The Great Texas Blackout of ‘21

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Green energy policies have failed Texas. Power outages, in large part caused by frozen wind turbines and snow covered solar panels, are still keeping nearly 500,000 Lone Star residents freezing in the dark. Now, Big Green and the wind and solar industries are in non-stop spin-mode, trying to drum up an alternative narrative to shift the blame from their failed policies.

"While millions of Texans remain without power for a third day, the wind industry and its advocates are spinning a fable that gas, coal and nuclear plants—not their frozen turbines—are to blame.

After imperiling the grid with their wind turbines and solar panels, Big Green is gleefully distributing talking points to the press about natural gas plants failing to keep up with demand."

"Thanks to the Clean Air Act, pipeline compressors run on electricity now rather than natural gas. So blackouts meant to conserve electricity can actually reduce it, by knocking gas-burning generators offline."

Source: CFACT

The main problem is now WATER.

Of course, in Texas, the water seems intricately related to the electricity.

It is not in NYC.

Our heating is steam heat, usually. Very effective.

Texas is going through a very hard time now...incredibly hard.

The Effect on Mexico

Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday, as the largest energy-producing state in the United States grappled with massive refining outages and oil and gas shut ins. The cold has killed at least 21 people and knocked out power to more than 4 million people in the state.

Mexico generates the majority of its power from natural gas, mostly imported from the United States. Latin America’s second-largest economy has reeled as imports via pipeline from Texas dropped by about 75% over the last week, causing billions of dollars of losses on power outages and factory closures.

Automakers Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen and Audi all reported disruptions to their Mexico operations.

The death toll is 22. One more death, and Gov. Abbott is responsible for as many deaths of people of color as the El Paso shooter.

Earlier, I made a reference to an "anti-dick pic law" in Texas:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/07/texas-passes-law-against-dick-pics-week-in-patriarchy

It was never about patriarchy or sexual harassment. It was about enforcing the evangelical Christian version of Sharia Law because "nudity is un-Christian". This is what Abbott was more worried about than 22 people freezing to death in a major winter storm.

Most people probably don't realise just how close Texas came to disaster this week. According to ERCOT officials:

The grid was "seconds and minutes" away from a catastrophic, uncontrolled failure that could have left residents without power for months.

"It needed to be addressed immediately," Bill Magness, president of ERCOT, said of the rolling blackouts that have lasted days rather than hours. "It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system."

He added if ERCOT had waited to cut the power "then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you’re sunk..

If the grid had completely gone down it could have taken months to repair.

We are not talking about a few temporary blackouts, as James Burke warned us back in the 1960s. Back in the 60s, James Burke realised the utmost importance of building a foolproof grid. Sadly our leaders and bureaucrats have now lost sight of that. And the public, comfortable in the midst of all the things technology now brings them, have no idea of the perils that await.

Source: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/20/james-burkes-technology-trap/

The eyes of Texas turned to an emerging water crisis Thursday evening after electrical power had been restored to nearly 2 million homes -- though hundreds of thousands of residents remained in the dark.

About 13 million Texans -- or nearly half the state's approximately 29 million residents -- were under an advisory to boil drinking water, according to reports.


Workers in Richardson, Texas, prepare to work on a water main that burst due to the extreme cold.

In Austin, "tens of thousands" of leaks in the water system, as well as burst pipes inside homes, were hurting that city's water supply, city Water Director Greg Meszaros told the Austin American-Statesman. Austin saw 325 million gallons of water leak out of its system between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the report said. "That is an incredible amount of water," Meszaros told the newspaper.

Two of Houston Methodist's community hospitals had no running water but still treated patients, with most non-emergency surgeries and procedures canceled for Thursday and possibly Friday, and burst pipes were repaired as they happened, said spokeswoman Gale Smith.

Source: Texas now grapples with water crisis as power returns to nearly 2 million homes