As Texas entered its third night on Tuesday with freezing temperatures and 3.3 million customers without electricity, the operator of the state’s unique power network, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), encouraged Texans who still have electricity to turn on lights. turn off. disconnect appliances and turn off the thermostat. People without power have found refuge elsewhere, if they could, or they sometimes use lethal means to generate heat.
Texas government Greg Abbott (R), and state lawmakers have called for investigations – and Abbott and others prominent GOP politicians wrong wind turbines and other renewable energy sources wrongly blamed for the failures of the energy grid in texas.
Abbott, Texas’ governor, blames solar power and wind for the eclipses in his state, saying “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States.” pic.twitter.com/YfVwa3YRZQ
– Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) 17 February 2021
“Some turbines have indeed frozen – although Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep it going through the winter,” The Washington Post reports. “But wind accounts for only 10 percent of the power generated in Texas during the winter,” and the losses associated with thermal plants mostly have “depending on natural gas a factor of five or six caused by frozen wind turbines.” According to ERCOT, the generation of wind power actually exceeds the projections.
One nuclear reactor and several coal-fired plants are offline, but “Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas. The Texas Tribune. And ‘gas is currently missing in the most spectacular way.’ Instruments and other components at gas-fired power plants froze ice, and ‘according to some estimates, almost half of the state’s natural gas production came to a standstill due to the extremely low temperatures’, as electric pumps lost power and uninsulated pipelines and gas wells frozen, the Tribune reports.
After a winter storm in 2011 cut off power to about 3 million Texans, a federal report warned Texas that the same network debacle would happen again if it did not adequately erode its power infrastructure and fuel reserves – reminding Texas that ‘many of those the same warnings were issued after similar disappearances 22 years earlier and did not heed, ” The Associated Press reports.
“Upgrades made after the winter storm in 2011,” The Texas Tribune notes, but “many generators in Texas have not yet made all the necessary investments to prevent equipment outages.”
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