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 Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips Texas toyed with cascading crisesThe Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too. ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart: Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday. — by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds of rebooting to get back in action. (Read all the gory details thanks to Lance at the link). But there was a potential gas powered disaster in the works too. As the cold bites, and everyone with a gas heater switches it on, the flow in pipes ramps up, and pressure falls. If gas powered plants also swing into operation, the gas pressure can fall so low that air can leak in to the pipes. The system has one way valves but at low pressure any faulty valves in the system allow air with oxygen back into the pipes. As Vic Hughes warns “Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.” So when a big freeze arrives, the wellheads may be icing up and reducing supply at the same time as demand is exploding. In New England in 1989, gas supply fell 95%. Hughes reports that the decisions that came next were gambles on major scales. On the one hand, the low pressure might lead to deadly suburban explosions, but cutting the gas to areas might be even worse. When every home in that area then switches on their electric heaters, the grid faces an electricity blackout as well. As blackouts spread, homes switch on their gas heaters, and so it unravels. An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Powerby Vic Hughes, American Thinker To maintain safe gas pressures, the operators wanted to shed load with localized gas shutoffs. Since all non-critical gas loads had already been shutoff, only critical loads were left. This included houses and hospitals. To save the gas grid, the operators had to cutoff gas to a very large number of customers. Whose gas to shut off? After the gas was shut off: The houses without gas would rapidly lose heat and quickly become unlivable. Anyone who had any kind of electric space heater would plug it in. That would blow the electric grid. An electric utility call confirmed a sudden, albeit short-lived, increase in electric load for space heaters would probably blow the already critically strained electric grid. The electric grid in areas well beyond the gas shutoff area probably would be blown also. Widespread blackouts would impact not only shut off gas customers. It would kill the electric blowers in furnaces that could still get gas. How many? No way of knowing. Lots and lots of people are in the cold and in the dark. Many would probably get in their cars for heat and try to drive somewhere, although in reality there is nowhere for that many people to go. All the traffic lights would be out, creating a massive traffic jam, trapping many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands)? Since the blackouts killed the electric gasoline pumps, filling your tank would be impossible. As cars ran out of gas, abandoned cars would block traffic and create massive traffic jams, possibly for days. In the end, it was only luck that the gamble paid off: The decision was made to just let the gas system pressure drop and hope it would stay high enough to get by. If it didn’t, a few blown up neighborhoods would be less damage than a gas shutoff. Luck saved them. An unexpected break in the weather lowering demand, along with some unexpected supplies, saved the city. If you aren’t properly scared, all this relates to the short-term deaths. Longer-term deaths from a gas shutoff were incalculable. Hughes goes on to explain that shutting off the gas en masse can take as long to reboot as a blackstart. Frozen houses get burst pipes, basements flood, things ice over, then every furnace and gas line needs to be individually cleaned and inspected… His last words: Wind power did this to Texas. Be very afraid of the Green New Deal. Read it all at American Thinker. h/t to Bill in AZ. PS: Hanrahan sent in an excellent long comment from an Engineer in Texas. I would like to post that, but am hoping to find out if we can get permission, or if it is published elsewhere. I’m hoping Hanrahan will check his email, or perhaps someone else has seen a forum with perhaps “Goatboy” and these words: “ I’ve been an engineer in the Fossil Power Generation industry for over a decade. I am based in Texas, but have worked at plants around the US and even around the globe. I literally know these plants inside and out. ” He mentions AEP Turk. And AEP Walsh and “Sickening Schadenfreude”. PPS: While the media has roasted Ted Cruz for leaving the state during the crisis, they are praising Joe Biden for not turning up. Andrea Widberg, American Thinker On Sunday, the Washington Post enthusiastically relayed that the White House’s pronouncement that Biden is “eager” to visit Texas and might even go there this week. According to the WaPo, Biden’s hands-off approach is a virtue: Biden is taking a notably low-key approach to the storm relief process. It’s a marked contrast to predecessor Donald Trump’s habit of making himself the often-hostile center of attention during natural disasters. It all makes sense if you understand that the American media are Pravda West – except the media are actually worse than the original Pravda. Soviet “journalists” lied and propagandized because they’d be imprisoned or killed if they didn’t. Our American “journalists” lie and propagandize because they want to. February 22nd, 2021 | Tags: Blackout, Electricity Grids, Texas | Category: Electricity, Energy, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Grids |  Print This Post | | Comments (46)Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2. Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame). This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.  