“Texas officials have warned they may need to use rolling blackouts to ease the strain on the state's power grid this winter, despite the same strategy resulting in over 200 deaths during a previous storm. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said it may need to employ controlled outages if temperatures plunge below freezing for days on end as they did in February 2021.”
Translation: When Republicans “fixed the grid” they actually were lying — again.
Has the grid been fixed?
“No, the Texas electric grid isn’t fixed, if by fixed you mean guaranteed to work perfectly in all weather conditions. But there have been some improvements on the Texas grid after the storm of 2021 that should increase its reliability in extreme weather conditions.”
In fact it is SO NOT FIXED we’ve had rolling blackouts during SUMMER AND WINTER since the Great Snowpocalyse of 2021. What we HAVE had is a PR snow job by Republicans.
https://justenergy.com/blog/were-there-any-improvements-on-the-texas-grid-after-the-storm
Nor is all of Texas on the Texas grid.
El Paso, for example, is not. They DID NOT suffer power outages like the rest of Texas.
There is a reason the Texas grid sucks: $$$
“Politicians voted to spend billions to support the construction of gas-fueled power plants, even though many gas-fired plants failed dramatically in the freezing weather, as did other power sources like wind and solar.”
Close. But not the whole story.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/05/texas-bills-energy-natural-gas-fossil-fuel-renewables/
The whole story is that home customers who used natural gas were fighting with gas electric generators — as a result the pressure (and as a result volume) dropped dramatically causing electric generators to go offline.
Some renewables went offline, but both ERCOT and Governor Abbott blamed it ALL on renewables — which of course makes no sense.
The Republican solution? Put ALL of our eggs in one basket by building MORE gas powered plants — the ones that caused the problem in the first place.
Now, I’ve only been an engineer for over 45 years and my job has always been to minimize risk (product should about by reducing risk to a minimum — if this is news to any engineers, this is a great skill to have in your back pocket).
Doing what Republicans did is just stupid and shows few in our Legislature or ERCOT has a brain. Worse, many Republicans in this state want to make renewables MORE expensive — because capitalism (/sarcasm font).
@feloneouscat Fellow Engineer here, and risk is something that is absolutely tracked, calculated, and reduced as much as possible. If a risk is identified in the risk matrix beyond a certain value, the project is instantly required to create a mitigation plan to reduce the risk or to track it relentlessly until the issue has either passed or the project needs to be retired. Nothing is allowed to be released if the risks aren't eliminated by the end of the program.
@Gord02 @feloneouscat Not wrong, but the magnitude of the consequence is an important factor.