Reaction & Commentary
Talk to you a little bit about what’s happening in texas there is no way we should be having these problems in texas with the with our own power grid with as much gas and oil as we have what the heck is happening yeah so i mean i this is something i’ve
Been warning about for a while in september 2020 so i live in california when the california blackouts were happening i warned on twitter that there are similar things happening in texas and so a blackout is an extreme event but this blackout is not unprecedented texas has been having what i call
Industrial blackouts a lot they call it demand management but it basically means when there’s not enough power they have their industrial or they’ll call it curtailment they’ll have their industrial uh projects stop you know they’ll cut off power to industrial people they won’t cut it off to the home so
What’s happened here is the lack of ability to meet demand has just been so extreme and there are some unexpected events that it that everyone is seeing but it’s important that this is not an unprecedented thing it’s just a more extreme thing and this is something that’s happened in
California it’s happening around the country and the fundamental reason whatever else is going on is the insistence on using unreliable wind and solar energy instead of reliable energy from coal nuclear natural gas well why is that we have just one thing yeah go ahead we know that those sources because there’s
Issues of failures in texas and we’ll talk about that but we know for a fact that coal gas and nuclear can work under any weather conditions around the world so whatever is going on in texas it’s not that coal plants don’t work gas plants don’t work nuclear plants is a combination of
Specific mismanagement and non-preparation in texas but the main thing is too much attempt to rely on unreliable energy and that takes away focus and funding from the reliable energy and for making it resilient okay so i’m i’m kind of caught in between some people are really really pissed
Some people are like well that’s what happens i’m somewhere in between there are times that i feel like i’m living in syria however i don’t expect the state to spend oodles of money protecting for something that happens once every even you know when it comes to salt trucks
And everything else why spend the money it happens every 10 years this is something that happened you know about every 40 or 50 years in texas so i cut some slack but i don’t understand uh why our coal plants are down they are down our natural gas plants are down
Why well so there’s i mean we i don’t think the urcots are caught as the so-called reliability council of texas they haven’t been totally open so it’s not easy to tell exactly what’s going on there are a number of things that can happen so one thing that they’ll tend
Not to talk about is it’s possible there’s been some just mismanagement of supply and demand so when demand was exceeding supply they didn’t curtail demand early enough and that can cause things to trip up it can be that specific plants aren’t resilient enough it can be that the fuel infrastructure
There’s something off with that in terms of delivery of fuel and this is something that i think that will emerge but again these are all things that are handled everywhere around the world they’re not inherent in coal gas and nuclear whereas what you see with wind and solar is they went
Completely out to lunch when they were needed most so no matter how even if there had been no freezing of the wind turbines wind would have still been useless during very large portions of the situation so the basic lesson wait wait wait wait wait wait wait why
Wait why why why would wind turbine when there was winds why were wind turbines not useful well well they’re they were frozen some of them but i know that wasn’t wind well not that many of them throws i got but if you look at the recent data over
The last several days there have been times when it’s been one gigawatt out of 32. so they part of the thing is they call the capac they call the maximum possible wind the capacity which is ridiculous it’s just a lucky situation so they say oh we have 32 gigawatts of wind and
Everyone brags about that but when the going gets tough you had one two or three gigawatts of win so again they’re always people always like to talk about the peak but the real thing is where are they when you need them and the point is they’re not reliable they’re they’re
Basically reliable for zero and that’s why they add so much cost because you always have to have the unreliable infrastructure and the reliable infrastructure so some greens are blaming not enough gas being online and that’s because the green screen scheme requires it to be offline so we can get more electricity from
Wind right right everything is engineered around trying to maximize the amount of unreliable wind that you’re using so the whole way the grid is working normally that’s very wasteful is you’re cycling the gas up and down to accommodate the wind if you had a reliable energy infrastructure
