Water lines to electrical power plants that use nuclear, coal, and natural gas have also frozen taking some of those offline. Texas relies on natural gas for the largest share of electrical power. Frozen natural gas wells, pipes, and controls have taken some gas fired plants offline as well.
Good article in the NY Times about this, it was on the front page of our local paper too. Since it's behind a firewall online, I'll simply paste a few of the useful facts for
some one here to ignore (seems I'm on that list again, badge of honor since providing the following data points would be ignored or misunderstood):
Analysts have begun to identify key factors behind the grid failures in Texas. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed power demand beyond the worst case scenarios that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, a large fraction of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked off line amid icy conditions, with some plants suffering fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked. Many of Texas’ wind turbines also froze and stopped working.
We know why they froze and like gas fired plants, the issue was this unexpected cold and insufficient handling for this event.
Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change
accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go be- yond the historical conditions those grids were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure
The grid operations didn't.
Measures that could help make electric grids more robust — such as fortifying power plants against extreme weather or installing more backup power sources — could prove expesive. But as Texas shows, blackouts can be extremely costly, too. And, experts said, unless grid planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate conditions, grid failures will happen again and again.
This will happen again!
Texas’ main electric grid, which largely operates independently from the rest of the country, has been built with the state’s most common weather extremes in mind: soaring summer temperatures...
Wind turbines can be equipped with heaters and other devices so that they can operate in icy conditions — as is often done in the upper Mid- west, where cold weather is more common. Gas plants can be built to store oil on-site and switch over to burning the fuel if needed, as is of- ten done in the Northeast, where natural gas shortages are common
Now maybe Alan can tell us what can be done to stop wind turbines from causing cancer as he was told by Trump.
To finish:
But some climate scientists have also suggested that global warming could, paradoxically, bring more unusually fierce winter storms. Some research indicates that Arctic warming is weakening the jet stream, the high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex. This can allow cold air to periodically escape to the South, resulting in episodes of bitter cold in places that rarely get nipped by frost.
More evidence that's Alan's idea of global warming is 'good' for Texas is absurd.
