas’ power grid, lawmakers might finally? take action. Brandon Waltens has the details.
- State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewoood) and State Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R-Arlington) have tried for several sessions to get attention to the shortcomings of Texas’ electric infrastructure. They were ignored while lawmakers instead pumped $19 billion into “green” energy subsidies.
- “Every time I author this bill, they push back on wanting to secure or protect the power grid and make it stronger,” Tinderholt told Texas Scorecard. “The power companies need to step up to the plate and participate in the bill.”
- FYI: The state’s power grid is managed by the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a semi-private non-profit entity overseen by the Legislature and the Public Utility Commission. The PUC’s members are appointed by the governor and approved by the Texas Senate.
- Will the governor and lawmakers push the blame solely onto ERCOT, or accept their measure of responsibility?
- As if in response… Gov. Greg Abbott – who earlier this month received accolades for his promotion of green energy subsidies – yesterday named investigating and reforming ERCOT a legislative priority.
- I wonder if the trophy those “sustainable” energy people gave the governor is still being displayed in his office? Seems like for the $19 billion Texas taxpayers have been forced to spend on “green” energy subsidies we’d have more to show for it than a cheap trinket given to a politician…
- “If Texas were a public company, the CEO would be fired today.” – Former State Rep. Matt Rinaldi (R-Irving)
- In the latest edition of his podcast, Luke Macias explains how wealthy government-subsidized oligarchies have been exposed by the massive power outages.
- “Power companies, their lobbyists and their PAC’s have worked tirelessly to keep politicians on their side. Now that millions of Texans are without power and lives are literally being lost, the winds have shifted.” – Luke Macias
- Texans took to social media to voice their frustrations with what we now know is the state’s highly unreliable electric grid. Robert Montoya finds many are demanding answers and action from their elected officials.
- Count Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller among those unimpressed with Texas’ lack of electric preparedness. He is calling on Gov. Greg Abbott to make big changes and immediately hold people accountable. Iris Poole has the story.
- “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas. The experiment failed big time. Governor Abbott’s Public Utility Commission appointees need to be fired and more gas, coal, and oil infrastructure built.” – Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller
Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never, which hit #5 on Amazon. His recent article, “On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare,” has been widely shared. Some highlights: * How Shellenberger went from being a renewables activists to championing nuclear. * Why Shellenberger decided to stand up against climate catastrophism after years of silence. * How modern environmentalism is a religion. * The real motives of most of modern environmentalism. * How environmental journalists misrepresent environmental science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq60W2pRk84
| https://industrialprogress.com/blog/ The Big Picture in Six Pictures Texas Electricity Crisis, continued Let me start off by saying that I am thinking about all of you in Texas and I hope you are coping with the (very preventable) problems your grid is experiencing right now.As I wrote yesterday, I think we are in the middle of the most teachable energy moment of 2021.Accordingly, I’ve been attempting to create every necessary message (and image) to properly explain what’s going on. “…proponents of fossil fuels are using the current crisis to emphasize why they think fossil fuels need to be part of the overall mix of options to power the grid. ‘The anti-carbon movement has really placed no value on reliability,’ said Alex Epstein, author of ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,’ who expressed his views in a long Twitter thread.”I was just interviewed by Congressman Dan Crenshaw for an hour on his podcast. (It hasn’t been posted as of this writing but I expect it to be up by tomorrow.) The Big Picture in Six Pictures Take a look at electricity use in New England, New York, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the Southwest, and Texas during this cold spell. |
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| All tell the same story: unreliable wind and solar electricity (green and yellow) completely fail to keep us warm or powered when needed the most. Instead, the media are telling the story that “fossil fuels failed” because certain gas and coal plants went offline in one of these regions–Texas–due to preventable problems. (We know that these problems were preventable because places that are much colder and snowier than Texas use gas and coal with great success.) The Failure of Unreliable Energy in Texas and Around the World with Steve MilloyJust as the devastation in Texas was reaching a peak, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, another whistleblower on “unreliables,” joined me to talk about what’s happening in Texas and around the world. I also asked him about his efforts to oppose certain ESG policies, and his views on the “fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 deaths” claim. FYI I addressed that claim in a Twitter thread. Here’s the summary: The widely-publicized claim that fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 deaths is the worst kind of pseudoscience. It ignores fossil fuels’ life-extending benefits and wildly overstates their negative side-effects. In reality, fossil fuels lengthen 5 out of 5 lives. The Future of Oil with Michael Lynch This week I also interviewed Michael Lynch, the oil guru who has been more right about oil economics over the past several decades than anyone I know. Mike was the second person I ever interviewed on Power Hour, and when he talked about long-term oil prices being in the $50/barrel range in 2011 I couldn’t believe it (even though I couldn’t argue with his logic). Now he has a new essay on claims that the post-pandemic world will mean “the end of oil.”I highly recommend this essay and Mike’s energy economics work in general. In this interview we covered: false past predictions of a green future, the real economics of EV batteries, what post-pandemic culture will look like, how much oil exists in the world, and much more. You can watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts. . To Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy, Alex https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1361128716391227394 |
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| Popular links:1. Change a mind by sharing my Google talk. Do you have someone you know who needs to learn pro-human thinking about energy issues? A great place to start is by sharing my talk at Google, which is designed to persuade even those immersed in the biased, sloppy, and anti-human energy thinking in our culture. You can find the video here.2. Empower a friend by inviting them to this newsletter. If you know someone who wants to increase their clarity and influence on energy issues, invite them to this newsletter by sharing this link: AlexEpsteinList.com. |
| Center for Industrial Progress, 302 Washington St., #150-9385, San Diego,, CA |
John Hargrove climate channel on youtube
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Peacock: Renewable Energy Failed to Keep the Lights on for Texans
Most of the grid was probably about as prepared as could be expected for this record storm. However, one part of the grid was mostly unprepared: renewable energy generators.