The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/ Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew in New Zealand, and people got quite excited to find this log in 2019. They have now published a paper on it. (Yes, we are talking about tree rings from 40,000 years ago, and by teams that don’t want to talk much about cosmic rays in the modern era. ) What’s more exciting than a flipped field? It’s having almost no field at all. As far as the climate goes, if they are correct, this would have been a very tough and wild era. Around 42,000 years ago — in the lead up to the flip, they estimate the magnetic field was so weak it was at barely 0 – 6 % of current strength. Earth’s shield would have been down, gone, and the ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation was flooding in. Presumably, the ozone layer and jet streams, cloud cover, it all changes. This is assuming that the dating is right and the layers mean what they think (and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical). Anthony Watts asked Willie Soon, who is dubious. Cooper et al are talking about modeling some of these aspects (which I am ignoring). Even if their assumptions on the ozone layer are wrong, if the magnetic field dropped, it would be hard to believe that this would not change all kinds of events — like ocean cycles, cloud cover, and the sea surface temperature. The real point of this paper that interests me and should not be lost under the personalities or junk modeling, is the Be10 and C14. Was there a point when Earths Magnetic field fell? If so, when and what flowed from that? Somehow our ancestors survived this. Though the Neanderthals and some other species may not have. Indeed, a magnetic flip or fail, would be a decent candidate for the Neanderthal extinction. It was thought that the last of Neanderthals may have lived until 35,000 or even 28,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, but better data suggests it really did all end “around 40,000” years ago. In which case, the timing coincides with what must have been a dreadful time to live — an ice age, plus magnetic shocks.  Earth’s Magnetic Field during a flip (right). NASA A climate catastropheProf Chris Turney describes a bad era (this is the climate scientist who was once stuck on a cruise-in-thick-Antarctic-ice). [Update: Though let’s not let personalities cloud what we might find in the data.] Ancient relic points to a turning point in Earth’s history 42,000 years ago The temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study co-led by UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum shows. During the magnetic field breakdown, the Sun experienced several ‘Grand Solar Minima’ (GSM), long-term periods of quiet solar activity. Even though a GSM means less activity on the Sun’s surface, the weakening of its magnetic field can mean more space weather – like solar flares and galactic cosmic rays – could head Earth’s way. “Unfiltered radiation from space ripped apart air particles in Earth’s atmosphere, separating electrons and emitting light – a process called ionisation,” says Prof. Turney. “The ionised air ‘fried’ the Ozone layer, triggering a ripple of climate change across the globe.” “End Days”There would have been auroras all over the Earth, and many lightning storms. Dazzling light shows would have been frequent in the sky during the Adams Event. Aurora borealis and aurora australis, also known as the northern and southern lights, are caused by solar winds hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. Usually confined to the polar northern and southern parts of the globe, the colourful sights would have been widespread during the breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field. “Early humans around the world would have seen amazing auroras, shimmering veils and sheets across the sky,” says Prof. Cooper. Ionised air – which is a great conductor for electricity – would have also increased the frequency of electrical storms. “It must have seemed like the end of days,” says Prof. Cooper. It may have caused many extinctions and changes in human behaviour It’s a leap into pure speculation, but hey: The researchers theorise that the dramatic environmental changes may have caused early humans to seek more shelter. This could explain the sudden appearance of cave art around the world roughly 42,000 years ago. “We think that the sharp increases in UV levels, particularly during solar flares, would suddenly make caves very valuable shelters,” says Prof. Cooper. “The common cave art motif of red ochre handprints may signal it was being used as sunscreen, a technique still used today by some groups. “The amazing images created in the caves during this time have been preserved, while other art out in open areas has since eroded, making it appear that art suddenly starts 42,000 years ago.” If human art did leap 42.000 years ago, I think there would have been a bit more to it, than time indoors. If times were so tough, there would also have been a major genetic bottleneck, similar to the one circa 70,000 BC when the volcano Toba exploded and nearly wiped humans off the planet. Earth’s magnetic field is wandering now. Maybe that matters? The Earth’s magnetic field does seem to be wandering around | Courtesy of John Hillhouse, USGS The whole 1.5 degrees of apocalyptic warming won’t seem quite so apocalyptic if Earth’s magnetic field shrinks. We might miss our satellites and electric power grids… An accelerant like no otherWhile the magnetic poles often wander, some scientists are concerned about the current rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere. “This speed – alongside the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field by around nine per cent in the past 170 years – could indicate an upcoming reversal,” says Prof. Cooper. “If a similar event happened today, the consequences would be huge for modern society. Incoming cosmic radiation would destroy our electric power grids and satellite networks.” What does this mean for the current climate scare machine? It means lame excuses. Prof. Turney says the human-induced climate crisis is catastrophic enough without throwing major solar changes or a pole reversal in the mix. “Our atmosphere is already filled with carbon at levels never seen by humanity before,” he says. “A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants. “We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again.” So if Earth’s magnetic shield is about to collapse don’t build underground bunker-cities inside Faraday cages — get cracking installing solar panels as fast as you can. