It's Official: Texas has achieved Third-World Status

[LVSteve]

Interesting article in Texas Monthly that leaves blood up just about everybody's wall.

The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold – Texas Monthly

Was particularly taken by this paragraph.

When we spoke midday Thursday, Magness told me he thinks Texas lawmakers, as they investigate what went wrong this past week, ought to explore weatherization mandates. He noted, however, that better weatherizing power infrastructure, like inducing electricity producers to invest in extra generating capacity, likely would raise Texans's electricity rates. "Is it worth the cost to consumers?" he asked. I asked him if ERCOT had any answer to that question. "I am not aware," he said, "that we have ever conducted a real cost-benefit analysis on that topic."

Cost-benefit? I guess it depends on how much being dead you can take.

 

[delcrossv]

This "it doesn't fix all the wrongs, so it's all wrong" tack is an absolutist position that rejects incremental improvement.

I've seen similar arguments with guns, where if it doesn't fill one specific niche, it's discounted wholesale.

I'll make the assumption you're talking about "renewables". Solar/wind are great for small, off-grid , distributed service. See them all the time running isolated installations and they're fine.

Where the problems arise is in trying to shoehorn those technologies into areas where they're not suited- grid level power generation being the one at issue in this thread. No amount of incremental improvement can change the net solar insolation nor the energy density of moving wind. One can't extract what's not there.

In a similar vein, you don't hunt Cape Buffalo with a .22 Savage, and you don't shoot squirrels with a .338 Lapua.
Horses for courses.

Looking at a graph of Energy Returned on Investment may be clarifying here. Investment being the energy necessary to build the power source, Energy Returned being the amount of energy you get back through operations.
In the below graph, "buffered" means with batteries, unbuffered means without. Dispatchable sources, of course, have both terms equal.

 

[ISCS Yoda]

I just stumbled back onto this fun discussion. I like what Lee Jarrett said. But this made me laugh:

Not every place is New Mexico.

Thank goodness!!!!!!!!!!!