By
Bill Peacock
February 18, 2021
With almost hundreds of thousands of Texans still without power—and many without water—everyone is looking for someone to blame.
Monday’s Dallas Morning News ran a Bloomberg Wire story that blamed the blackouts on freedom: “The extreme cold appears to have caught Texas’s highly decentralized electricity market by surprise.”
Not to be left out, State Reps. Chris Paddie and Craig Goldman and House Speaker Dade Phelan have called for a joint meeting of two committees on February 25 to “review the factors” that contributed to this “unacceptable” situation.
The first cause of the blackouts is easy to identify: Texas experienced a winter storm of historic proportions. The 10 inches of snow that hit Midland set an all-time record, easily surpassing the 1951 record of 2.5 inches. Brownsville reported snow for only the third time since 1898. And Austin’s 6.5 inches of snowfall was its most since 1967.
Many details will soon be coming to light, but most of the grid was probably about as prepared as could be expected for this record storm. However, one part of the grid was mostly unprepared: renewable energy generators.
Renewables Were a No-Show
This leads us to the second, and likely primary, cause of the blackouts: renewable energy subsidies.
At 1:25 Tuesday morning, when the Electric Reliability Commission of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator for most of Texas, announced that it would “instruct utilities to begin rotating outages, wind was basically a no-show. During the critical four-hour period from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. when ERCOT was forced to begin rolling blackouts, actual wind output averaged less than 5 percent of the ERCOT load. This was down from about 58 percent during the same period the week before. It would be hard to overstate the damage caused by wind’s unreliability Monday night—or the harm and costs its intermittency causes on a regular basis.
At the same time, solar (the most rapidly growing energy source in Texas) was where it is every night—off the grid, for the simple reason that the sun was not shining. Some might claim this is no big deal because solar is not designed to generate electricity at night. Exactly. Solar’s primary design feature also proved to be its main design flaw Monday night.
Of course, supporters of wind energy are already out defending it, trying to deflect the blame elsewhere. Ross Ramsey at The Texas Tribune claimed “frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the lost wind power makes up only a fraction of the reduction in power-generating capacity that has brought outages to millions of Texans across the state during a major winter storm.”
Reliable Generation Forced Off the Grid
ERCOT’s numbers above do a better job than anything else in refuting the claims of the wind defenders. Yet they only tell a part of the story of why renewables are the main factor underlying the blackouts. Over the last five years, wind and solar generation have dominated new power plants coming online in Texas. Wind generation’s output has increased by 113 percent, and solar’s by almost 2,000 percent. This growth has crowded out almost all investments in other types of more reliable and affordable generation such as natural gas and coal. Gas-fired generation is up only 3.5 percent during this period. Coal’s output is down 30 percent.
Why would investors build new intermittent sources of generation in Texas like wind and solar that do not show up when needed? And that cannot take advantage of the higher prices during times like these? The sole cause for this is renewable energy subsidies.
From 2006 to 2019, wind and solar generators in Texas received about $19.4 billion in subsidies and benefits from taxpayers and consumers. In 2018, about 28 percent of renewable generators’ income came from subsidies. Investors have flocked to these subsidies. And why shouldn’t they? On the other hand, investors are spurning natural gas and coal because without the massive subsidies offered to wind and solar, new natural gas plants are hard-pressed to compete.
Because of market distortions created by renewable subsidies, when Texas ran low on electricity Monday night, the grid operator had nowhere to turn. Reliable natural gas plants that could have shouldered much—if not all—of the heavy load were nonexistent because they had not been built, thanks to renewables subsidies.
We Had Plenty of Warning
Finally, it is important to understand that Texas did not arrive at this condition overnight. For years, it has been obvious to everyone that renewables have been worsening the stability of the Texas grid.
In 2012, Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) Chairman Donna Nelson explained the problems caused by renewable energy subsidies to the Texas Senate:
Federal incentives for renewable energy … have distorted the competitive wholesale market in ERCOT. … The market distortions caused by renewable energy incentives are one of the primary causes I believe of our current resource adequacy issue… [T]his distortion makes it difficult for other generation types to recover their cost and discourages investment in new generation.
In 2019, Texas state Sen. Kelly Hancock authored a bill that would have required the PUC to study how to deal with the problem caused by renewable energy subsidies. The Texas Senate passed the bill with strong bipartisan backing, but the bill was killed in the Texas House State Affairs Committee, chaired by current Speaker Dade Phelan, when lobbyists for renewable energy companies and environmental groups rose up in opposition.
Even without the bill, however, the PUC could have taken steps to address the harms caused by renewables. Instead, its commissioners caved to the demands of generators for more subsidies to paper over the problem. The Texas Tribune reported in 2018, “Major power generators including Calpine, Exelon and NRG are asking the commission to tweak an existing formula known as the operating reserve demand curve (ORDC) to increase the amount of money they receive when demand for power escalates.”
John Hargrove Seeking Truth and Reality 