Llano Estacado

Quite the contrary. I think it is Latin for “we don’t rent pigs” or something. What does Judith Curry’s belief or disbelief in climate change have to do the merit of her (or a 3rd party on her site, I’m not even sure) analysis of last week’s grid failure? What does Exxon’s or API’s understanding of anthropomorphic climate change have to do with balance of sources for power generation in 2021?

No idea, I’d have to do some internet research. Even the oldest spent materials will still be cooling for another 50+ years. I assume they have some cavern/subterranean fix for long term. They’re French though, so rest assured they’re following Atomic Energy Agency, international, and other industry best practices. (Ugh, I hate that turn of phrase)

Nice ad hominem. You have another source for that info? EIA doesn’t show that at all the evening of the 16th. NG generation actually went up. Lol. In a one week period MISO saw wind energy go from 10GW to under 1 back to 15GW and fossil fuels were there to fill the demand every minute. SWPP is even more telling. That’s the argument from the O&G industry, carbon generators, and their mouth pieces. You can’t incentivize unreliable energy then be surprised that the market levers don’t have thermal energy ready to back you up. I absolutely may have blinders on or drank the koolaid, but I’ve yet to see a logically laid out rebuttal to the path we’re on. More unrelated ad hominem. France has given the western world the solution, and I find it maddening we aren’t going along. Agree, let’s start planting NOW, but rather than tweaking the market and incentivizing storage tech, and reviewing where we are in 5yrs, we need to be going full speed ahead building even old tech proven reactors with worse EnergyROI than new designs. Build and build until they’re 70% of the power supply or more. Storage or hydro at 10% for diversity and the rest mix of fossil fuels until wind and solar can pick up the baseline. If we’re scraping 5 year old reactors in 2030 cause storage has caught up and we have renewable TWs to spare, so be it, but I have an unsettling feeling will be right back here, talking what industry deserves incentives and tax credits and subsidies to make the market work the way we want. And which admins’ policies failed. Almost 50 years ago Messmer said, “In France, we don’t have oil, but we have ideas.” It worked.

I drive a Dodge Stratus! What kind of fallacy is that? The US Navy could decide to power Ford Class carriers via internal combustion engines, but that has nothing to do with the reliability and TX power grid. I may be reading that EIA chart incorrectly, but the notes at the bottom I interpret to say it’s normalized and time adjusted for a whole summer month. That’s the best data I could find looking through EIA and NERC sources for any measure of “reliability” or “downtime”. But, “shit capacity factor” leads to the larger talking point that started this conversation the market has little to no incentive for power generators to offer reliability. Wind and solar are intermittent and require backup via some sort of storage or additional peaking capacity. Wind and solar investors don’t see that externality they pass it on to the utility customers, us. Cost effective storage at the levels were talking for ERCOT ~20GW or more are years down the road. NG plants are already failing to cover peak demand in Texas and Cali as we’ve seen, but we just keep building more wind turbines expanding their baseline which will just exacerbate the problem on overcast and still summer days/nights.

Wrong. You must hang with some geriatric suburban peepers. Once you get a little ways up the mountain or deep in holler you’ll find that having a daddy who ran whiskey in a big block dodge is a prereq for true preparedness.

Sorry, an instrument sensing line, probably 20 years old, of a feed-water pump on the non-nuclear side of the plant froze up when Bay fucking City, Texas saw sustained temps 20 degs F below freezing. Nuke tech older than your or I absolutely crushes the competition on capacity reliability and it ain’t close. 90+% https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b Fair enough call out, but you were the one who brought up hand wringing and negative externalities as it relates to the carbon fuel industry during a renewable energy storage conversation. When it comes to carbon footprint of our energy choices it’s binary, IMO. It either matters absolutely or it doesn’t. Policy makers can’t start throwing around “existential” in conversation then pick 4-40yr terms to scale down as it suits their base’s or donors’ liking. “Subsidized big oil and the deregulated free market have failed us” cry the green new dealers “But renewables govt backed loans and production tax credits are picking winners” whine the oil barons It’s a convoluted mess between the subsidies, guaranteed loans, tax credits, tax carve outs, depreciation schedules and write offs, making apples to apples comparison near impossible for the best economists, and that is before you introduce negative externalities of hydrocarbons, depleted uranium, or depleted chemical batteries. Cool.

Yall have citations? Cause we can either pay our fair share as part of the global energy kumbaya as a fraction of the next Covid Stimmi or pay off a brunch of brother-in-law construction loans with nothing to show for it?

Saw these making the social media rounds as well. Sucks.

EIA says about $0.0775 kWh for some 30yr life expectancy plant X. Not too far from future projections of combined cycle NG plants. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf See lasts post EIA graphs. We know how to create reliable as hell, carbon neutral, baseline power from nuclear. If carbon emissions are a 5-10-15yr existential threat to humanity. Why the hell are we waiting for storage tech? Quit the fucking hand wringing and drag ass and tax incentives for green projects and let’s start building 60+GWs of Gen4+ nuclear generation tomorrow. We can worry about electrifying cars and battery tech next decade. I say that sincerely as an O&G engineer. And I ask again sincerely, are there holes in Judith Curry’s analysis, that isn’t too far from PenelopeW’s, that I’m missing?

