I think I got all my pipes drained dont see any leaks yet. Was kind of impressed with my daughter. I found her outside today cleaning driveways for $5....

The reality is there is a huge story underlying the shortage. Every pundit cherry picks the parts of the story to make their point, but the reality is, the whole story is bigger than any one pundit may say. But the bottom line is ... Government Subsidy to bring about a Green New Deal ... a.k.a. ... the Climate Change bull shit. Just look at ALL the facets of the story.

1) Coal Plants have been and are being decommissioned based on the B.S. Government ruling that CO2 is a "pollutant". Coal, Nuclear, Oil and Gas are the ONLY sources that can provide reliable base load.
2) Wind Turbines are going up like pandhandlers on corners because of Government Subsidy, connected to Climate Change Legislation. ... AND .. yes, the damn things froze up.
2A) Wind Turbines and Solar count fully towards capacity, but only run at a fraction of capacity, like at 17%. Thus ERCOT reports X MW capacity, but this is a fake number, because wind and solar NEVER run anywhere near capacity,
3) Natural Gas plants, the best choice to replace coal is NOT subsidized, ... because it is still a fossil fuel. ... back to the Green Bull Shit again.
4) ERCOT and the isolated grid in Texas is a creation from the Texas Government to insulate itself from the Federal Government and its stupid push for Climate Change Regulation.
5) Here's a twist ... the crash in NG price in 2008 never recovered, decreasing production, .... and the cold snap created a run on NG (tanks, and home heating), decreasing the amount available to the NG power plants.
6) LASTLY .... just poor management!! Yes it is true, the Texas Government should have force shut non-essential business. Hell people in Dallas can't drive to begin with .... add ice and it's a catastrophe (reference the 100 car pile up). They would be better off staying at home. Heck we've been staying at home anyway for the last year due to Covid. Further ERCOT did a poor job of managing and preparing for the storm. They KNEW this thing was coming at least 2 weeks in advance, and failed to up base load production. Summer is usually the time when Texas experiences top load, .. not winter. Thus, many plants go down in the winter for maintenance ..... they could have brought the gas fired plants back on line, but they didn't. But then again, not that it would have mattered, because there wasn't enough NG reserve to cover the increase in production.
7) .. and LAST of the LAST ... independent grid or not, ERCOT should have designed a grid that could import electricity from other places in emergency situations. It's no different from having Solar Panels on your house! You use all of your electricity, but when your demand exceeds the Solar Panel's capabilities, ya have to buy a bit from the electric company. That was just stupid design.

Virtually all of this is completely wrong. First off, here's a wind turbine in Mawson Station, Antarctica...

...seems to be working just fine. So if Texas is having a problem with theirs, blame Texas in particular, not wind turbines in general.

"Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter," The Washington Post reports. "But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter," and the losses tied to thermal plants mostly "relying on natural gas dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines by a factor of five or six." According to ERCOT, wind power generation is actually exceeding projections.

One nuclear reactor and several coal-fired plants went offline, but "Texas is a gas state," Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas, told The Texas Tribune. And "gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now." Instruments and other components at gas-fired power plants iced over, and "by some estimates, nearly half of the state's natural gas production has screeched to a halt due to the extremely low temperatures," as electric pumps lost power and uninsulated pipelines and gas wells froze, the Tribune reports.

https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-grid-failed-mostly-065217364.html

By all accounts, Texas is getting 2/3 of the power from both solar and wind, and only 1/3 of the power from nuclear and fossil fuels.

https://www.statesman.com/story/new...ural-gas-renewable-green-new-deal/6780546002/

So Texas would actually be doing much better if it had 100% renewable energy, rather than only 22%.

In October 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that renewables generated 22% of the state’s energy, while gas generated 51.8%.

In ERCOT’s plan for this winter, it expected that thermal and hydro resources, i.e. gas, coal and water, would need to generate 67,000 megawatts per hour during a high demand event to support the state. This didn’t take into account a historic snow storm where demand would increase and supply would be threatened.

On Monday, frozen instruments and a limited gas supply forced 30,000 MW/h of power offline. This was half of what ERCOT believed they would need. According to the agency, wind turbines account for less than 13% of the total generation that was lost. The majority of which was coal and gas.

So yes, there are some issues with renewable energies during extreme weather events, but those issues are only a sliver of a larger problem that has left hundreds of thousand in the dark.

