The Great Texas Blackout of ‘21

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The devil is in the details.

Assuming your math is correct, what's it compare to in paying for fossil fuels to burn over the same time period + all other related facilities/maintenance costs?

And then dollar costs aside, what's the environmental cost of each? It's been established that burning fossil fuels is killing the planet, soooo, if we have other ways of generating energy without murdering the planet we all depend on for survival and perpetuation of our species, we should prrrrrobably do those things asap.

Some nice shower maths there. When you start playing with Lithium-ion calculations another interesting factor comes into play beyond dollar amounts - is there actually enough minable material on the Earth to build even one cycle of batteries and still have enough for laptops and electric cars?



The alternative is nuclear, a clean, safe and mature technology, which should cover us for a few hundred years at least. Most people are afraid of it because of propaganda from fossil fuel companies. The same companies who love promoting solar and wind because they know very well it's unworkable and will make us reliant on them in perpetuity.

Nuclear power generation is definitely safer than it's ever been, but AFAIK we still don't have a viable plan of what to do with radioactive waste material.. stuff that takes 10,000 years to break down is stored in tanks that are leaking after 50 years. That's the problem with nuclear power generation - what to do with the leftovers. ??

Who says all the metals mined for batteries have to come from Earth? They're not exploring mining the moon and asteroids for nothing. Never know - might be more metals somewhere else for us to use.

Solar doesn't take up as much land as you guys make it sound like. Ever more efficient panels & systems generate ever more electricity on smaller parcels of land. There's plenty of wide open space in Canada and the USA to stick solar farms and power everything with. While you say it isn't viable, watch and see, I bet it's gonna happen in our lifetimes.

It's a minor problem and there are many ideas to deal with it, some more feasible than others, though none quite as outlandish as creating a grand fleet of spacefaring mining ships so we can make batteries. It's minor because there really isn't that much of it to deal with (especially compared to the toxic solar panel waste explosion we're going to be hearing about soon). Nuclear plants have been operating for decades and many of them still store decades worth of waste on site.



This is a little ... optimistic? No doubt we will be mining things in space in the centuries to come, but we're not even close to the point where we can mine another Earth's worth stuff to make batteries.



Find out how much you'd need, it's pretty insane. And there are physical limits on how efficient solar panels can be - we're pretty near that limit. The insanity of a solar grid is one of the reasons why wind turbines are a popular "green" alternative, despite being mechanical (rather than all-but solid state like solar panels) and taking that much more effort to build and maintain.

Here have some videos on the house:



Interesting tidbits in the above: Germany increased its solar capacity in 2016 and yet saw a drop in annual solar energy generation - because it wasn't very sunny. Same with wind in the same year. It's a good demonstration of the reliability you can expect in terms of energy generation you get from solar and wind. You can build more panels and wind turbines and see less electrical power over an entire year. That's why you theoretically need a ton of battery storage - solar and wind are unreliable over timespans of months at a time. In practice, if magical battery technology does not appear, you need to overbuild renewable infrastructure (already costly in many ways) or you rely on fossil fuels.

Nuclear waste is a non-issue. The big disadvantage of nuclear is that the cost is much higher. It also cannot be ramped up in response to demand. Not to say that it doesn’t have a place in the system, but it isn’t a silver bullet.

It’s starting to look like the solution to intermittency is going to largely be power-to-gas. When the sun shines and the wind blows, produce a f**kton of hydrogen or biomethane with the excess electricity. When you need electricity, burn the gas. Burning hydrogen produces water (which is where you get the hydrogen from in the first place!), while burning biomethane is carbon neutral, and can be carbon negative with carbon capture. This is inefficient but that probably doesn’t matter.

Essentially, there’s more to energy storage than batteries. There are other technologies in the pipeline, like compressed air, or flywheels, or hydrogen fuel cells. Heat storage methods can also help keep homes warm in winter or even perhaps cool in summer.

It wouldn’t work with a crisis like this one, but intermittency can also be resolved through demand-side response, when things like washing machines or certain industrial processes automatically switch on and off when energy demand is high.

One last thing that it is important to mention is that this crisis was largely caused by failures with fossil fuel systems. Both petrol (gasoline) and methane (natural gas) experienced huge disruption in their supply, and even nuclear energy production was affected. Texas simply wasn’t built to withstand these colds. The system needs to be more robust regardless of everything else. Pointing the finger at renewables is a false narrative. 80% of Texas’s energy supply comes from fossil fuels and nuclear, with only about 7% from renewables - the disruption at fossil fuel plants had a much bigger impact on consumers than a few frozen wind turbines.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16 ... wer-storm/

I'm not sure what figures you are using, but I often find that the cost of storage systems (real or imagined) or backup generation aren't included or are glossed over (probably consciously in these stupid times) when the cost of solar and wind are calculated.

In some gushing paper from a dingy Westminster backroom a while ago, the LCOE of combined cycle gas turbines (solar and wind even cheaper than gas now guise!) were presented separately from solar & wind, ignoring that you explicitly need CCGT or diesel generators or better yet an entire fossil fuel grid backup to actually have wind and solar integrated and at all useful in the UK at present. It's like saying locomotives are cheaper than lorries over a 30 year timespan while hand waving away the cost of laying tracks, digging tunnels and bulldozing houses. Even when attempts are made, it's often a misleading snapshot of the current electricity grid - this problem of storage/backup externalities only gets exponentially worse the more variable generators you add to your grid.

Despite all the headlines, I'm not yet prepared to believe that solar and wind are actually cheaper than any currently used source of electricity and there are signs that may be the case.

Or perhaps more diplomatically:

Solar and Wind power are cheaper*

*batteries not included

Yet nowhere on Earth has a real plan for where or how to store nuclear waste for the next 10,000 years.. soo, yeah, that's a problem.

Sites designed for long term nuclear waste storage are being constructed right now in the US, the UK, Finland and Sweden to name a few. How's the fleet of space miners coming along?

Space miners will be in action before any government anywhere comes up with a container for nuclear waste that'll last 10,000 years.

No, global warming is.

They are closing coal fire power stations here in Australia, also.



We had the same sort of power problem in South Australia not that long ago.

Presumably, the majority of people wanted this.
Well, now they have to suffer the consequences of having an unbalanced power generation system.

Not my problem....... yet.

Did snow on the solar panels, and wind turbines being frozen, help or hinder power generation?

Not requiring power stations and grid operators to winterize their systems hindered power generation. Windmills are functioning perfectly fine in Alaska.

https://www.newsweek.com/texas-wind-tur ... ic-1570173

^ lol "Hasn't been necessary.." pretty sure they've been told more than once in the past that winterization is advisable because.. winter storms can happen. Easier/cheaper to just ignore it and let a few people freeze to death I guess.