Forty percent of Austin residents are without power, and up to a total of four million Texas residents are suffering under extreme cold conditions as the state power grid is overwhelmed. Making matters worse, a shortage of natural gas combined with failures of most wind turbines due to ice and freezing temperatures have dropped power generation.
TEXAS – Nearly 200,000 Austin Energy customers woke up without power Monday and were not expected to get it back until Tuesday — possibly late in the day — because of a so-called rotating power outage that didn’t rotate, leaving parts of the city in the cold and dark.
The outages began in the middle of the night, leaving swaths of neighborhoods without electricity, as already freezing temperatures dropped into single digits during an extraordinary winter storm that has raised questions about the city of Austin’s and the state’s ability to handle such an event. (read more)
The Houston Chronicle reports: […] “Natural gas supplies for electric generation are already strained in the winter, the peak season for gas used for heating, adding pressure to supplies used to generate electricity.”
The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and natural gas in the state, said Monday afternoon that some producers, especially in the Permian Basin and Panhandle, were experiencing unprecedented freezing conditions, causing concern for employee safety and affecting production.
[…] “This event happened quickly, and the amount of load that we needed to remove from the grid was significant. It was in a very short time that we maxed out on all of the available circuits that we had to disconnect,” Sargent said. “So because we’re at a max limit, there’s no more energy that we can shut off at this time to bring these customers back on. Basically, we’re stuck here.” (read more)
Good news. Results are on the way.
About 200,000 residential customers are coming back on line now.
More are expected in the coming hours. https://t.co/8AlqYOycT8
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) February 15, 2021
I used to work on energy trade floors.. I saw this one coming..
which means They saw it.. but didn’t prepare for it..
Either ERCOT gets their weather forecasts from the local television stations..
or it was planned.. never let a crisis go to waste..
we now know the operations and management of the Texas Electrical Grid is currently in the hands of the enemy..
..so plan accordingly..
AOC says to have an electric blanket in case the power goes out.
I still remember Koch, Dynegy and enron counter trading. My contacts were insiders. 10 years ago they had rolling blackouts. Texas.
Biden gave China access to the US Power Grid. Could this have been a factor?
Too early for that to be in effect. China Inc. will be buying up Raw material sources like gas and oil. For military strike purposes, they will buy uptransmi ssion suppliers in stead of the power plants. China Inc. will allow their democ-0commie allies to screw up the power generation for them.
(TX) Legislature to Investigate Electric Council as Blackouts Continue
Can’t help wondering if maybe this is also connected as a response to growing secession popularity, kind of a way for the deep state to tell Texans, “How does that feel? Where would you be without us?” I think this storm is so extraordinary that it looks suspiciously like weather warfare, Just a thought.
Luke Legate
@lukelegate
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=e4ce6d875b&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r-8176123525257847602&th=177ad8d6c5640373&view=fimg&sz=s0-l75-ft&attbid=ANGjdJ-DQ_xKZvVmCX2t6ubW0LA5usqgVhHosrnP5X0_ZFo81xwjHlcRXNod6_HUnbK5iKBZqJ0kpYgIZY1LnpFXqvAVvX7YymS2kM3nQbpVedy_gvvrlT3EARp3e-A&disp=emb&realattid=ii_kl8qmsnj0
This is the outcomes of attempting to depend on renewable energy, it will never be there when you need it most. California, and now Texas, rolling blackouts will become the norm. Time to start voting all these politicians out of office.
It is the dependency that is the problem
Oh, you mean like staying alive? That dependancy?
What is happening in Texas is a monumental error. I have watched huge wind turbine blades trundle down freeways for years, many of which were subsidized by tax dollars. Republicans who have been running the state bought into the green bs. No one gamed out the worst case scenarios. All were either starry eyed idealists or greedy miners of subsidies. No one thought about grandma freezing in the dark. I have had power out here in The Woodlands, TX two days in a row: twelve hours on the first day and four, starting at 2am when my c-pap and heat went off, on the second. How did this happen? Stupidity and greed.
Finally able to get online this morning,
And I want to thank
All the tree house
Commenters who
Shared prayers, gave advice and suggestions on our dire situation here in Texas. We had more snow last night and still without power except for 1 hour on
And 6 hours off.
