I just know that I have to put the lid down when it's on "high" to get a burger sizzling! BUT, It cooks chicken thighs on low with the lid down slow enough their dripping don't catch fire like they try to in the summer.
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Watching the fallout from the weather in Texas - lessons to be learned.
- Thread Starter Tacos4me
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I just know that I have to put the lid down when it's on "high" to get a burger sizzling! BUT, It cooks chicken thighs on low with the lid down slow enough their dripping don't catch fire like they try to in the summer.
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"Failed to Winterize" could be a thing
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I will wait for the post mortem analysis.
Wind power works in much colder climes than Texas - e.g., NY state. It is all about being prepared - Texas was not prepared.
Also, how much of their problem was the power distribution system and not the power generation?
We have wind/solar and hydro here, and the recent outages were almost solely the distribution system due to the ice/snow and trees, not the generation facilities. It gets just as cold or colder on the east side of the Cascades as it got in Texas.
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As an interesting side note.
If Texas is anything like Florida.
Local building practices aren't helping owners of mild life and older housing.
Many places in Florida had no building codes (including weatherization requirements) until well into the 1980's - 90's.
I still marvel at some of the building practices I find in the families' 1970 house north of Daytona.
Overhead pipes in unheated (marginally heated) spaces......you bet... all over Florida and the south.
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True on hardening the power distribution grid.
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I lived for 10 years in a duplex (among a group of duplexes built the same year and design) that was built in the 60s. It had very little insulation. You could hear the wind and feel the cold coming off the Puget Sound which it overlooked.
I grew up in a farm house built in the late 1800s and it had/has no insulation, the electrical wiring was (is?) a fire danger, it was creaky, you could hear and feel the wind, and the pipes would freeze in the winter.
I now live in a triple wide manufactured home built in 1997. It once got down to 22* here one winter and no problems with the pipes as they are all insulated. The house is well insulated (R35) and heated (electric furnace and woodstove which can heat the house by itself if you can distribute the air using fans). I have had problems with external faucets though.
I grew up in a farm house built in the late 1800s and it had/has no insulation, the electrical wiring was (is?) a fire danger, it was creaky, you could hear and feel the wind, and the pipes would freeze in the winter.
I now live in a triple wide manufactured home built in 1997. It once got down to 22* here one winter and no problems with the pipes as they are all insulated. The house is well insulated (R35) and heated (electric furnace and woodstove which can heat the house by itself if you can distribute the air using fans). I have had problems with external faucets though.
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There's 50-100 billion reasons why that doesn't pencil out. Also, the last major freeze they had was in 2011, not 100 years ago.
Electricity in Texas before the storm was about 20% cheaper than the national average. For an average home, that works out to about $400 per year in savings. $400 x 10 years = $4000. What's it cost to fix a house or business full of broken pipes and water damage? Or how about a business that just had to close for a week because their lights and computers wouldn't turn on?
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"Can it be fairly summarized that solar and wind power are not to be counted on in this kind of weather event in Texas."
No, in my opinion it cannot be summaraized that solar and wind power are unreliable in a cold weather climate. Why do the wind turbines in Canada, Sweden or the American Midwest produce electricity year-round? The answer, in short, is that turbines in colder places are typically equipped with de-icing and other tools, such as built-in heating. In Texas, where the weather is almost never this cold, they viewed that expenditure as unnecessary.
The statement is cherry picking information to simply support an existing political opinion....
It is the same as someone else who is only in favor of renewable energy claiming diesel engines will not start in very cold weather, so every motor should be an electric motors...
Because diesel engines require much higher temperatures to fire the fuel, they've always been harder to start in cold weather.
To overcome this issue, a variety of heaters have been developed that keep various parts of the vehicle warm even when it isn't being driven. Some of these may be on the vehicle when you buy it; others you can buy and install later on if the need for them arises...
The failure is not that it was diesel or wind, the failure is that the operator decided the added expense of preparing for cold weather was not worth the cost.
We agree on that point, we just differ on what political party was the first to politize the weather emegency in Texas... Even though the failure was certainly not because wind power will not work in cold weather, right wing politicians and media tried to paint that false picture.
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Yes and no.
Wind and solar are among the most expensive power in Texas. The root problem is that they didn't have enough capacity, and to exacerbate this, some of the capacity failed due to extreme cold. If the same money had been spent on cheaper energy sources, they would be in better shape. So as usual, it's a lot of things going on at once and everyone is trying to mold it to fit their purpose.
Bottom line; this weather is extremely rare. Sometimes extremely rare events catch us out.
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Earlier in this thread I paraphrased a Greenie Dem talking head blathering into the leftist echo chamber that is Oregon PBS. The Texas wind generators DID NOT fail....they were operating properly within their design parameters.......The fact they they did not function at all was an indication of success given they were not designed to operate in the current Texas weather conditions. Green Double Speak spoken with a straight face.
There's absolutely no doubt weather hardened units could be installed....further raising the cost of an expensive power source. Those hardened units would probably be operationally less efficient 99.9% of the time when the hardening was superfluous, again increasing the cost of an expensive power source.
At some point you have to stop throwing good money after bad. Optimize wind generation for max efficiency 99% of the time and accept the fact it should not be relied upon in aberrant conditions Texas experienced. Harden and expand gas logistics and generation to take up the slack for the worst case scenario. Harden distribution as needed.
I'm going shooting.....
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It's about making choices.
So they gambled and lost their bet.
And now they have some fixing to do.
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Would this thinking also apply to a major earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone?
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Did they though? Amortize this week against the opportunity cost of the time value of the money it would have cost to harden the grid, over the next 120 years, and I wouldn't be shocked if they won. Could have won bigger, but winning is OK.
That reminds me of the LNG facility down along the Willamette sitting on ground that will 100% liquify when a major quake hits. Gotta consider that risk/reward factor though...I guess .
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You're correct, the grid operators and electric companies won. They didn't harden their assets and won't feel any repercussions from the outages. The people of Texas (end users) will carry 99% of the costs of the outages and the resulting damage caused by the outages. Let's celebrate!
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The important thing is to make people angry about it.
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The loss of life and treasure = a no win.
After the 2011 freeze event they knew that they should do better.
It's all politicized now with bomb throwers on each side.
Hopefully clear thinking people will be able to clean up the mess.
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Black swan theory - Wikipedia
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When was the last time it snowed in Texas? More recently than you think
Texas may be no stranger to extreme weather, but it doesn’t often get snow. 2021 has broken snow records. When was the last time it snowed in Texas?
www.thefocus.news
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