By now everyone in the US has some idea about the catastrophic failure of the Texas electric infrastructure…..we all have seen the pics of broken water pipes and freezing weather…..the deaths and the agony that it has produced……and the reports are that Texas was very very close to a meltdown completely…

Texas was “seconds and minutes” away from an even greater catastrophe when the decision was made to bring in what were supposed to be rolling blackouts, according to officials who operate the only standalone power grid in the lower 48. Officials at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Thursday that when a winter storm took more than half of its winter generating capacity offline early Monday just as demand was surging, operators had to act fast to prevent a worst-case scenario—equipment catching fire and substations blowing—that could have left many Texans without power for months, the Texas Tribune reports. ERCOT chief Bill Magness said that if operators hadn’t followed emergency procedures, the grid would have been overwhelmed, causing infrastructure damage that would have led to an “indeterminately long” crisis.

“The operators who took those actions to prevent a catastrophic blackout and much worse damage to our system, that was, I would say, the most difficult decision that had to be made throughout this whole event,” Magness said. He said a blackout where “we have to start the grid from scratch and power could be out for an indeterminate amount of time” is the “disaster scenario that’s our central job to avoid,” per BuzzFeed. So much power generation was knocked offline that the blackouts lasted far longer than expected. By Thursday, some 325,000 homes and businesses were without power, down from 3 million a day earlier, the AP reports. Senior ERCOT director Dan Woodfin, when asked how regulators could stop this from happening again, said one of the biggest problems was natural gas wellheads freezing up. (The cold weather has also caused a water crisis.)

This was a disaster of their own making.

You see the Texas infrastructure gurus decided that they would not be part of the nationwide electric grid…..so they did not have to follow federal regulations and the lack of concern in the past made this disaster possible…..plus they cannot borrow power from other states because they want to be self-sufficient (and how did that work out for these idiots?)

Texas seems to always have the idea of secession in the back of their politician’s narrow minds…….https://lobotero.com/2021/01/19/is-there-a-texit/

I see that conservatives are blaming clean energy for the problems in Texas…..7% of the energy comes from wind….BTW apparently they do not know that the energy in Antarctica comes from wind so that blows their idiot lie out of the water…..

Stupidity of deregulation and ill prepared is the problem….in other words the slugs in the state legislature.

Going it alone is not always the best idea…..just ask residents of Texas.

Then there is Se. Cruz that could have used this as a teaching moment for his kids to give them a sense of community instead they went to Mexico for a vacation.

And yet he will NOT be held accountable for his actions…..just like his butt buddy Trump is not held up.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo