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.
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.
Nuclear IS very dangerous in many ways. But Gates is pursuing safe, clean nuclear - a difficult goal indeed. He's not alone in this, but only a few people are pursuing it - you can't 'buy' this, because it doesn't exist yet; he's pioneering new technologies.
I'm an electrical engineer / physicist by training. All current Nuclear plants in the world are based on spin-offs from the US project to develop nuclear weapons started during WW2. Very little serious research has been done on 'alternative ways' to harness nuclear power because it is very expensive, very controversial, and payback is non-existent. Gates is doing just that. In fact, his approach actually takes spent fuel from current technologies as input, so it will reduce the amount of nuclear waste.