Texas had a record cold snap for the past 2 days, including snow and ice in Galveston. It pretty much shut down the city of Houston, 4th largest city in the U.S. brought to its knees by 12 degree temperatures and a light dusting of snow and sleet.
The worst has been the rolling blackouts. Roughly 2 Million people or more were without power at various times over the past 2 days. Some were without power for 2 days during the cold. My house lost power for 25 hours. The outages are intentional due to lack of electrical generation capacity. Over the state of Texas, over 6 Million had to endure long power outages.
Reason: The power companies were made to include up to 25% of power generation from "Green energy" sources, such as wind and solar. In case nobody noticed, there isn't a lot of sunlight in a snow storm. Also, when wind turbine blades get iced over, hundreds of even thousands of wind turbines are shut down. That happens during winter storms. Duh!!!!
Couple that with one of four nuclear power plants not on line, Texas shut down all of our large coal burning power plants and reliance on small (unreliable) suppliers... and you have a mess. From my understanding, at worst we had a deficit of 43 Megawatts vs. Required to keep customers supplied. The total need was about 69 Megawatts, but it just wasn't available. Families had to stay in the cold, people lost pets, etc... .
The "Green Agenda" makes our nation's energy very vulnerable. I don't mind wind and solar power, which is expensive energy and great when it works. My problem is when 50% of our electricity is generated by natural gas. That's a zero stock, instant supply issue. If it's ever disrupted, if someone shuts down the gas lines, the power plants instantly stop. That's 1/2 of a major state suddenly going dark.
We had big coal plants in Texas that carried a week or two of coal reserves, plus the coal was delivered by rail. That is not vulnerable to pipeline shutdown and it couldn't be instantly affected by supply disruption.
What we did by going "Green" is to make our economy and lives more vulnerable to being disrupted in case of emergency. That is a bad trade off. Clean coal power should be brought back as a stable, necessary part of our energy mix.
Just how isolated is the Texas 'grid'? I had never heard about Texas' isolation before, but it seems Texas made a conscious decision not to integrate with the federal grid? That would seem to be asking for trouble, if true. Statistically, there's always going to be somewhere in the US NOT needing much power so interconnecting the whole country just seems totally logical.
I understand power loss due to resistance, and that's why the grid operates at very high voltages. But you are saying power can be delivered from Texas to California (sold by Enron) but power cannot traverse the state itself? Some inconsistencies there.
I must say, Wind Turbines must be the ugliest things on earth!
I'm a huge fan of Nuclear. Ironically, Bill Gates is one of the foremost advocates of clean/safe nuclear. Another fun anomaly regarding Gates - he's totally hated by the left because of his wealth! He must be one of the most disliked people on earth.