Sure, no point in wasting a natural disaster.
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I agree. The US is doing it’s part to make things better but is still taking all the blame despite that fact.
Windmills and solar panels are great in addition to regular sources of power. Natural gas is clean, hydro is clean, coal is even cleaner than it used to be, nuclear is clean (but troublesome to most).
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My poor Florida born and raised cousin lives near Houston now and is having to endure below freezing temps while im in the mid-Atlantic enjoying a warm sunny day. Luckily her house has not lost power, so far.
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66 degrees today from 36 yesterday. Effing nutty. I just go with it, as does my bear dog/doodle.
Yes coal plants are cleaner than they used to be with regards to air pollution but the problematic ash ponds (for the bottom and fly ash) have not gone away. Nuclear power is clean in operation though we have yet to figure out what to do with the resultant nuclear waste. Decommissioning the power plants when their time is up is both time consuming and not cheap. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/decommissioning-nuclear-facilities.aspx.
I am not against Nuclear power but I would add an * when saying it is clean. I hope Bill Gate’s and his TerraPower project pan out. But I am leery of existing nuclear power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
A gollf course with very few trees is available in Chesapeake,Va builit on coal ash. Fairly cheap tee fees and open times. You can see for miles.
While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state’s wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it’s rated for. Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there’s no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast.
Power supplied by wind (green) is coming in ahead of forecasts.
So while having Texas’ full wind-generating capacity online would help, the problems with meeting demand appear to lie elsewhere. An ERCOT director told Bloomberg that problems were widespread across generating sources, including coal, natural gas, and even nuclear plants.
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Carbon emission per capita, 2019, by national ranking:
USA : Ranked 13 @ 15.52 m.t./hd.
China : Ranked 37 @ 8.12 m.t./hd.
India : Ranked 103 @ 1.90 m.t./hd.
Source:
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I assume you are referring to the one mentioned in the 60 Minutes segment.
Edit: My last few posts are pushing things off topic for which I apologize.
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Anything to do with the Texas Cold Snap and refinery closing??:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/supertanker-loads-diesel-at-rotterdam-in-latest-sign-of-glut
January 1981 maybe? It was 5 degrees in Mobile, and I saw dozens of water spouts on the helicopter ride in.
The resultant nuclear waste gets carried by sailors in ships and dumped in the ocean. Or carried in ships to some third world country.
Sure, but in places like Wales, you have walls of the stuff about to kill hundreds of people in one very quick event, the soils are not stable.
Better check your sources. From a friend who works in the industry:
40hrs without power and counting. Some funny not-funny stories below, may be long for some though.
Funny story. A New Hope. TX aspires to be the new Silicon Valley. If you are a multi $B company from California or Washington St, you are probably looking at moving all of your operations to Austin or Houston. Cutting cost, bringing jobs, all the goodies. Great, right? You may be thinking twice now. Because 1/2 inch of snow and some mild freezing temps and your operations come to a halt and you are flushing toilets with lake water.
Funny Story 2. The Empire strikes back. TX has a capacity to produce est 86GW of power. For the winter months about 50% of this capacity is put offline (mostly natural gas and coal blocks) as it requires about 40GW give or take. With a winter storm like that, the predicted demand is around mid 60GW. Natural gas spare capacity is the fastest to put back online, in a matter of hours, coal takes days. Friday before the freeze, the spot prices on natural gas skyrocketed to $600/MMBtu in the Midcontinent, normally trading at $3-$7 range. Several gas trading companies understand the supply/demand game extremely well and are in the business to take advantage of the market conditions (read: shake their customers down). This was actually Enron’s business model in CA in the late 90s. In an unregulated market, they are free to do this. No generator (power plant) will be buying gas at this price because they will be taking a loss. No official or a company rep will ever admit it, but the easiest solution is to ride the freeze out, nevermind the 4M customers without power (as of Feb 15). You are just a loss-creating nuisance at this point.
Funny Story 3. The return of the Small Government. TX power grid is not part of the national grid. TX wanted to avoid federal regulations so they put a corporation in charge of managing power distribution, ERCOT (it actually has reliability in its name, no joke). It manages the supply-demand and makes decisions on power distribution. The state has full jurisdiction over ERCOT. Has anyone seen Greg Abbott in the last 2 days? Because his office has served 4M Texans a taste of free market at the price of near freeze experience.
More:
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Sounds about right, January 1981
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The way I understand it is similar to the way a river behaves when there is little change in elevation. The river tends to meander more.
Warming is occurring faster in the polar regions so there is less temperature gradient which causes the jet stream to meander more.
From here.
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A couple more links:
Still wasn’t what I was addressing: nuclear waste disposal and coal mining dumping.
Tornado comes, the generator flies awaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
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