Merry Christmas.

Yep. Our grid here in Texas is basically isolated from the larger national grid, we connect or used to in only two places. So we can 'kinda' manage our own situation, and the best thing is we can be buffered from national grid emergencies.

But even here we allowed chinese wind and solar farms to operate on the grid, and even be counted as 'X' percent of available power. This is a false thing- wind and solar will never be available in emergency, they should never be counted as available power for the grid.

America needs more nukular, gas turbine, coal and geothermal type plants. We need more spinning reserve, wind and solar cannot pump out the current on a cold wintry night. But if we had 1 turbine sitting idle and were running the others with all the boilers up we could bring another turbine online in less than 20 minutes, add another 120 megawatts.

And because we actually performed all our maintenances our stuff ran, the most efficient plant I worked with was older gas turbine tech, but being older tech we had everything we needed to keep them running smoothly. We were more reliable than most of the newer engines, many of them had teething troubles and couldn't be online with our efficiency.

But you gotta do your maintenances, in States where that isn't a priority power can be kinda sketchy. ERCOT liked to keep one of our turbines in reserve, they knew we could spin right up whereas the newer ones might be balky.