Major fail by our politicians and power provider.
Your cycles shouldn’t be that long. We were having the same problem until my wife was able to get ahold of our provider and report an issue (I’m not sure how, at one point she told me that ERCOT was saying “Don’t bother reporting issues”).
She got it done yesterday and last night our cycles got better (hours on 30-60 minutes off).
Drive by the wind turbines on either side of I-10 in Palm Springs, California, and you’ll see lots of wind turbines out of commission. There are times when I would drive by them at night, and occasionally you would see one of them on fire due to bearing failure. The turbines are managed by energy companies but most wind turbines are owned by investors. Once the turbine stops working, either due to failure from age or some other expensive mechanical failure, the investors, having recouped their initial investment plus profits, simply walk away rather than to make expensive repairs or replace the turbine. The wind turbines are also notorious for killing lots of birds every year. Solar farms in the west and southwest take up a lot of land, and as you’re now seeing in Texas, produce no electricity when they are covered with snow or ice. Parts of the state have had cloudy skies for almost two weeks. Not much electricity being produced when the sun is blocked.
YEP, daughter in Bacliff, TX has a duplicate scenario but now NO WATER. they forgot people in TX do not know what to do when they have no heat in freezing weather.. Only PVC plumbing in TX so unprotected pipes are bursting. Next thing to go is their gas which is the only way some have of heat (range top burners). They also cannot drive on ice….so there is that! What a cluster! Luckily daughter from OHIO so she was prepared including bathtub full of water but no frozen pipes yet..
Start with Biden and Harris. This BS is one of their BIG plans.
The only way these facist, leftists will do anything is when they start becoming victims of their own idiotic actions. They need to suffer, get hurt or be injured, severely. It’s the only way.
Even suffering doesn’t make the Demo-commie-fascist useful idiots wake up.
I have been reading twatter and comments on various sites…..they truly are brainwashed. They are the true deplorables along with their vile leaders
Speaking of “suffering,” power outages and overpriced electricity aren’t the only ways to hurt us. Here’s a 2020 compilation of most of the other ways windmills have of causing harm.
https://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/fullaccidents.pdf
Democrat Houston has been largely spared while Republican suburbs are hardest hit. Go figure.
Seems to me, the PUC-ERCOT-companies failed to anticipate winter storms that were even worse in the 1880s and 1890s.
Texas going blue, driven by wind…
Earlier this month Greg Abbott accepted an award for the state’s reckless subsidies of “green” energy from a leftwing lobbyist. $19 billion wasted on subsidies since 2006…
Is it wrong for me to feel bad for those who recently moved there from California? They must be wondering about now, “What the h311 did I do?”
Their California emigrant predecessors have already been doing the communards’ work, along with the local varieties…
More deaths at the hands of environmentalists.
They started building these dumb windmill back in the Clinton era. Slowed a bit during the Bush War on Terror era. And ramped back up during the Obama days. Besides being an eyesore they are a danger to animals, constantly break down, are not cost effective and don’t work when we need them most. Best case scenario… let them rot in place. Not another dime for upkeep on that federal boondoggle.
Would be nice to have all thoise coal plants back on line as well as the abandoned nuke plant, clossed becuase our limp noodle State Government caved to Sock Puppet Obama’s EPA.
Texas has two separate energy agencies, natural gas, and electricity. Texans pay up up the wazoo to keep these separate from the rest of the grid. For example, natural gas piped all the way to New York from Texas is cheaper there than in Texas. The same for electricity. This was designed to ensure Texans always had these energy resources available to them first before the rest of the country.
Well,this has failed, and if I lived in Texas I would bitch my ass off. The incompetent managers of this system need to be canned with prejudice.
The transmission part of the infrastructure is not the problem. How soon everybody forgets The closure of coal fired and atomic generation faculties under threat of Federal Suits and Loss of Funds during Sock Puppet Obama’s regime. Also, cannot forgive the limp d_ck RINOs running Texas who caved and took the money from their financial pay masters in return.
Also, how hard is it to design in heaters, insulation, and other winterization design features. We do get freezing temps and a few weeks of freezing rains every winter as well as the periodic winter blitz with 2-3 week so fo sub-zero, freezing rain and snow. Plus, allot of the “green generation sources are located in Northwest Texas which does get ugly winter winter EVERY YEAR due to the weather flowing off the nearby Rockies.
