Texas News All Bad

Gov. Abbott of Texas forbids sell of natural gas to Mexico causing loss of electricity all over Northern Mexico. If Lakeside has a blackout it is due to this. At same time people are dying in Texas and millions are without heat, water and power, Senator Ted Cruz flies with family to Cancun. After public outcry he has now returned to Texas and blames vacation on his young daughters.

Governor Abbott is a twit. It's not a problem in the SUPPLY of natural gas, it's that the plants that use natural gas are not "winterized".... nor are the wind turbines.
Here's another take on the situation...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/texas-power-energy-nightmare/index.html
Ted Cruz? The twit to end all twits.

According to one report, the bad news coming from Texas was quite close to being much worse.

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Texas Was "Seconds and Minutes" Away from Catastrophic Months-Long Blackouts, Officials Say
The Texas Tribune 18 Feb. 2021
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/

"As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline, Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state that could have occurred for months and left Texas in an indeterminately long crisis."

Glad to see the other side in that link cerebrozo. Tough choice but I believe they made the right one under the circumstances.
Why did Texas choose to have its own grid? Under those conditions, other states could have helped out.

If you can't get past the Times firewall, Paul Klugman today on exactly why Texas chose to have its own grid. AND how terrifying the post-Trump world is going to be in Republican terms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/texas-storm-power.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210219&instance_id=27273&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=70443563&segment_id=51947&user_id=113c61034e497bf178766dffc3398218

Texas: Land of Wind and Lies

Politicians are neither gods nor saints. Because they aren’t gods, they often make bad policy decisions. Because they aren’t saints, they often try to evade responsibility for their failures, asserting either that they did as well as anyone could have or that someone else deserves the blame.

For a while, then, the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal. True, the state’s leaders pursued reckless policies that set the stage for catastrophe, then tried to evade responsibility. But while their behavior was reprehensible, it was reprehensible in ways we’ve seen many times over the years.

However, that changed around a day after the severity of the disaster became apparent. Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

This isn’t normal political malfeasance. It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents. And it’s another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism.

The underlying story of what happened in Texas appears to be fairly clear. Like many states, Texas has a partly deregulated electricity market, but deregulation has gone further there than elsewhere. In particular, unlike other states, Texas chose not to provide power companies with incentives to install reserve capacity to deal with possible emergencies. This made power cheaper in normal times, but left the system vulnerable when things went wrong.

Texas authorities also ignored warnings about the risks associated with extreme cold. After a 2011 cold snap left millions of Texans in the dark, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission urged the state to winterize its power plants with insulation, heat pipes and other measures. But Texas, which has deliberately cut its power grid off from the rest of the country precisely to exempt itself from federal regulation, only partially implemented the recommendations.

And the deep freeze came.

A power grid poorly prepared to deal with extreme cold suffered multiple points of failure. The biggest problems appear to have come in the delivery of natural gas, which normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity, as wellheads and pipelines froze. Nor was this merely a matter of the lights going out; people are freezing too, because many Texas homes have electric heat. Many of the homes without electrical heat rely on, yes, natural gas. We’re looking at enormous suffering and, probably, a significant death toll.

So Texas is experiencing a natural disaster made significantly worse by major policy errors — and the officials who made those errors should be held accountable.

Instead of accepting responsibility, however, officials from Gov. Greg Abbott on down, backed by virtually the entire right-wing media complex, have chosen to lay the blame on green energy, especially wind power.


Now, it’s true that the state generates a lot of electricity from wind, although it’s a small fraction of the total. But that’s not because Texas — Texas! — is run by environmental crazies. It’s because these days wind turbines are a cost-effective energy source wherever there’s a lot of wind, and one thing Texas has is a lot of wind.

It’s also true that extreme cold forced some of the state’s insufficiently winterized wind turbines to shut down, but as I said, this was happening to Texas energy sources across the board, with the worst problems involving natural gas.

Why, then, the all-out effort to falsely place the blame on wind power?

The incentives are obvious. Attacking wind power is a way for both elected officials and free-market ideologues to dodge responsibility for botched deregulation; it’s a way to please fossil fuel interests, which give the vast bulk of their political contributions to Republicans; and since progressives tend to favor renewable energy, it’s a way to own the libs. And it all dovetails with climate change denial.

But why do they think they can get away with such an obvious lie? The answer, surely, is that those peddling the lie know that they’re operating in a post-truth political landscape. When two-thirds of Republicans believe that Antifa was involved in the assault on the Capitol, selling the base a bogus narrative about the Texas electricity disaster is practically child’s play.