Eh, I wouldn’t say it is angst exactly, although fellow Texans needlessly died this week of exposure, lack of power (in the energy capital of the world) for lifesaving equipment, and CO poisoning cause policy makers can’t get this right. So, that sucks ass. It is more my engineering brain, and general curiosity trying to see through the #bothsides talking points on a very complicated problem, and get to root cause and actual solutions. Texas/ERCOT called for standby demand generation this week and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for a lot of reasons this week, but if we’re targeting 50% or 100% renewable by, say 2030, as some goal post how do we square that round in a market that has proved it is already failing. Honest question; Where’s the safe threshold % for renewables versus surge capacity as we ramp up storage and battery tech? CISO and ERCOT had their failures at ~10-15%. I’m not at all an expert, but this weeks EIA’s renewables numbers look fairly similar for all grids, regardless of TX’s wind vs NG production. What’s safe tomorrow? Heat wave August 15th, 2021? 5 years from now?

Catching up on this thread... LOL Us younger guys 150% fucked up our own access to that place. Makes me a little sick now, thinking back about trying to navigate that element having only the view of a 20yr old low-fence hunter ethics and little to no understanding of office/career politics. “4 times in 5 years? Get fucked! I’m gonna go down with my clients and my project team shoot 1/100s of does you need dead, or be ecstatic about a chance at a 120 cull if I’m lucky...stop. scratch that, I’ll leave the rifle at home and just take a 12ga, borrow a high rack, an ice chest, and chase some birds.” Shoulda coulda woulda have dozens of great memories off that place. So much squandered.

Folks made it through in the Brazos River Valley with no loss of life. 2 more mamas left to domino. May go down as one of my all time favorite pics taken on the place.

I see that now, both via her larger website and a simple Google of her name. Apologies for my ignorance. Does that disqualify everything in her blog post? As I mentioned, that post seems to track pretty well with the larger attitude of this thread in regards to the failure. 1) All types of power generation failed to properly winterize. 2) PUC/ERCOT and RRC failed to properly forecast the impact of demand, but even if they had properly forecast they have no levers on the market place to spool up additional generation 3) The market, politicians, nor regulators offered any incentive to properly prepare after 2011. 4) A capacity market wouldn’t fix all of our problems, but it should likely be action item #1 once the dust settles Now knowing she’s testified to Congress about the impacts climate change, I’m even more curious about the latter part of her post and personal views vis-a-vis the Surl hive mind. I’m in the O&G business. My bubble and I would generally agree that battery storage to the scale we need to continue to increase dependence on renewables isn’t there and we increase our incentives and reliance on solar and wind without dependable back-up for demand spikes/on site storage of fuel energy to the grid’s and our own peril. Diverse energy market, great. Artificial markets amplifying undependable energy sources while existing cheap reliable power (especially carbon neutral nuclear) is passed over and moth-balled, not so great.

CSB: I included the LL Bean “duck” boots because my dad switched from lace up Red Wings to LL Beans in the winter when he (a Houston native) took us from Midland to Amarillo during the early 80s oil bust. He calls them “duck” boots and wore them countless times shoveling walks in Amarillo or driving to the company truck to log a well on a winter weekend or family ski trips to NM/CO or stomping through cut milo fields for ducks or pheasant. His career later took him to Houston then Plano then rural central ETX as a “gentleman rancher” in retirement. After watching him wear those boots for 30yrs in inclement weather all over the state and out of state, they still look ridiculously out of place to me south of I-20.

Options abound, but as TwiceHorn noted traditional western/cowboy boots aren’t really all weather work boots. If your somewhere south of Lubbock going with a true insulated Columbia, LL Bean, Schnee’s snow boot is way overkill except once every 5years and you’re going to look like a fresh out of the Rockies transplant. A true Texas waterproof rain/mud boot for chores is going to range from $20 white shrimp boots to Muck boots to Tingley steel toes (choice of roughnecks for years) I think what your really looking for is the Tecovas Bandera posted up thread or the American standard Red-Wing/Irish Setter in lace up or pull-on in dozens of styles. Not really waterproof, but weather proof workhorse. Good enough for chores, work (if you get steel toes), or hiking in all but the worst conditions you’re going to see in Texas.

Genuinely curious on your and @PenelopeWitherspoon opinion of this early postmortem piece I saw via Twitter. Think it mostly in agreement with how this threads track so far. The personal opinion section at the bottom gets a little in the weeds and talking points about tax incentives and unreliability of renewable energy. As someone who works directly in the O&G industry I’m familiar with these points, but fact of the matter is it’s never going to apples to apples in regards to taxes, “subsidies”, or “incentives” unless we completely rewrite the federal tax code. Note: I have no idea who Judith Curry is or her possible political or industry ties are https://judithcurry.com/2021/02/18/assigning-blame-for-the-blackouts-in-texas/amp/

It’s actually pretty analogous to the larger ERCOT energy market vs capacity markets, and “free market efficiencies”. Capacity market “Honey, commodity prices were low so I looked at various power providers performed some long term cost analysis and locked us in for 18mo at great pricing for ~1500kWh” vs PUC/ERCOT method “Holy shit! My wholesale kWh pricing at 9:05am was $10/kWh! I’ve read baseline nuclear and natural gas can generate power economically at a 1/100th that price. Surely, the free market will dictate generation companies have built new power plants by 9:10am to cover this demand. I’ll buy more power then.”

Days, weeks, months, state judiciaries, SCOTUS...

Iowavote.com? That’s not going to play well.

“I know suburbs better than you” isn’t too far from “You’re the (Russian) puppet” if you squint your eyes...and drink a pint

Don’t know if I can close this shit show out.

Trump vs Biden is no Lincoln vs Douglas

Is that President Camocho’s music!?!?

In34

In34