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Photo by Ansalmo Juvaga
By Jo Nova
Seen on X
Spare a thought for the people of Cuba
The situation went from awful to something much worse.
They ran out of working electrical plants ten days ago, and endured blackouts lasting for four straight days, including one hurricane. Reports coming out suggest that though electricity is partly restored, it’s often only for four hours a day. Not surprisingly, the country is semi-paralyzed — schools are still closed and “labor services” are largely non-existent, apart from hospitals, funerals and efforts to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Oscar.
Soon they may run out of people. People were fleeing Cuba before things got this bad.
The big blackout began on Friday October 18th. In the next four days they restarted the grid three or four times only to have it crash again, and while power is sort of mostly restored the structural problems appear to be dire. Nothing really sums the state of the communist economy better than one line on Vox news which described the moment the big blackout began:
“Seven of the country’s eight thermoelectric plants, which generate power for the island, were […]
Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips
Texas toyed with cascading crises
The 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 […]
Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months
A 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.
It’s so cold in Texas homes that fish tanks are frozen. pic.twitter.com/IRuDjpG5Af
— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) February 18, 2021
Others are desperately using gas BBQ’s indoors even though it […]
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 […]
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 […]
Fragile grids
Over a million people customers lost power in the UK yesterday thanks to the sudden outage of a gas and a wind plant. Some of the country’s biggest railway stations were inoperable. Passengers were stuck on trains for up to seven hours. Others stayed in hotels, walked miles or paid “hundreds” for taxis. The outpatient sections of Ipswich Hospital were blacked out for 15 minutes when backup generators failed. “At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.” — BBC. Commuters resorted to using their phones as torches to get out of tunnels in the dark.
Urgent Investigation called for into “fiasco”
According to headlines, at this early stage before the investigation all we know for sure is that wind power is definitely not to blame, but Boris might be. (Seriously, it’s the no-deal Brexit that hasn’t happened).
Officially, people are saying in solemn knowing tones that it is “extremely rare” for two generators to go out at once. But the odd thing about this is how small the loss was. Barfield Gas power is only a 730 MW generator, and Hornsea Wind […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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