Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Has Trump derangement syndrome cost Texan lives? Back in 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal fuel onsite, for disaster resilience.
At the time the resilience proposal was widely criticised as being a thinly disguised Trump scheme to pump government money into the coal and nuclear industries. But in hindsight, a bit more resilience might have saved Texas from days of painful electricity blackouts.
From 2017;
Rick Perry: DOE’s Coal, Nuclear Proposal Is ‘Rebalancing the Market’
Perry doubles down on arguments that the NOPR will protect Americans.
LACEY JOHNSON NOVEMBER 02, 2017
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said a proposed rule to subsidize coal and nuclear plants is “rebalancing the market” to correct for the Obama administration’s support of renewable energy.
They “clearly had their thumb on the scale toward the renewable side,” said Perry, who spoke about his energy policy priorities with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and Axios CEO Jim VandeHei at an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The DOE’s request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would upend decades of energy market policy by guaranteeing cost recovery for power plants with 90 days of fuel supply on-site — something that only nuclear power, a few hydropower sites, and some larger coal power plants can provide.
“If you can guarantee me that the wind is going to blow tomorrow, if you can guarantee me that the sun’s going to get to the solar panels…then I’ll buy into that. But you can’t,” said Perry.
The notice of public rulemaking, or NOPR, implies that there is a looming threat to grid reliability due to coal and nuclear power plant retirements. Its conclusions are largely based on an incomplete analysis of the 2014 polar vortex, which could have led to blackouts had several coal-fired plants now slated for closure not been available to serve the load.
The move has been widely criticized by clean energy advocates as politically motivated and factually unproven, and has drawn a backlash from major sectors of the energy industry.
…
Read more: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/rick-perry-doe-coal-nuclear-proposal-is-rebalancing-the-market#gs.Fp8TJMg
Federal regulators rejected the plan, on the grounds that Rick Perry failed to provide enough evidence that retiring coal and nuclear plants was undermining grid stability. The plan was eventually dropped, after vigorous lobbying from gas and renewable energy groups.
Now that the scenario Rick Perry predicted has actually happened in Texas, it seems pretty obvious the Rick Perry was right about the risks. Nuclear power plants and fossil fuel plants which had access to adequate fuel supplies mostly stayed fully operational.
Why is government intervention required to ensure grid resilience?
Keeping several months worth of fuel onsite is a cost which does not contribute to company profits. The cost of all that reserve fuel represents money which could instead have been used to pay down capital debts, or pay out dividends to shareholders. Power companies which choose to wear this kind of expense are at a competitive disadvantage compared to power companies which run leaner operations, by running their reserves down to the bare minimum. The expense of keeping fuel in reserve impacts market share and company growth; consumers frequently flock to the lowest price energy service, without considering the long term consequences.
Rick Perry’s plan would have eliminated the financial penalty for keeping a fuel reserve onsite, by compensating power companies for the cost of maintaining substantial fuel reserves.
Given resilience payments seem to be a workable solution, will President Biden or Texas Governor Greg Abbott implement the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan, to ensure nothing like the Texas power outage disaster ever happens again?
Update (EW): Mark Baher reminds me I was critical of Rick Perry’s plan in 2017. At the time I was focusing on Perry’s explanation that he was seeking to “rebalance the market” against renewable subsidies – I had a vision of Perry’s plan kicking of a subsidy race, between proponents of renewables and proponents of fossil fuel and nuclear. What I didn’t realise was how limited reserves would be in a severe weather event. Perry was right, I was wrong.
“Given resilience payments seem to be a workable solution, will President Biden or Texas Governor Greg Abbott implement the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan, to ensure nothing like the Texas power outage disaster ever happens again?”
I think there’s a better chance that pigs will sprout wings, fly across the Atlantic Ocean at midnight tonight, and the Sun rising in the West tomorrow morning than Biden doing something this smart.
They’ll wait awhile. Change the name to the Biden-Harris Plan and take credit for it.
I thought AOC thought of it and she is the smartest of the bunch
Sadly, AOC may actually be the smartest of this bunch. I have never seen such stupidity as we have witnessed since Jan 20th on just about every policy issue. The Obama era stupidity pales in comparison to this.
If AOC really is the brightest of this bunch, well, heaven help us all.
Only if China buys into the plan.
Are you ignoring, or just belittling the leadership role of Israel, you darned holocau$e denier?
Same as taking credit for COVID vaccine, poor old Joe now saying there was no vaccine when the real President was in the office, but can Joe explain the television images of himself being vaccinated?
Trump’s attempt to prop up fossil and nucler power would have had zero effect. Texas didn’t run out of fuel, Its gas infrastructure froze, and coal became like rocks. Real esilence would have meant actually frost proofing both the natural gas and coal infrastructure.
News Flash:
Coal IS rocks.
Coal does not freeze. It is already solid. My understanding is that there were not enough coal reserves on site to have had a chance to make a difference in the energy shortfall. Trump’s plan would have eliminated that problem.
It ran out of Wind, that is for sure.