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this paper and the Adams Event in the wash… In the meantime, it’s a spectator sport to watch how the Apocalypse Science absorbs some conflicts of catastrophe. REFERENCECooper, A et al (2021) A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago Science. 19 Feb 2021: Vol. 371, Issue 6531, pp. 811-818, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8677 February 22nd, 2021 | Tags: Paleoclimate | Category: Fauna, Geology, Global Warming, Paleolithic | Print This Post | | Comments (112)… February 20th, 2021 | Tags: Unthreaded | Category: Uncategorized | Print This Post | | Comments (324)If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were? Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid. Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine. But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the weather would never get that cold again. Like perhaps they were afraid of endless droughts, more cyclones, and deadly heatwaves, but not Arctic ice storms? Renewables fans will point to this as mere incompetence. But if the government had built the “fifth largest nation” of windmills with all the cold bells and whistles, it would make them even more unaffordable. Anyone with infinite money can make wind plants more useful in cold weather, but it makes them more expensive all year.
Texas: What Went WrongRay Ryan, War Room Media … this is Texas . . . so the need for winterizing assets has always been an afterthought. Other parts of the country that deal with colder temps annually have solutions for a lot of these issues. For example, natural gas power generation can have heat tracers on pipes, valves, and various connections; insulation around key equipment; indoor power generation vs. open to the elements. Insulation would be near impossible to implement in Texas due to the heat, but the other components could be installed as a retrofit or at the time of construction. The only problem is, it costs money. Wind turbines can be outfitted with insulated turbines, oil and fluid heaters, resin covered blades to limit ice buildup, and other high-grade components to protect the asset . . . but again, it costs money. Wind also decreases in the winter months due to the physics of how wind is created, so ERCOT already had a massive range of expected wind output: 12%–43%, and in really bad weather 6%–7%. Many of Texas’s wind turbines (except for those along the coast initially) ended up freezing, limiting total output, while solar panels were covered with snow or ice, limiting capacity. Most of the renewables in the country (especially in Texas) are backed up by short-cycle gas turbines, which are assets that can turn on in 2–3 hours. These assets are called peakers, or peak shaving, and can come online quickly to fill a growing electricity need during peak hours or surging demand, such as heat waves or cold spells. Coal can be used as peak shaving, but there are limitations: it is costly and timely to maintain because it can take 24–48 hours to bring it online, coal piles can freeze together if not rotated, etc. All of these restrictions make natural gas the preferred and cost-effective method. Texas paid for unreliable energy, not for spare capacityRyan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for). ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well. And Planning Engineer spells out just how this set the grid up for failure: Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in TexasBy Planning Engineer Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down. And he asks the key question, and the answer is “renewables”: Why has Capacity been devalued? If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources. So the core values of a strong grid were eaten away in the haste to make the grid “renewable friendly”. Those same artificial forces pushed coal plants below profitability — and now having destabilized the grid, when the trainwreck occurs, the Greenblob wants to blame the failure on fossil fuels. To paraphase Planning Engineer: — why would anyone build a perfectly good power plant to sit around most of the time doing nothing and just waiting for the wind turbines to fail? More emergency peaking units [gas plants that can be brought on at a moments notice] would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions? On Monday night that is an awfully sharp fall. That was a sharp loss of 10GW in the dead of night. Did all the gas wells freeze at once, or was there some common safety feature of automatic shut downs triggered? (I’ve seen no suggestion that there was, I just wonder). Perhaps it was the middle of the night when lots of people in Texas suddenly put their gas heater on and took the supply from the power stations?  Texas energy generation
These blackouts wouldn’t have happened if Texas hadn’t shut down so much coal power. The Green blob is trying to tell us that the ghastly blackouts was all the fault of fossil fuels — mainly because gas powered plants went offline. But the truth is that if Texas hasn’t swapped coal plants for wind towers the grid would have been fine. They certainly couldn’t run a 100% wind and solar grid. But we all know they can run just fine on 100% fossil fuels. Bills going through the roofTyler Durden on ZeroHedge explains how some people are paying for power on variable or indexed plans. So when the grid gets $9,000 price spikes, their bill rockets up obscenely: Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that’s a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.
Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.
Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated. Texas won’t forget this.
Texas: day four without power and water for some, fishtanks freeze, pipes burst, “worse than Africa”Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for monthsA few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.
Others are desperately using gas BBQ’s indoors even though it produces the deadly carbon monoxide gas. The death toll won’t be known for days. Daylan Cook, 18, said he had built a fire inside a ceramic pot in his apartment living room, aided by hand sanitizer and gasoline. … The local emergency medical services department said it had responded to 63 carbon monoxide exposure calls in 2 1/2 days. People are being told to boil water on outdoor gas BBQ’s to fill hot water bottles to keep themselves warm, and advised to stay in one small room, and to seal the doors and windows.
Civilization on the edgeThe water supply network in Austin was being drained because pipes in houses without electricity had burst, water mains had broken and customers were both storing water and also leaving taps dripping in an effort to stop their own pipes bursting. The demand for water was so great it exceeded supply in some areas by 250%. That meant the water pressure dropped below the minimum needed for sanitation. On Wednesday the City of Austin issued a water-boil notice because Austin’s largest water treatment facility, the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant, lost power. They described it as just precautionary, but it meant that many people without power now had to find a way to sterilize water, and people with power added more of a drain to the system. St David’s hospital in Houston has no water pressure or heat. They can’t transport patients to other hospitals as the others are facing their own issues. Meanwhile there were dozens of water main pipes also leaking, but Austin Water couldn’t drive out to fix some breakages because of the ice, and sometimes they didn’t even know where the breaches were, their instrumentation wasn’t working, the data wasn’t coming in, and snow was obscuring everything. There were warnings that some fire hydrants wouldn’t be working due to the lack of water pressure. And so the chaos spread. How would Texas have fared if they were 100% renewable? About an hour ago ERCOT said that most power was “able” to be supplied The grid is now up to 58 GW of capacity. Wind power is now back to 6,800 MW (some more turbines have thawed out). In the latest update ERCOT says that a “Majority of customers are able to be restored.” Apparently, it’s a theoretical restoration. It’s now up to electrical retailers to connect the dots. There is no longer any forced load shedding although they also say 40GW of generation is still not operational. How does that work? Rolling blackouts are expected to continue and people are being warned not to turn everything back on. Keep reading → February 19th, 2021 | Tags: Blackout, Electricity Grids, Texas, USA | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable | Print This Post | | Comments (278).. February 18th, 2021 | Tags: Unthreaded | Category: Uncategorized | Print This Post | | Comments (229)Things are still not looking good in Texas. At the peak demand on Sunday in Texas the people were using 70 Gigawatts of electricity — an all time record. Then both wind and gas generators failed. Currently the ERCOT Grid is using about 42GW of electricity and ERCOT reports of up to 46 GW of generators being out of action. Total wind output is still under 3GW out of 30GW* of wind capacity. The gas was the back up to the Wind, but Wind power can’t be a back up to the gas (or anything else). An ERCOT press release claims that they still have to loadshed 14,000MW which means 2.8 million homes. “As of 9 a.m., approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.” It’s not clear to me how they arrive at only 18,000 MW missing of wind and solar. Perhaps they are only counting the 6 or so GW they expected to be able to use of windpower? There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t even rotate the blackouts between suburbs without dropping out critical infrastructure. Apparently the wind has stopped and the wellheads are frozen over. The amount of coal power in Texas has halved in the last decade, while the amount of wind power has tripled. I expect right now ERCOT might be happy to hear any proposal to Build A Gas Line from, say, Canada. Two days without electricity or water in sub-zero temperatures is not just a blackout With 20 dead already, there must be more to come. Life in Woke World 2021. Tragic in so many ways:  Here’s an idea: bring gas to Texas. Call it Keystone… Winter Storm Creates Havoc, Wall Street Journal Robert Lewis, 40, a cook and retired Marine, said he and the friend he was staying with had been without heat or water for more than 48 hours. They had had little to drink. His cellphone died, so he had no way to call for help. “All we could do was grab every blanket, every jacket that we could, and huddle up,” he said. He had heard people tell of a lone 7-Eleven that was open, so he walked there, only to find a line around the block to get in and the shelves cleared of food, he said. He added that he got the last cup of coffee for sale. He was evaluating his next move, saying he would keep looking for supplies. “I’m going into survival mode,” he said. There are stories of pain on Twitter: People are very angry the pain is not being shared across all suburbs. Replies to ERCOT are a rolling wall of fury.
