Yes.

Just the planing for a nuclear power plant is an easy 5 years, permits, environmental reports another 5-10 years, then building a model of the plant. most are close to 20 years before breaking ground.

The three best ways to reliably generate power with minimal pollution, is hydro electric, nuclear, natural gas. As far as building natural gas is the cheapest, most practical. Hydro electric is great if you have areas to build good size dams and you get flood control and water storage for irrigation or drinking water.

Nuclear fuel doesn’t freeze.

The cooling system can, they use a lot of water to cool the reactors, that is why most are on coasts, large rivers or lakes.

When nuclear plants having cooling system problems things get bad real fast. Fucasemia in Japan melted down because the main cooling pumps stopped working and the emergency diesel engine to run the emergency pumps got flooded. 3 Mile Island was a cooling system failure too. The containment worked but it was a mess in one reactor.

So we can drill for gas and oil in the Arctic Circle, no problem, we can drill for gas and oil in the middle of the desert, we can drill for gas and oil under the freaking ocean, but we have an issue when it gets too cold in a rural part of Texas?

If they found natural gas and oil on the moon, they'd be launching and splashing rockets at the Houston ship channel right now!

Ercot PUC etc were warned 10 years ago this could happen but they all chose to bet it 1)wouldn't be that big of a deal and 2) it wasn't worth the money.  And to them it wasn't but to homeowners and insurance companies it sure was.  I suspect there are options between fuck we'll ride it out and winterize everything like it's the we're in Chicago.  But anything beyond fuck it costs money and we've got economists and bean counters running our utility system in the state of Texas.  

From someone who's been in the electrical industry for a long time it's going to get worse, according to glassdoor a senior Oncor engineer makes around 98K and a transmission planning engineer around 107k.  For the knowledge and education those positions require that is shit pay when a software jockey can knock back 125k and never get called out of bed at 2AM.  We're losing a great deal of knowledge as these people retire and there are very few to replace them.  One of oncors cheif engineers right now has over 40 years with the company, is head of their interconnect group and is a mechanical engineer.  Other utilities are begging their local universities to get power programs started up but looking at the current salaries there's going to be few takers.  

It really sad to hear the piss poor pay being offered. Their are places for mechanical engineers but not running the entire show.

Drilling a well uses different equipment than when you've already drilled a well, and have it on production.  When you drill, you have a rig, and in cold environments like the Artic, the drill floor area is enclosed and heated, plus you're pumping drilling mud down the drill pipe to lift up cuttings, and the mud itself is warm.

On production, you just have a wellhead and what's called Christmas Tree with various valves, chokes, meters, etc.  Natural gas, while warm when it enters the tubing to flow up to the surface, has a low ability to transfer that heat due to it being a gas, and so un-dense.  So the wellhead and Christmas tree can cool down to the ambient temperature or just above it.

Also, natural gas, mixed in with water from the formation, can create what's called a gas hydrate - methane ice in effect, at a much higher temperature than what water freezes at.  You can have hydrate plugs form at 40-50 F, depending on the pressure and phase envelop of that flow composition.

Wells can be insulated to keep ambient heat from the well stream in.  You can also insulate every faucet on your house, your doors and windows, your walls and roof and floors to the point that nothing will freeze if it got to 0 F, or less.  But Texas isn't usually that cold, so people don't spend the money on that, and neither do oil companies to keep wells from freezing during very rare weather events.

Nothing is ever designed to be 100% reliable in any possible condition - it would cost a fortune to be armored up against 0 F, and 120 F, and hail, and floods, and earthquakes, and sink holes, and tornados, tsunamis, and meteor strikes.  You examine what conditions are reasonably practical, and design to withstand those.  

It is across the entire energy industry.  WE are losing the old bastards, that know how things work, and not brining in any rising stars.   Pay has not kept up in many cases and the entire energy industry, with the exception of solar and wind, are now viewed as greedy and evil for ruining the planet and profiting from its destruction.   You cannot get kids coming out of college to look at the energy industry and I don't think big salary bumps would be enough to help.