The problem for ALL generation was proper winterizing. The Texas utilities weren’t prepared for a cold wave of this depth and magnitude. The blame isn’t with the gas pipelines, nuclear plants, wind turbines etcetera that had to shutdown but the ERCOT and generation leaders who failed to prepare. Another possible contribution is the impact on the grid where there wasn’t enough capacity to maintain line voltage units were tripped offline to protect the generators. That’s a common impact when there’s a wide area power outage. If a large generator or transformer fails catastrophically it takes months to years to replace. They are protected from overloads which would occur if a generator was asked to do too much.
Unfortunately that isn’t something that can be addressed in the few days warning they had. That’s not to excuse the lack of preparation but to frame it properly. I saw this in the 70s & 80s when Louisiana refineries had to shut down when it froze because their water lines weren’t insulated. It took millions of dollars and years to properly address the issue. It will here too.
Finally I don’t know what the predictions and odds were for a weather event like this to occur and what the economic justification was. However it happened and there will be a rush to fix the issues exposed by last weekend. So while blaming the equipment may be satisfying it doesn’t do much to analyze the issue and find a solution.

I’m not reading all of that, but Wind turbines are not created equal. Ones you see in Alaska won’t won’t in Texas heat and Texas ones won’t work in Alaskan cold.

Science isn’t a strong suit of yours so I stopped there.

Also, as Winston said, they waited too long before they attempted to bring idle gas online. It doesn’t work like that.

The fault is of Texas.

I'm not even going to read or respond to what ever that guys name is. Stupid is as .... well, it's just stupid.

But to you and Winston's and my point earlier .... in order to bring the gas plants back on line, they would have had to bring up gas production as well. The crash in NG price in 2008, combined with government subsidy for wind, has pushed all construction to wind and solar. The Gubmint conveniently omitted gas (a fossil fuel) from the "subsidy mix". A dude in houston, CFO for some group, dismantled and sold off three ongoing NG plant construction projects, simply because it wasn't economical at the time to finish building them. Electricity in Texas is ridiculously cheap compared to most places. ... well ..... errrr ... was cheap.

Anybody else see the problem?? Cutting Coal use by 50% is a problem.

U.S electricity generation by source: Natural gas vs coal - Washington Post - details energy production by source. You'll notice in the upper midwest and NE, where it gets really cold .... coal and nuclear is king. wind and solar ... not so much.

Look at the number of fossil fuel plants that were impacted by the storm. More gigawatts dropped due to problems at fossil fuel plants than wind. This on both absolute and percentile measures. It wasn’t the mix of fuel that was the problem. It was that none of the generation methods were prepared to handle the cold.
It was exacerbated by the islanding of the Texas grid. They couldn’t import power to make up for the loss of generation. They were hoisted on their own petard due to false pride and arrogance.

This is just wrong .. and a lie.
Read .. The Day After Tomorrow: Renewables Fail Edition – Watts Up With That?

Wind and Solar provided a whopping 8% of Texas Electricity for Feb 16th. Yet, they are over 20% of the total capacity. The politically motivated dip shits in politics and the media are scrambling to wave hands .. with comments like "a handful of wind turbines froze up". As Middleton notes .. when you only have two handfuls, one handful is half of what you got.

It won't let me copy the graphs ... but you'll note, Wind took a HUGE hit compared to ALL of the others.

My personal preference is to use COAL and NUCLEAR at full capacity and NG at 60% load as the base load. Wind and Solar and NG are then used as supplement. There is a reason Coal and Nuclear are the preferred sources up north. ... and have been for decades!!! .... OH .. and screw the Global Warming NUTS. I'm all in on Wind and Solar when they discover a way to store the electricity. (actually, there is a way, but nobody is focusing on it, ... but that's a discussion for a different day).

Winston ... you are better than that.

If Wind is running 1000 MW .. .and Gas is running 10,000 MW ... and they both go down 10 percent ... well of course NG went down more in MW (1000) than wind (100).

As you can see .. WIND is bullshit. NG Coal and Nuclear took a much lesser hit than wind, which decreased by 50%.

The breakdown for 16 February 2021:

MWh %
Wind Generation 73,395 ...................... 6%
Solar Generation 20,134 ...................... 2%
Hydro Generation 3,833 ........................0%
Other Generation 682 ............................0%
Natural gas Generation 759,708 ......... 65%
Coal Generation 204,655 . .................. 18%
Nuclear Generation 98,394 ................... 8%
Total 1,160,801 100%
EIA