Then there are people with animals who will not leave them to die, sending their last message because the battery is going. Praying. Just read the replies! Officials “hope” the ice will melt off the wind turbines: Wind production isn’t the only problem Texas faces but that 30GW of infrastructure isn’t there when Texans need it. What kind of infrastructure operates at only 3% of capacity randomly?  Wind power output in Texas. Some people are getting the extended not-so-rolling form of blackout. They are the ones who live in places without hospitals, fire stations, and other important infrastucture. There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t rotate the blackouts without dropping out critical infrastructure. Keep reading → February 18th, 2021 | Tags: Blackout, Electricity Grids, Texas | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | If a new drug reduced deaths by 10% it would almost get a Nobel Prize — that is, as long as it made someone rich.  A free antiviral shining down on you? At the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona 930 people who turned up with Covid were randomly asked to take a vitamin D3 (calcifediol) treatment or a placebo. Of them, 551 were given four doses of Vitamin D3 over the next four weeks. The other 379 luckless people got the chance to be randomized controls.. The lucky ones got 20,000IU (or 20 normal vitamin D3 tablets) on day one, then 10,000 IU (ten normal tablets) on four other days in the next month. (Technically, the big dose was given was given on day one followed up with half doses on day 3, 7, 15, and 30.) In the hapless control group as many as 80 people (21%) would go on to need Intensive Care (ICU). And 57 people of the original 379 would end up dying, or about 15%. Of the 551 people given five dollars worth* of Vitamin D (that’s the cost online) only 30 (5%) would go on to need the ICU, and all up 36 people died (6.5%). So, proportionately, more than twice as many people died in the group that missed out on Vitamin D3. Which loosely suggests that of the 57 deaths in the placebo group, possibly 34 of them could have been saved by a cheap vitamin available at chemists around the corner from their home. People can get D3 from the sun too, though not so much in northern Europe in winter. If you are a normal sane person, this could make you very angry. Lives could have been saved and many hospital beds emptied at almost no cost. Even before Covid arrived – we already knew a lot about Vitamin D3 .. As I said in April, deficiency in D3 is a pandemic we need to solve. D3 is used to activate or influence about 200 different genes, Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. For months now we’ve know that in at least one study, 40% of older people who die from respiratory infections seem to be dying because they are deficient in this vitamin. The study also showed that people who were deficient in Vitamin D were also more likely to die. And here’s another kicker — this study was done way back in March April and May last year. It’s a Spanish study and it’s only just been published. And the thing that will make you grind your teeth was that nearly a year after this started there are still no good big studies. It’s almost like this one slipped under the radar in the early days and forever after, despite the billions in costs and the millions of patients, no one wants to do a larger follow up? This was an idea so obvious it was organised within weeks of the outbreak, yet one year later, … crickets? There are caveatsIn most studies the people that benefit the most are the ones who are deficient. This study All the patients in both groups were also given HCQ and AZ. Perhaps this improved all the outcomes? On the other hand, doctors didn’t know a lot about Covid back then, and that undoubtedly meant higher death rates. The standard treatment for everyone at the time: All hospitalized patients received the same standard therapy, consisting in hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/24h What we desperately need are bigger better studies, though who would want to be in the placebo group? The billion dollar question is why they haven’t been done.  … There are plenty of reasons for human incompetence, but there are serious financial incentives that needs to be addressed. There are huge profits in finding new drugs and almost none in solving the problem with known cheap and unpatentable molecules. Follow the money. This is exactly the kind of research that our government funded universities and hospitals ought be doing. Yet where are they? Trapped in some public-private agreement? Worried that if they speak up they might be cancelled? Think of Craig Kelly MP — he’s under attack for talking about Ivermectin. The Covid pandemic is a virological bomb, but a lot of the damage is due to a pandemic of corruption and government incompetence. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to start protesting for real government funded research on vitamins and antivirals. Raise awareness that people need to check their Vitamin D levels, and we need to make sure those with darker skin know about their higher risk for being deficient. Do Black Lives really Matter? Does your Health Minister even care less? Just ask… Other posts on Vitamin D
