I live in Houston, and my power went out at 1:40 am Monday and just came back an hour ago. Texas gets 23% of its power from windmills, some from solar, and they iced up and shut down, so much for wind and solar. We also had four “Peak Power Stations” who, for some reason, weren’t on standby like they should have been, and the water froze so that they couldn’t get 12 turbines online; that’s 28 megawatts down because of incompetence.
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15 replies on “So much for windmills.”
Center for Industrial Progress president and founder Alex Epstein had this to say.
https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-glenn-beck-program/texas-power-failure-wind-unreliable?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
The only way Abbot can save his political life in Texas right now is to get on the air with a public address to Texas and the first words out of his mouth should be something close to –
“My fellow Texans, I’m very sorry. I’ve made a terrible mistake. I know the nature of that mistake and we’re going to correct it today.
I thought I was doing the right thing. Clearly I wasn’t.
Green energy has failed spectacularly. Henceforth we in Texas will no longer rely on it or develop it.
We will keep the wind turbines we already have and repair them as best we can with the parts we have available. But we will build no more of them.
Instead we will produce new power systems and explore options with conventional fuel as well as Nuclear. I wish to share with you some thoughts on this subject. But nothing is set in stone yet, and I’m willing to listen to all options.”
“Also – any remaining Covid restrictions are hereby null and void. I’d rather the people of Texas decide for themselves the risks they are willing to take rather than mandating anything. In short – I’m far more concerned at the moment with people freezing to death than contracting a flu that most people can survive.”
If he takes responsibility and announces a one-eighty on green energy and restores Texas to pre-covid status. He might – MIGHT – be remembered as a great Texas governor.
But I hold out little hope for this scenario. In fact I think Austin will double-down.
And they want us to trade our evil, fossil fuel burning cars for EVs. Just the thing for an already fragile power grid, millions of vehicles charging up over night! Brilliant! Provided that the grid doesn’t collapse, as is being demonstrated right now. At least with a gas powered vehicle you can manually open your garage door, fire it up and go find someplace where you can buy food & other necessities. They’ll have to pry my fingers off the wheel of my gas burner before I’ll buy an EV.
From up here in perpetually frozen, cloudy, gloomy western New York state, I hope all you folks who are experiencing this crazy weather are okay and that you get your power back soon.
We live 40 miles north of Austin. Power was off for 6 hours yesterday morning with temps at -3F. It came back for the better part of the day, but has been rolling on and off all day today. I hope we can get something hot to eat and warm the houses before it kicks off again.
My thought was to give country folks a break and maximize those blackouts in areas that voted for the BS that put us here. We can’t get in or out because of ice-covered roads that the county won’t plow or sand.
I’m 66 and not too healthy. I’ve fallen on the ice five times so far. Screw this.
Is this fatal for Governor Abbott? Does this turn Texas blue? It is the kind of failure than can induce realignments regardless of where the true blame should fall.
What does Abbot have to do with it all? I thought he responded well and is saying he will push the legislature to investigate. Let’s see if he gets it done before we level any judgments. This whole problem wasn’t just caused by windmills either. There are a lot of backroom deals being made when it comes to public utilities; they’re a cash cow for politicians.
I don’t claim to know, but I heard somewhere that part of the problem was a law requiring Texas to get _____% of its power from wind and solar. Thus, when wind and solar went down, everybody else was required by law to shorten power production.
As I said, I don’t know that that’s true, and it would surprise me very much if the response of power plant managers in these circumstances wasn’t “F___ that”… but the existence of such a law wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit.
When things go this wrong people blame the man in charge and they blame the party in charge. It may be irrational, but that is what they do. See e.g. hurricane Katrina and GWB.
If such a law exists, I can’t tell you whether or not it has anything to do with Abbott. It could be federal, it could be far left Austinites overriding him, it may predate him.
Your correct, it does pre-date Abbott and Perry. To be honest, the deeper I dig the more of a fucked up mess I find, and it’s all for the benefit of the rich and powerful in control, and not we, the sheeple.
The sheeple’s ignorance is as much to blame as any representative we elect because we rarely know anything about who we vote for.
But the MSM has been assuring us it has nothing to do with wind turbines and everything to do with malfeasance on the part of Greg Abbott…….
Well, as long as he’s damned, Gov Abbot should tear those windmills down, and melt them down to use as raw material for another Nuke plant!
Build a nice 180 megawatt Thorium reactor and tell those leftards to go pound sand.
I agree, and with common sense like that, you’ll never have a career in politics! That’s meant as a compliment, by the way. A politician is a parasite. They can’t create, produce, or troubleshoot themselves out of a wet paper bag; they can only survive off of their host, we, the sheeple. We have a nuke plant near here in Bay City. I have a better idea for the wind turbines in question. Wait for a real windy day, and let them overspeed and blow. We can sell tickets and souvenirs too. Sell chunks of the blown windmills for so much a pound. There’d be billions, and we could put that towards two new nuke plants.
I’m in N. Dallas. My power went down at 10:40 on Monday, and I was without power for 36 of the following 48 hours. When I woke up yesterday morning at 5 am it was 3 degrees outside.
There’s a nuclear power plant 50 miles from here, and this state produces more natural gas than anyone else on the planet. And yet my 82 year old mother-in-law was having to fight to keep from freezing to death, one of my coworkers has 9 different family members in his house rooming with him because he’s the only one with power, and some people I know have been spending the night in their cars because it’s the only warm space available.
This is unacceptable.