The Great Texas Climate Disaster, Part Duh!
They had plenty of warnings, but grid operators simply decided to save money by not winterizing their pipelines and equipment and Texas politicians let them get away with it.
Things are heating up in Texas, although not for the half-million or so souls who are still burning baby cribs to stay alive. That hint of hot air you sense coming from the Lone Star State is being both felt and generated by Governor Greg Abbot and his army of Republican apparatchiks blaming the completely predictable, totally preventable energy disaster on each other and the damned Democrats and fruity renewable energy socialists. Things have gotten so hot on the public relations front that Ted Cruz decided to cut short his vacation and return home on Thursday when someone pointed out to him that sunning his hairy buns on the beach in Cancun while constituents were literally freezing to death was about as good a look as trying to overthrow an American election.
Yesterday, Gov. Abbott made an appearance on Hannity where he complained about wind turbines, solar power, and Democrats who want to address the climate crisis. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” he said. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” Pinocchio would have been banned from a bowling alley for less.
In an earlier local TV interview, Abbot blamed the outages on frozen natural gas pipelines which is closer to the truth. Will Englund, energy reporter for The Washington Post, nailed the real problem:
What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
Former Governor Rick Perry, a perennial 40-watter if ever there were one, even said Texans would rather freeze than link their grid to other states and risk being subject to Federal regulations. I’m guessing he has several backup generators at his home.
It isn’t like the politicians and grid operators didn’t know or weren’t warned. In February of 2011, a similar incident occurred when an Arctic cold front sent freezing temperatures into Texas for four days in a row. Then, as now, equipment and instruments froze, resulting in the shutdown of power plants and triggering rolling blackouts. A similar event occurred in 1989.
A post-mortum analysis of 2011 disaster, issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets reliability standards, read, in part:
“Many generators failed to adequately apply and institutionalize knowledge and recommendations from previous severe winter weather events, especially as to winterization of generation and plant auxiliary equipment.”
It noted, in what is surely meant as comic understatement, that Texas power generators were “reactive as opposed to being proactive in their approach to winterization and preparedness.”
“The lack of any state, regional or Reliability Standards that directly require generators to perform winterization left winter-readiness dependent on plant or corporate choices.”
So there you have it, folks. There is no incentive for the grid operators to spend money on winterizing their equipment to avoid these large-scale humanitarian crises and so they’re not going to do it unless someone makes them, like they do, in say, Minnesota or Michigan where the pipelines and wind turbines never freeze. Surely, you don’t mind sacrificing your health and a few baby cribs to preserve your freedom and the holy power of a regulation-free-energy market.
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