*That’s the USD price of 60 tablets of 1,000 IU — enough to treat one person. People taking Vitamin D would be wise to also look up Vitamin K levels. REFERENCENogués, Xavier and Ovejero, Diana and Quesada-Gomez, J. M. and Bouillon, Roger and Arenas, Dolores and Pascual, Julio and Villar-Garcia, Judith and Rial, Abora and Gimenez-Argente, Carme and Cos, ML. and Rodriguez-Morera, Jaime and Campodarve, Isabel and Guerri-Fernandez, Robert and Pineda-Moncusí, Marta and García-Giralt, Natalia, Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes. SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3771318 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3771318 Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas. Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages. UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather. While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.  Anchorage, Alaska is warmer than parts of Texas. At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west Records will be broken in Texas
Daily Mail Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without electricity for hours had no certainty about when the lights and heat would come back on, as the state’s overwhelmed power grid began imposing blackouts that are typically only seen in 100-degree Fahrenheit ‘We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,’ said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures. Poweroutage.us reports on blackouts across the US. Texas has its own grid called ERCOT.  Texas more than four million people are still without power. … Prices also hit the jackpot – $9,000 as everyone needed electricity but generators were out of action Reuters: Real-time wholesale market prices on the power grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were more than $9,000 per megawatt hour late Monday morning, compared with pre-storm prices of less than $50 per megawatt hour, according to ERCOT data. If there’s one thing you would think Texas would be able to do, it’s keep the lights on. Most electricity comes from natural gas and Texas produces more of that than any place on the continent. There are huge natural gas deposits all over the state. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did. Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state’s vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy. So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas — it’s a great state, actually — but to give you some sense of what’s about to happen to you.
Armutt @hayahapa: Issues Texas is having with the cold illustrates a key part of collapse: The problem is not that we lack the technology to keep society running. The problem is we lack the social infrastructure to keep the technology running
Bloomberg Green says, not to worry about Windpower in Texas, it’s just a small problem. There are already claims that it’s not the lack of Wind power that matters, and that gas plants and others have failed due to a lack of “winterization”. While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, wind only comprises 25% of the state’s energy mix this time of year. The majority of outages overnight were plants fueled by natural gas, coal and nuclear, which together make up more than two-thirds of power generation during winter. “The wind is not solely to blame,” said Wade Schauer, research director of Americas power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie. He estimates that about 27 gigawatts of coal, nuclear and gas capacity is unavailable, in part because the cold has driven up demand for natural gas for heating. “That’s the bigger problem.” UPDATE: Trying to figure out how many MW of Wind versus Gas/Coal/Nuclear went downERCOT is at EEA 3 Emergency Warning currently with reserves of less than 1,000 MW. ERCOT announced Sunday night that it had set a winter record for power demand, reaching 69,150 megawatts between 6 and 7 p.m. ERCOT said Monday morning that 30,000 megawatts of power generation had been forced off the system. The ERCOT Real time demand at this point: 46GW. Wind is 4GW now. But Proletariat Chris reported Texas wind power was just 900MW out of 31,000MW as of about 6 hours ago. Ryan Maue reports that there was almost no wind in Texas today.
See #Uri h/t RicDre and WUWT For Fun: what people in Texas do for entertainment on a snowy day: (This video may not display in Firefox.)
February 16th, 2021 | Tags: Blackout, Electricity Grids, Renewable Energy, Texas, USA, Wind Power | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Renewable, Wind Power | Print This Post | | |
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