Have lived in Texas over 30 years. This is the 3rd major storm in those 30 years and there have been other winters with constant freezing weather and periodic freezing rain. This is not new. Also, as stated above, the Northwest portion of the state, where much of the green stuff is located, ALWAYS has had bad winter weather.
But fortunately for those of us in Northwest Texas, we’re not completely on the Texas grid…we still get electricity from southeastern New Mexico.
No rolling blackouts here.
Exactly. Winter comes around regularly every nine months; it’s inexcusable not to prepare for it.
I don’t buy the “extreme” excuse, either. Airlines spend untold numbers of dollars training pilots for emergencies — extremes — that they may actually never experience during an entire career! Yet, it can make or break a career if you can’t handle these emergencies on a check ride, even though your “everyday” flying skills may be ok.
It was the job of these entities –the companies, the local and state authorities — to make sure this didn’t happen. Someone blowing up the infrastructure is one thing; winter being winter is a totally different matter.
100% This situation is an absolute embarrassment. Completely unacceptable and you could watch the fake news lap dogs run out and put out the BS cover up story as fast as they could get it going. Billions of dollars in damages and loss of life here. It is unacceptable and the people MUST demand every leader involved with EPCOT removed.
And to think the Green New Deal was generated by AOC and her ilk. This woman is about 31 years old. She has no life experience or common sense to realize. what chain reactions can occur when you take a country with 350,000,000 people who rely on a consistent energy supply. Has she ever owned a house and thought about alternative heat sources if things go south? Of course not. Her ideas will be the doom of this nation.
It is good that Austin greenies are getting a taste of their green energy future. Hearts and minds are being changed. Those without power would vote for coal-powered plants about now.
No they wont. They have been indoctrinated that this is all the fault of “BIG OIL”.
Thank a teachers union!
They are now trying to blame it on traditional gas plants. The pipelines couldn’t provide the needed gas when the wind turbines failed. More spin doctoring. Also poor planning, shutting down coal plants with not improvements in the gas pipelines infrastructure.
Windmills freeze and break in the winter, that has been a well known fact for many years. Natural gas ALSO freezes in winter, or extreme cold temps, as it is loaded with WATER.
There is no shortage of Natural Gas, this is a supply delivery issue as the Natural Gas is either frozen in lines or the pump and flow stations cannot move the heavier liquid, as natural gas reacts to cold weather by gaining weight. It goes from a more gaseous state to a near 100% liquid state in the colder winter months, and is still loaded with water. I am keeping this simple.
Bottom line is this, the only readily available fuel to generate electricity is COAL. And what have we done with COAL? We have banned it across the nation. This will now be the new norm in Texas and other states that rely on these inefficient fuel sources to generate their electricity.
It can be 100 degrees below zero, COAL does not care as long as there is an ignition source, it will burn and create electricity.
Got COAL?
All part of a bigger picture:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/sacrifice_to_superstition_euthanizing_fuel_industry_jobs.html
Have I read some elitist comments from the so called intelligent people of the northeast and west coast zombies.
The audacity of these idiots to make statements that southerners are idiots and do not know how to deal with weather.
First Texas would not be in the power problems if they had not relied upon wind turbines, period. They were paid off with billions in subsidies from the taxpayers. If they had kept to the power plants of coal and natural gas.
The zombies making these comments are the ones that are relying on natural gas and fuel oil to heat there houses in the winter. They are the bottomless pit that take and take.
The zombies will not tell the truth. All their energy needs are meet by suppliers. Now ask where the suppliers get the natural gas from? Where does your fuel oil come from? Where does your gasoline and diesel fuel come from?
They are getting it from the south or they are buying it from other countries.
It would not take a rocket scientist to cripple the west coast and north east so called elites. If you know what to look for in electrical and crude lines and natural gas lines.
The zombies are completely reliant upon outsiders to provide their consumption needs. Hell they can not even feed themselves.
Now you so called intelligent elites, who are the idiots?
Sorry for the rant. I saw some comments by elite thinkers , that block you for telling the truth about their commodity intakes, with no way to produce it themselves. They think southerners are idiots.
