Naturally, every discussion on the football side ends up in a political pissing match. Right. On. Cue.
PNW finally thawing out. 2-4 inches of ice mixed with snow. Bought two 4-wheel drive vehicles to handle this…and to destroy the ozone layer. Feel vindicated after both plowed right through the slush with ease. Definitely something my Honda Accord couldn’t do.
Be safe Texans!!!
While I did attend UH, most of my life I’ve lived in the Midwest. The ice and snow on the roads, especially black ice is especially dangerous. I remember we had an ice storm in Houston back in 1985. I just bought my first “new” car, where I was the first owner… I called my boss and told her, “I grew up in this stuff, I know how to drive in it, I don’t trust the rest of you, I’m staying home.” I remember cars on the west loop trying to get over the SW freeway. A lot weren’t making it.
Also, don’t forget your water pipes. You don’t want the water in them to freeze and burst. If you don’t want to shut the water off, keeping the water on a trickle will do the trick too.
We got six inches of snow last night. Here, it’s not a big deal. It’s all relative.
Be safe, be careful.
I spent much of the last few days pulling people out of ditches and driving them to their homes. Frankly Ester performed flawlessly. She is a 92 Bronco with arb air lockers on both front and rear diff, 4.56 gearing and 35 in. AT’s. I built her for times like these. She gets about 12 mpg.
We have been without electricity for over 36 hours and then we got a call last night telling they were shutting down our water lol.
A good friend came over at 3 am and shut off my water heater in the attic.
Not complaining because we are blessed with great neighbors!
Go Coogs!
I moved to St. Paul, MN in Oct of '73 and the next weekend I went and had snow tires put on my car. All the native Minnesotans laughed at me and acted like I was an idiot for having them put on before the first snow. About 3 weeks later, it snowed and you would have thought those folks had lived in the tropics all their lives. People were getting stuck in the underpasses, wrecking trying to get over overpasses, running in the ditch, etc.
My co-workers were staying up all night waiting in line to get their snow tires on and coming into the office by mid day the next day. I had no problem since I had my snow tires already and I stayed off the freeway on the way to work.
Our power here in Katy went off at about 2:00am yesterday morning and just came on about 30 minutes ago. I guess all this green energy from windmills isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t remember the natural gas generators freezing up like the windmills. Oh yeah, there are also several plants down for maintenance that won’t be able to come back on line in time to contribute power this week. Our house is pretty well insulated so it didn’t get real cold inside – about 60°-- and had we covered the pet door, it would have been better. However the pipes in the attic froze, but have thawed this afternoon. Thank goodness for PEX pipes that don’t burst when they freeze.
Dang i feel like everyone I’m checking in on in Houston has lost power. Prayers to all
I am betting they figure something out to prevent them from freezing going forward. Whatever it is, the retrofit exercise could be expensive, but the new ones may have heaters the way some car seats (up north) have seat heaters in them. Innovation - just like your pipes that don’t break.
We’ll see.
If the regulators had limits on how many plants, or how much generation, could be out at once and schedule maintenance accordingly, it could do without the wind power and rely on fossil fuel like always in the past. Natural gas burns clean.
Yep, but you know the message that hydrocarbons are BAD! We’re committed to wind now. Might as well fix the root causes of this issue which is none freezing wind turbines and reserve supplies from multiple sources.
Denmark doesn’t seem to have issues with wind power. Hell, most of the US doesn’t either. We went cheap in Texas and didn’t prepare anything. We also made our bed with our energy system overall.
I am 30 miles north of SA.
It was a combination of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and wind energy problems that produced this crisis. Natural gas power plants did “freeze up.”
Texas doesn’t have a problem with wind power. We have made a signiifcant investment in it over the past 1/2 decade. We lead the nation in wind power and it now makes up 20% of our capacity. Howver, much of it didn’t winterize the infrastructure to address a once in 10 year event. Texas will fix the problem.
Our producing capacity has been chasing the problem of growth and summer time significant demand and not a once in 10 year or more winter time event.
I was replying to Red80 who says there is a problem with wind. There is not for those who didn’t cut costs. Sure, once in 10 years but now people are dying because of that cost cutting decision. Other power plants were not prepared either and the major loss was not from wind. As THE energy state, this should not happen.
There has to be a way to heat them. There are heated runways, roads, and many other things. I bet Texas has not been under a winter weather pattern like this in well forever…So it comes down to opportunity cost. How much does it cost to add that tech and is it worth it.
But it did as we go through a major transformation of energy sources and continued significant growth. It was a scenario that wasn’t contemplated (ice storms freezing up 50% of 20% of the capacity) and as the article points out it is far more complicated then just wind turbines freezing up.
The real story is yet to be determined across all those complications. We’ll figure it out once we determine what the real problem was and we’ll solve it.
All the political driven finger pointing on both sides is a waste of time and energy.
Agreed. And Tech, whether battery storage, efficient panels, etc. is developing by leaps and bounds. Put a Tesla battery pack in your house, heat the panels and this would not be a problem.
There is a way to heat them…they are just the more expensive option.
Texas has never been know for its 'belt and suspenders ’ approach to infrastructure. They like to go cheap passing on the costs to whoever they can.
I agree with all this. My main point is that it is ignorant to blame wind power for what is going on. Still no excuse for what is happening. Warning signs were there before (2011 specifically) and they were ignored. Let’s hope there actually is change and it isn’t just brushed off as “weather like this wont happen again for a long time”.
Yes, there is and they come with winterizing technology (if ordered I assume). Anything that produces energy should be able to utlize some of that energy to heat them to prevent such an occurrence. The article I posted talked about winterizing was a request by regulators on ERCOT but ERCOT didn’t make the requirment on the wind producers to become reality.
" And in 2011—when Texas’s wind power capacity was one-third what it is now—state regulators ordered ERCOT to make winterizing updates. Since winterization is not mandatory, though, it’s not clear what the utility actually did to upgrade the grid."
I am pretty sure a post mortem will be to retrofit with winterizing technology all wind turbines if a wind turbine is going to be connected as a reliable power source to the Texas grid.
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