clearly they did not "work there asses off" if a few days of sub zero weather ruins there grid.

like, infrastructure can survive these kinds of conditions, it does every day in other states and countries. you just have to accept that you are paying the cost to do things properly. and those costs are what the free market is going to deprioritize, because "hey, when is texas gonna be so cold?" just like in california "why should we build our buildings so strong, a bad earthquake doesn't happen that often?"

well, it turns out, often enough.

whereby when you have reliability, not cost as your goal, you start asking questions like, "how many millions of people will be without power if i dont have the infrastructure to survive this?" and "how many hundreds of those people will really need power, like medical devices, heaters etc?"

you start asking people and service oriented questions when you stop letting the free market determine if everything costs too much.

and then you start building more robust infrastructure. and then things like this dont happen.

Natural gas has its advantages, for heating and cooking...may this serve as lesson for all the proponents of green energy. It is suicidal to rely on just electricity.

its the natural gas system that has failed here. not green power. lol.

This has been a historic cold spell over a huge region. The temps were terrible, though the length of time of those low temps is what really caused the disaster. In SW Oklahoma the old record was 83 consecutive hours below freezing. We are going to smash that record and it looks like we will top 300. We had two days where the high for the day was lower than the past record low for the day. Unprecedented cold. States other than Texas had rolling blackouts, though at lower levels.

Trying to stop this from happening would be like trying to stop flooding and wind damage from a Cat 5 hurricane. They damn sure could have done better. It is not as simple as some of you are making it out to be.

The green sources had a higher outage rate than the thermal sources, as a percentage of installed capacity.

and?

texas relies on natural gas and oil for far more power than my state, where it is colder, for longer, every single year. green power can absolutely be winterized. its not a green power problem any way you slice it.

this is a lesson in why you dont privatize your grid to cut costs.

It is electricity made by natural gas that failed.
Agree that is not green per say, but my point is that homes relying just on electricity are vulnerable, as opposed to homes with direct gas hookups.

No, the lesson is much more complicated than that.

Just another peachy day in Texas south of I-10, just so happens to be snowing at 2:45pm. We will get through it.

ah. i dont honestly know enough about in home generation by solar to argue one way or another here.

either way, its not a green energy problem. its an infrastructure one.

it really isnt. but that would go over your head.

I'm not hearing of many complaining. Deal with it. Might be a bunch of fake news out there.

Dream on, kid. You can't even spell a 4 letter word.

There will be a lot more blackouts like that with reliance on green energy.
You can bet your bottom dollar on that.

Look at California, they have most solar panels, and most blackouts.

The infrastructure problems will be exacerbated because green energy is intermittent by nature. Unless we are talking nuclear, but then better start building them reactors real quick.

the texas situation does not support this conclusion.

Let's look at some actual numbers.

Here's the drop in capacity for the 4 main categories, as of Monday at 8PM, compared to what they were putting out on Sunday:

Gas down to 71%, compared to the previous day.
Coal down to 74%
Nuclear down to 74%
Wind down to 8%

Wind was putting out a whopping 649 MW.

Glad that wind is only responsible for about 11-12% of normal output.

yeah, lets fix this dripping faucet when you have 3 or 4 full blast going down the drain.

again, there are many states that are colder than texas, that use wind and solar to a higher extent without issue.

texas is a poster child for a oil and gas power system, and when it fails, conservatives are all like "but green power"

lol.

I have 200 towers just north of me. They were all shut down. The length of time with crushing low temps was never expected or planned for.

This is far more complicated than you are attempting to make it.

it really isnt.

plenty of colder states that regularily see weather like that of texas run wind and solar power to a larger extent without issue.