And if you’re expecting any change in the policies that helped cause this disaster, don’t count on it — at least as long as Texas remains Republican. Given everything else we’ve seen, the best bet is that demonization of wind power, not a realistic understanding of what actually happened, will rule policy going forward.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

ferret wrote:Glad to see the other side in that link cerebrozo. Tough choice but I believe they made the right one under the circumstances.
Why did Texas choose to have its own grid? Under those conditions, other states could have helped out.

About 2:10 into an ERCOT video about its history, ERCOT explained that Texas has an independent grid because of its response to the 1935 Federal Power Act. ... So Texas power companies agreed not to sell power outside of Texas, which allowed them the ability to avoid federal regulation.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/verify/texas-independent-power-grid/507-6192cf48-4bf4-4a82-8586-0e5c0a549707

Thanks for the copy/paste Mike!
So it appears my statement about cutting off the supply of natural gas to northern Mexico is incorrect.
"The biggest problems appear to have come in the delivery of natural gas, which normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity, as wellheads and pipelines froze"
I think their energy commission oughta go on a road trip to Edmonton and learn a thing or two.

Plan B... thanks. Silly buggers. They need a plan B.

The lies being told by Gov. Abbott and Cruz are now being revealed. The Governor has quit saying it was caused by the wind turbines as the massive failures of the gas and coal structures have now been disclosed.
Several years back a democrat introduced a bill to winterize their energy sector but it was ignored by the republicans. Now they will pay a price.
This should turn the state blue. Even fox news is calling him Fled Cruz. It is now being disclosed his house was cold and wife wanted to leave for Cancun. This should finish his political career in Texas. If he runs again he will be called "Fled Cruz".

Wind power = dead birds = more bug's = less food crops = hunger = bad idea !
Visit Palm Springs in Ca , used to be a very nice to visit.

Wind power will evolve. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/these-creative-wind-turbines-will-have-you-rethinking-what-you-know-about-wind-power-180957767/?page=5

And of course, oil spills harm no wildlife whatsoever and there is absolutely no pollution caused by coal or other kinds of power plants. And none of those other kinds of power plants are using extraordinary amounts of water in production. My tongue is firmly planted in my cheek.

Tday wrote:Wind power = dead birds = more bug's = less food crops  = hunger = bad idea !
Visit Palm Springs in Ca , used to be a very nice to visit.

Could you please cite your sources for this very broad asseration? I have a home in Palm Springs, for 10+ years now, and must be missing something or oblivious to such dire consequences.

rafterbr wrote:The lies being told by Gov. Abbott and Cruz are now being revealed.  The Governor has quit saying it was caused by the wind turbines as the massive failures of the gas and coal structures have now been disclosed.
Several years back a democrat introduced a bill to winterize their energy sector but it was ignored by the republicans.  Now they will pay a price.
This should turn the state blue.  Even fox news is calling him Fled Cruz.  It is now being disclosed his house was cold and wife wanted to leave for Cancun.  This should finish his political career in Texas.  If he runs again he will be called "Fled Cruz".  

Seems to me these guys can do whatever they want, and get away with it. This is the new normal. Sure, a 24 hour newscycle, but then that's it. Cripes, they just let a President of the country get away with inciting a seditionary riot in their own capitol. Who cares about a little Ted Cruise?

You mean Fled Cruz? That's his new name. ;)

ferret wrote:You mean Fled Cruz? That's his new name. ;)

To think he was born in Calgary, Alberta and was once a Canadian citizen!  Boy are we lucky he renounced is citizenship when he ran for the leadership of the Republican Party.  I thought you had to be born in the U.S. of A to become president.  Guess not!  https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/mar/26/ted-cruz-born-canada-eligible-run-president-update/

Too funny Tom! Yes, we're lucky!

Texas was given a three week warning for what was coming...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/weather-experts-lack-of-planning-caused-cold-catastrophe/ar-BB1dQ9Kl

While Ted fled AOC raised $2,000,000 for the people of his state. Way to go Rafael, maybe you might wanna stay away a little longer!

https://people.com/politics/aoc-raises-1-million-in-relief-for-texas/

Oh, and he left his dog, Snowflake at his home in TX.

At 1pm on Thursday, when the entire Cruz family was still in sunny Cancun, a reporter, Michael Hardy, spotted Snowflake looking out the door of the family's Houston home

ferret wrote:  I think their energy commission oughta go on a road trip to Edmonton and learn a thing or two.

Plan B... thanks. Silly buggers. They need a plan B.

Question for you: Would officials in Edmonton be prepared to deal with power problems that would occur if temperatures there were to exceed 40° (104°F) for five consecutive days?