“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).
I am constantly frustrated with the idiots who make up our political office — they want to control my body, my vote and my life.
They want to make it deadly to live in Texas for anyone who isn’t rich.
Worse, they are fake capitalists. They are no more fond of capitalism than they are of free speech or the free exercise of religion.
They are everything our Framers were against.
Not everyone can afford an electric generator and yet this is HOW FUCKING BROKEN TEXAS HAS BECOME!
I wish I were joking. But we talk about our banana republic state as if it were modern and we can’t keep the fucking lights in mildly inclement weather.
The argument that “oh, companies are doing the best they can” is complete and utter bullshit. I know because I used to build systems that survived inclement weather from Canadian winters to Texas summers.
It is complete and utter bullshit and ERCOT, the Governor and Republican legislators all know this because they are corrupt.
The economic interests to DO FUCKING NOTHING is lower, to State Republicans than the loss of life.
Hell, more people were upset about Ted Cruz’s dog being left in a heatless house than dead Texans (good news, the dog was not left in a heatless house, all posts on Twitter were wrong).
And that is PRECISELY the problem with our state. Musk is deemed more important (both the left and the right — for different reasons) than the number of people without health insurance —about 4.9 million people