Texas at -20C, five million without power as Wind Turbines freeze

Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state

An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas.

Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages.

UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather. 

While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.

At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west

 

Daily Mail

Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without electricity for hours had no certainty about when the lights and heat would come back on, as the state’s overwhelmed power grid began imposing blackouts that are typically only seen in 100-degree Fahrenheit

‘We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,’ said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.

Poweroutage.us  reports on blackouts across the US. Texas has its own grid called ERCOT.

…

Prices also hit the jackpot – $9,000 as everyone needed electricity but generators were out of action

Reuters:   Real-time wholesale market prices on the power grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were more than $9,000 per megawatt hour late Monday morning, compared with pre-storm prices of less than $50 per megawatt hour, according to ERCOT data.

Tucker Carlson:

If there’s one thing you would think Texas would be able to do, it’s keep the lights on. Most electricity comes from natural gas and Texas produces more of that than any place on the continent. There are huge natural gas deposits all over the state. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.

Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state’s vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy.

So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas — it’s a great state, actually — but to give you some sense of what’s about to happen to you.

 

Armutt @hayahapa: 

Issues Texas is having with the cold illustrates a key part of collapse:

The problem is not that we lack the technology to keep society running.

The problem is we lack the social infrastructure to keep the technology running

 

Bloomberg Green says, not to worry about Windpower in Texas, it’s just a small problem. 

There are already claims that it’s not the lack of Wind power that matters, and that gas plants and others have failed due to a lack of “winterization”.

While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, wind only comprises 25% of the state’s energy mix this time of year. The majority of outages overnight were plants fueled by natural gas, coal and nuclear, which together make up more than two-thirds of power generation during winter.

“The wind is not solely to blame,” said Wade Schauer, research director of Americas power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie. He estimates that about 27 gigawatts of coal, nuclear and gas capacity is unavailable, in part because the cold has driven up demand for natural gas for heating. “That’s the bigger problem.”

UPDATE: Trying to figure out how many MW of Wind versus Gas/Coal/Nuclear went down

ERCOT is at EEA 3 Emergency Warning currently with reserves of less than 1,000 MW.

ERCOT announced Sunday night that it had set a winter record for power demand, reaching 69,150 megawatts between 6 and 7 p.m. ERCOT said Monday morning that 30,000 megawatts of power generation had been forced off the system.

The ERCOT Real time demand at this point: 46GW. Wind is 4GW now. But Proletariat Chris reported Texas wind power was just 900MW out of 31,000MW as of about 6 hours ago. Ryan Maue reports that there was almost no wind in Texas today.

 

See #Uri 

h/t RicDre and WUWT

For Fun: what people in Texas do for entertainment on a snowy day: (This video may not display in Firefox.)

Texas on a snow day!!! #Dallas #texas #snow pic.twitter.com/zI1jVB9V5I

— Bullish Brit (@spacthat1) February 15, 2021