Of course, no one wants to discuss the fact that if people were not demanding energy, there would not be an energy industry.  Turn off their light, stop selling gasoline, natural gas, and any man made fibers or industrially processed fibers to the hypocrites.  The only food available to them should be what is grown within walking distance of their home, with no mechanized or chemical assistance....and let them live in log homes made of trees they cut down themselves.


Providing electricity to your home is complicated shit.  If your a EE, or if you have insomnia, Google "Inertia and the Power Grid: A Guide Without the Spin" and read this little 40 page white paper created in back in early 2020 (before the Texas shit show).  The paper has a very Pro-Renewable slant to it...enough that many executives in the power industry have called them out for it, but this basically uses the ERCOT grid as an example of how the other two grids should strive to add more solar and wind. The end of the paper talks about "magic" technology solutions, that do not yet exist, that are supposed to make up for the admitted shortcoming of solar and wind, but the first 30 pages or so is a good treatment on how HARD IT IS TO KEEP THE GRID UP, and why Solar and Wind are bad for the grid, as it is designed today.  

BTW... part of their green solution is to be QUICKER TO SHUT DOWN POWER TO CUSTOMERS ANYTIME THERE IS THE SLIGHTEST PROBLEM WITH A THE SUPPLY.

The energy solution, of course, is fusion power.  As the joke goes, it's the power source of the future, and always will be.

This is one of the reasons they're pushing connected devices such as thermostats and appliances.  If they can't get to us that way they're going to push for demand charges and time of day which is already done in other parts of the country.  Ironically, it's a practice that was used by Griddy to entice customers for the cheap power and then decried by the powers that be when consumers got a big bill.  Given the opportunity the PUC & Ercot push both of those practices.  

Make me king for a day and I'd re-regulate the whole system to go back to the pre-2000 system and put out bids to double our NG generation over the next 10 years.   A guaranteed 7-8% margin is what they're making now and would not be out of line with pre-2000 profits.  Utilities could go back to being a safe place to put cash and receive dividends or buy their bonds.  In return, we'd get a rock solid electrical system that wouldn't piss it's pants when the temps hit 95.  

ERCOT can go pound sand.

I pay my electric bill and I decide what temperature my house stays at. No way any ERCOT assholes get access to my thermostat.

Easiest way is don't buy a WiFi thermostat, if you do, make sure no one else can access it other than on your phone. Read the instructions real carefully to see if you sign up or opt out.

Well, if they cannot tweak enough smart devices, they can always turn your power off completely.   Many of the smart meters support remote opening and closing.   IF they don't do that, they will just open the substation breakers on 10,000 customers at at time.  

Check your devices and the user agreement.  Nearly everyone of those devices relies on a web connection and centrally located server for phone access.  Finding devices that run 'local loop' is nearly impossible or requires some time, hacking and software knowledge that is a challenge for the average homeowner.  

Those end user agreements are always subject to change.  The best I've been able to do is to make sure I don't use devices that rely on google amazon etc for home automation.

If someone comes up with a black box solution that doesn't require me to write scripts in Home assistant I'm all ears.  

I have no idea, I just use regular digital T'Stats. Bought a programmable for down stairs, quite using the program.  

Please stop with your own bullshit.
If we were not making room for wind and solar none of those outages would have occurred.  We would have had plenty of rotating generation running to carry the load and we would not have had idle plants freezing up when they needed to be on line because they would have been online.

Yep!  Among other things,  Grid Inertia is being destroyed by wind and solar.  Their RGeen  Energy solution to this is to BE QUICKER TO AUTOMATCALLY DISCONNECT CONSUMERS AND INDUSTRIAL USERS...as in fractions of a second when there is a problem, like a power plant going downs.

But there should be room for both.  Deploy solar and wind generating capacity, but don't use it as part of the "minimum reserve".  Of course the beancounters will figure their way around that pretty quickly.