The Great Texas Blackout of ‘21

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many scientists are on board with the thought that the earth's population exceeds the earth's carrying capacity. issac asimov said that back in the 70s and it has only much gotten worse since then. we sentient beings and all our animals and stuff are choking this earth, and there will be hell to pay sooner than we think.

Luckily, the rule of people in developed countries having less children seems to be worldwide - when nations become "developed", drive to spawn countless babies lowers a lot.
It makes sense - when chances that all your children reach maturity approaches almost 100%, you don't need to have six so maybe one would survive.
Humans are incredibly adaptive.

it makes me feel like an incomplete human.

Texas Legislature held marathon hearings a week after the freeze. That testimony, and an increasing flow of information from operators on the ground, has produced a more complete picture of what went wrong during a storm that plunged Texas into a deep freeze colder than most of Alaska.

Federal and state tax policy have encouraged the overbuilding of wind, and to a lesser extent, solar power, resulting in cheap, subsidized power flooding the Texas grid. This inexpensive but unreliable power has acted as a powerful disincentive to build needed natural gas power plants.

In the past five years, Texas saw an increase of about 20,000 megawatts of installed wind and solar capacity with a net loss of 4,000 megawatts of gas and coal-fired power plants. This 4,000 megawatts, had it been built or not prematurely retired, would have saved lives during the 2021 St. Valentine’s Day Storm.

We know that wind turbines were affected, with half of them freezing up. Over the course of 2019, Texas wind produced about 34% of its capacity – from hour-to-hour and season-to-season, sometimes more than 70%, sometimes close to zero. At one point during the storm, solar was producing no electricity while wind produced about 1% of its potential output. Since electricity must be produced the moment it is needed, that meant that natural gas power plants had to make up the shortfall.

The emerging data from thermal – gas, coal, and nuclear – power plants suggests that there were some cold-related failures. But, as ERCOT struggled to keep the lights on, the grid became unstable, tripping additional power plants offline to protect their massive generators from destructive interaction with a fluctuating line frequency.

As ERCOT issued the order to start load shedding – rotating blackouts – some of the darkened circuits included vital oil and gas infrastructure. This uncoordinated move starved natural gas power plants of their fuel – leading to a further loss of power and the widespread and incorrect rumor that wellhead and pipeline freeze off contributed to the disaster.

When these systems lost power, gas production dropped 75%. An Obama-era environmental rule that forced oilfield compressors to switch from natural gas to electric likely made things worse. Eventually, power was restored, and natural gas production ramped back up to meet electricity generation demand.

Source: Texas' blackouts – here's the truth about why they happened and what we have to do next

Fox News. Well, no ax to grind there, no siree...

the rightwing war with reality continues and accelerates.

^^^too GD CHEAP to maintain their own equipment. as well as stupid.