“The heads of ERCOT’s board of directors don’t even live in Texas”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/ercot-board-vice-chair-texas-cold-power-outage-15953854.php?IPID=Chron-HP-CP-Spotlight
Of course, blaming ERCOT for generation failures is like blaming the grocery store if the cow dies. The Public Utilities Commission looks like a more reasonable target for the ire.
Joe Biden told everyone we were heading into a ” Dark Winter .”
Dual meanings are a thing with the evil bunch.
Dark Winter was also a table top exercise in June 2001 about a mock bio-terror attack.
Zerohedge ( archives )
Biden needs to be investigated for his remarks.
Something nefarious going on. No power from Sunday night through Tuesday. Down to 10 degrees and we have electric heat (so no heat) Now there are rolling blackouts every couple of hours. This morning we now have No water and Austin and Houston are being asked to boil their water. It is 32 degrees this morning on Houston…cold but not unreasonable. Could this be part 2 of lockdowns? First take your freedom to move and assemble. Then your heat, methods to communicate, water, lights, etc. Remember when Biden said several times we were in for a dark winter?
Every free thinker should be shouting to the rooftop that green energy is not reliable and we need to open up our oil fields so we can meet energy Independence. Anything else is a fallacy it will plunge the nation into darkness. I’m surprise the Texas swallowed that BS on green energy.
We have to call buck fiden out as a traitor for handling energy in this country and everything having to do with energy if he’s going to bankrupt this country buying oil from our enemies.
Whoever made the decision to put 7% -20% of the State’s generating capacity into wind turbines that can freeze up (and did) needs to be fired. Period.
Whoever made the decision to have an energy board (ERCOT) that has a chairman who lives in Michigan and a vice-chairman who teaches in Germany needs to be fired. Period.
Whoever made the decision to have natural gas power plants that depend SOLELY on weather dependent on-time deliveries of natural gas — i.e. no interim storage — to avoid generating plant shutdowns should be fired. Period.
Sorry, just came off 36-hr (2 nights with temps of 19 and 13 respectively) rolling blackout and just a little bit pi$$ed. This was totally avoidable.
The Green Stupidity is spreading. Local City just installed a massive solar panel system, Coops have been partenering with a Little Rock Ark. based company to build Solar Powered plants at 1mgw per plant. 20 year contracts already signed with the Little Rock company receiving all the tax credits because Non profit coops can’t file for them. Talk about a big Scam.
Did I mention the Little Rock Company is not in my state, LOL.
I have lived in many states as far West as Arizona and Colorado and as far east as D.C. My experience goes back to , let’s say, the Clinton administration.
I have had the LEAST amount of problems with power in Texas than all other states. Virginia was the worse where it wasn’t unusual to just randomly have power go out for a short time (30 min – hour). A short power outage has always been rare in Texas and this is the first major issue I have ever seen.
I firmly believe the Biden Administration is sabotaging the power Grids. I remember when Obama was the King, if you talked smack on him online, you might end up with a power surge wiping out your computers, tvs, etc. if they weren’t surge protected. Power outages also occurred after smack talking the King online. I was actually posting on Biden the other night and his scams….. within an hour my power went out for 2.5hrs. in the middle of the night with freezing temps outside.
The ‘scientists’ told us that cold winters and even snow were a thing of the past.
https://rumble.com/vdwd0f-spinning-the-turbines.html
https://rumble.com/vdw3ev-coal-vs.-green.html
Tony Heller
https://rumble.com/vdvg8f-civilization-hijacked.html
So where is Joe Biden during the energy emergency in Texas? Crickets, lots and lots of crickets. President Trump would have been all over this. He cares about people. Biden, in his own words, “likes children more than adults”. He’s more concerned about beating his granddaughter during a game of Mario Kart, then he is about seeing to the needs of millions of suffering American citizens.
If this was planned, why would THEY sabotage their own agenda of green energy by showing the world that THEIR renewables are NOT ready for prime time. “frozen wind Turbines”..”frozen solar generators”..REALLY! How is that helping the Democrat Progressive cause? I think its an example of just how the ineptitude of the political leaders reaches. Uncle Senator Ralph’s nephew Jimmy was APPOINTED to a position he did not know anything about. They had well over a week to prepare for this storm. A WEEK.
