the sleet hits the fan in Texas

Sweden Shows Texas How to Keep Turbines Going in Icy Weather

This is nothing exotic. There are big installations in northern U.S. and bunches in northern Europe using same technology. The bean counters in Texas thought they were being smart and frugal, but failed to consider the costs of the statistical tail events.

Texas also sustained a lot of damage to steam turbine driven power generation equipment. I don't know that water feed pipes can freeze without damage.

Insulate them, or just keep the water flowing. People build power plants in Minnesota, so there must be technology.

It's not improbable that the planet is in for a cooling trend. Just when we are tearing down coal and gas and nuke power plants and banning NG and relying on things that quit in a snowstorm.

Worst-case, we can launch a Manhattan project to amp up fracking and build gas-fired power plants. Pipelines might be slow to build, so we could build a lot of small liquifiers and transport LNG by truck. That could start to help in just a few years.

California is busy designing an energy crisis too, and it doesn't even snow much here.

The state that just asked for federal aid over 4 inches of snow is currently proposing a bill to secede.

Even a Chevy Volt with summer tires handles 4 inches of snow adequately

Apparently a solar panel or a windmill doesn't. At least the Volt doesn't need to be charged, so will go when there's a blackout. Keep some spare gas cans around.

People are freezing to death in Germany too. Maybe that's what the Green thing is really about, reducing the human population.

I use the gas tank as a spare gas can, it's pressurized so fuel keeps a long time in there. If you don't use any for a couple months in warm climates the computer brings up the engine for a few minutes automatically to keep everything lubricated. Never had that happen to me it gets cold enough here regularly that the engine will come up to heat the cabin and battery coolant then shut down. a few ounces of fuel into the inline four space heater warms everything up to optimal operating quick and cheap, gas engines excel at producing waste heat...

Looking at a wind farm in Providence bay right now seems to be working fine and it definitely gets cold and snowy on the regular around here in winter.

Line crews are pretty fast around here even in inclement weather; haven't had a power outage lasting longer than 24 hours in ten years, at least. I have a small harbor freight generator in storage somewhere but for that length of time it's never really been worth the trouble getting out.

Times it's happened I just get some work done outside that needs doing during the day, read by lantern for a while then go to bed at 8 pm and it's back up the next morning, the sun and generally the power too, hey it was good enough for my ancestors here in the 1800s.

who is freezing to death in Germany? afaict they still get most of their energy from oil, coal, gas and nuclear

On Wednesday, 17 February 2021 at 11:09:43 UTC-8, John Larkin wrote: ..

... It was actually NG shortages that caused much of the problem.

A couple dozen people freeze to death each year in every major US city where it gets cold enough for that to happen; the homeless, elderly people with mental illness whose heat gets cut off, and other sad cases like that.

I did read that some homeless chose to sleep outside because they were scared of getting corona at a shelter

in any case, whether the power is green not wouldn't make a difference

That's what happens when you quit drilling gas wells.

It's a problem with pipelines and storage tanks, or the lack of. Sometimes they have too much and just burn it off. Sometimes not enough and frozen out.

On Wednesday, 17 February 2021 at 14:34:20 UTC-8, John Larkin wrote: ...

That wouldn't stop the wells and production facilities freezing.

It looks like the reason for the reduction in drilling is because of competition from other countries.

lol. texas could show sweden way more about air conditioning. sweden loses was more people to summers than texas ever could to heat or cold.

compare:

I read that Ted Cruz was cutting California down for their poor power grid not too long ago. Texas was bragging that they had an independent power grid so they would not fall into federal government rules. That means that if Texas runs short of power they can not tap into the national grid and get power from a state that has an excess of power. They cheapened out on the wind generators and did not provide heaters for them, so now they are worthless to the weather warms up. Texas prepared for worse case summer weather, but forgot it gets cold.

Now they want federal help.

Someone said they may be getting some power from Mexico now.

google german energy poverty

On Wednesday, 17 February 2021 at 15:18:12 UTC-8, John Larkin wrote: ...

It looks like the US is just as bad.

We have lots of ng, so it's a political issue here. When people sit in the cold and dark, they might be more sympatheic to fracking.

The greenies aren't anti-fracking or anti-nuke or anti-CO2. They are anti-energy and anti-people.

Do you mean french generated nuclear electricity and russian natural gas?