Which we used to have around the country you just have a whole slate of reliable plants and then when you had a lot more demand you could just ramp a lot of the reliable plants up but here what texas is trying to do is they’re trying to minimize the number of reliable plants
To cut costs and this is why the you know one of the public utility people said and i think in 2019 like hey we’ve got a serious issue our reserve margin is very scary texas is notorious in electricity circles for trying to get away with the lowest reserve margin possible which means
The smallest margin for error possible it’s gone down dramatically because they’ve been trying to cut prices and use wind that’s what that’s what happened in california we didn’t maintain our power lines enough because we didn’t want to raise prices even more after we had inflated them with green energy if you don’t focus
On reliability you’re going to lose reliability so in northern climates when it gets cold like this every single year how do how do they avoid this problem are they doing less green energy than texas is well there are two things i mean so one is just they have better specific
Policies for their plants and that can take all sorts of measures but they just figured out i mean these are you know these places texas even in bad weather is not as bad as places around the world i mean obviously if places in russia are using these kinds of places places in cold
Parts of canada now what’s happening though it’s important with the un what i call the unreliable so the solar and wind it is possible to have a certain amount of them along with the reliable so people in the midwest are saying hey look our wind turbines are working and it’s
True they you can spend money and they don’t necessarily ice uh but the point is they’re adding costs and they don’t scale because again you have to pay for the unreliable energy infrastructure and the reliable energy infrastructure plus you have real it’s really inefficient to run a grid that way because it’s like
Stop and go traffic for the reliables plus you you wear them down a lot more quickly when you move them up and down but the real thing to notice is you cannot rely on the unreliables they’re parasites and what we have as a country is a policy that’s trying to get us 100
Dependent on these parasites the real lesson of texas is not that wind turbines froze it’s that wind and solar cannot keep us warm and powered in the winter and so these green new deal type plans are a complete fiasco and everybody should be asking by what the hell would texas do under your
Situation how the hell would they get power if you’re going to have nearly 100 wind and solar which were totally out to lunch when they were needed most geez wow i mean we’re now buying the power i believe from mexico which isn’t like what uh so are these
When people say the texas grid we’re fine because we have our own grid in texas have the progressive policies just pretty much dismantled any positives we had with that yes so this is i i mean i was really scared of what was going to happen with this storm and my
Fears unfortunately came true but one thing i thought would be good in terms of a lesson is texas does have this isolated grid and that can be an asset or liability but what it really illustrates is the problem of relying on unreliable energy because in california even you know we import
25 percent of our electricity which at a given time can be 40 percent of our electricity 25 is just an average so we’re bailed out by nevada utah arizona but what happens is they start trying to have more and more unreliable then we can’t rely on them and that’s what happened in the
Summer it got hot wind went down the sun goes down every day people are shocked and we didn’t have enough electricity and we couldn’t get it so everyone is trying to play this game of get it of chicken with how much unreliable can i use
And get away with it and the texas is a good illustration because it’s this self-contained uh world and so we need to learn that the whole us cannot be like texas again texas is something like 20 percent wind it’s a tiny fraction of the biden plan the biden plan says
100 carbon neutral grid by 20 35 that’s 14 years and he’s so possible he does nothing to support nuclear and the biggest lie the biggest giveaway is none of these people support nuclear texas has not been increasing nuclear if you look at texas’s plan so i just i
Just wrote about this on on twitter it’s just alex twitter.com alex epstein as i wrote the statistics this is listen to this glenn like what would you think texas has planned okay so zero nuclear plants nuclear are the most weather resilient plants they store their food so zero plants
Uh no new coal plants they’re probably gonna shut down plants 9.4 gigawatts of wind so the existing 32 gigawatts it went down to one gigawatt when it was needed bucks so it’s basically useless and then 12 new gigawatts of solar and solar was almost completely useless so
And then five new gigawatts of gas which is basically to handle all the ups and downs of the wind and solar so this is texas plan and that is a mild day at the beach compared to what biden has planned so we need to totally change direction you