Some are not only without electricity but NO WATER! Where did that come from . These bureaucrats that are ‘Biden Son ” clones are in our local government as well as Federal. Time for a purge.
Stacy Abrams looks like she could suck start a wind turbine.
My Gas prices are up 80 CENTS already per gallon since Biden took over. We all knew this Fraud of President was gonna screw us….. but wholly crap. This is getting to be ridiculous folks. That’s an 82% overall increase in price in under a month.
I get wind turdbines freezing. But coal and natural gas plants? Were they getting their heating energy from wind turdbines?
Meanwhile in Texas, people that have power are getting $8000+ bills for electricity.
https://www.westernjournal.com/texans-disbelief-discovering-took-keep-lights-power-price/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=conservative-brief-WJ&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=western-journal
Welcome to your green energy.
It takes YOUR GREENBACKS out of YOUR bank account.
From a friend in Texas:
Reserve capacity is reported to ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission. Both entities are under the direct oversight of the Governor’s office. These are the people I dealt with for municipal entities before I retired. I am very familiar with the system in actual practice – and it is a sham. Energy companies exercise the real power, not the Governor or Legislature.
The gas line plants did not go offline due to power line damage. They are required to certify that they have adequate onsite standby generators in cases of no power line input. Since 2011 both the gas line plants and reserve gas and coal fired plants are required to “certify” to ERCOT adequate winterization.
The certification is really nothing more than a report, without details.
Many of the companies made the certifications knowing them to be untrue since there is no real penalty for false reporting. The wind/solar generation capacity actually being used prior to the shutdown was small and being reduced in anticipation of its loss when the freezing rain started.
When wind and solar went offline at the start of the bad weather, there was more than adequate “winter certified” reserve generation capacity. In reality it did not exist.
Header valves freezing on the gas pipelines was a primary reason the gas generation plants went down, and I am sure there were other reasons. South Texas Nuke shut down because the above ground portion of the water intake lines had not been insulated and, therefore, froze.
A number of ERCOT mid-level management employees I know personally had been warning upper level management (in writing) about these false certifications since 2011. The politicians were also warned. Nothing was done. This is the result.
that was my own review ..with also some folks who worm the power generation industry in TEXAS and also here in Louisiana.
That is was NOT an issue of wind ….wind power is texas is a very small supply, and it is NOT a reserve element …In fact, wind is used exclusively for load balancing and for short term fall back in the event of minor scale interruptions and planned and unplanned maintenance. That is DOES supply a certain amount during normal operation gives one the impression that they are essential to the entire grid, but this is just not true. Prior to wind, the conventional means to build such load balancing and small load contigency was small coal fired or gas plants. And this still exists in nearly every single network across the 3 major energy grids in N/America. And this still exists in Texas too…they simply ADDED wind to the scheme, given at the time, it was next to free as a cost…thanks taxpayers they will say!
in the matter of icing…these southern systems just are not designed for 11 degrees fahrenheit. For the same reason they are not designed to handle 140 degree ambient. Sure, it “might” happen, but one does not spend that kind of money and resource on an event that is so very unlikely. Could they be improved…sure…hindsight is wonderful….but then that raises the obvious question: harden for nuclear attack? solar eruptions? Biblical Floods? Global world fuel supply shutdowns..where do you draw the lines…the lines are drawn from the most probable cost benefit risks. that’s it. We should not expect anything more than that.
The other thing relates to cooling ponds…with surface ice, yes, there is definitely going to be some impact on normal operation but this would get noticed very rapidly as the icing just doesn’t flash freeze…you monitor the situation and start to notice you are reaching the limits of cooling capacity…then you doing something about that, ….the suggestion that these plants did not have a plan to monitor and then react to a cooling problem is ridiculous: they did precisely what you would expect..they knocked the systems down before it created a massively hard and time consuming set of failures…
today, most are back up….in terms of scale of the event, the draw down, turn around and then load balancing to get back up…most people are ignoring the obvious:
ercot did an exceptionally brilliant job given the problems that happened!
we will reading about this is risk mitigation and recovery journals for a long time in the category of “this is how it should be done”