If there had been a sufficient amount of RELIABLE coal and Nuclear this would NEVER have happened
GAS infrastructure was asked to do WAY MORE than it should have been asked for.
If you MANDATE UNRELIABLE SUPPLY .. this is what happens when you stress the supply system
You really have to get a brain cell from somewhere, and get rid of your ACDS mental affliction.
Texas needed a “second wind”.
Tony,
Why don’t you spend some time gathering facts instead of just parroting Greenie propaganda.
Take a look at the following graph. TX nat gas ramped up 450% after wind died. It didn’t maintain it the whole time but it certainly remained higher than the wind/solar that was lost!
Nat gas saved the day! (and coal doesn’t freeze. the moisture on coal might freeze but a bulldozer doesn’t have any problem with still pushing the coal onto the conveyor belt)
Are you saying cold coal wouldn’t burn?
It weighs the same as a duck, then….
One problem is that Texas decided to replace coal with wind thereby reducing their baseload power supply and their reserve capacity. Had coal plants not been taken off line, Texas would have weathered this storm far better. Unreliables do not provide either baseload or dispatchable power. As Rick Perry stated “If you can guarantee me that the wind is going to blow tomorrow, if you can guarantee me that the sun’s going to get to the solar panels…then I’ll buy into that. But you can’t,”
A few pipelines are alleged to have frozen. That’s it. Had they not replaced coal and gas plants with so many windmills and solar panels, that small drop in production wouldn’t have been enough to cause a crisis.
Federal regulators rejected the plan, on the grounds that Rick Perry failed to provide enough evidence that retiring coal and nuclear plants was undermining grid stability.
Have they got enough evidence now ???
Not enough for Biden administration.
The Kansas governor wants FERC to fix the problem. She should know about this proposal by Rick Perry–although she won’t accept it because she is a Democrat.
The are working the spin to bury the evidence … they have the paid trolls on the case already.
Post modern science (especially climate science) is not evidence based. It’s based on conjecture, wishful thinking, lies and propaganda … with a heavy dose of politics.
Where is the evidence that we have to be forced on to unreliable power because of the expected planetary extinction through AGW?
The events in Texas in February 2021 provide absolutely no evidence that Rick Perry’s plan would have helped. Anyone who simply looks at the data can see that.
One of four nuclear power reactors in Texas actually tripped offline during the event.
And the coal-fired power plants–totaling 5163 MW–that retired in Texas between 2017 and February 2021 do not come even close to the 20,000+ MW deficit between ERCOT demand and supply on February 15th and 16th.
Trump was a business man first. He picked cabinet secretaries that actually knew their stuff and were not just political hacks. The Washington DC elites simply could not stand that and suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The FERC and associated federal regulators share the blame for what happened in TX. Will they be held accountable? Not under Democrat rule in Washington. The Bureaucratic Hegemony will be absolved and left in place to k*ll American citizens with their idiotic, unscientific biases.
Rick Perry was the Governor of Texas during the buildup of wind power.
Much of the incentive to install wind comes from federal regulations.
Incentives, mandates, exclusions, and prophecy of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling… warming… change, a social contagion spread through JournoLism, Ivory Towers, social indoctrination sites, and steering engines.
Mmmmm, maybe, Tim, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t realize the need for emergency backups, in the case of deadly weather, which was bound to happen sooner or later. It’s a shame when the “elites,” who are supposed to be so wise and educated, can’t even be bothered to admit their 20-20 hindsight stupidity.
Maybe that is why he understood the need to on-site storage and baseload power.
Rick Perry was Governor of Texas when oil was as much as $130/bbl and expected to only go higher. Wind power actually had a viable economic case then, hence the buildup. Now it’s just driven by capital and production subsidies.
That’s hilarious, considering we’re talking about Rick Perry and the Department of Energy!
Here’s a guy, Rick Perry, running an department he wanted to eliminate…except that he couldn’t even remember what department it was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMosJdIfdo
The guy has a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science. He had absolutely zero education or experience in energy production or use, and then he was named Secretary of Energy. How much more of a political hack can he be?
The plan he recommended would have helped TX last week. Results speak louder than ad hominems.
How would the nuclear aspect of what he proposed have helped Texas last week?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why-a-nuclear-reactor-shut-down-in-texas-cold-snap-when-energy-was-needed-most
As for coal, didn’t coal-fired power plants shut down also?
And wouldn’t it make more fiscal sense to simply winterize the natural gas production system and existing natural gas power plants than to build new coal plants or keep existing aged coal plants operating?
Anyone with unlimited money could have “helped TX last week”. The proper question is, “What were some of the low-cost solutions?” How does what Rick Perry proposed constitute a low-cost solution for what happened in TX last week?
It’s not an “ad hominem” to point out that Rick Perry, as the Secretary of Energy, was a “political hack.” It’s a fact. (An inconvenient truth, so to speak.) Your claim that he was not a political hack as the head of the Department of Energy was simply obviously false.
He had absolutely no education or experience in energy matters, and in fact knew so little about them that he couldn’t even remember that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy. If he had known anything at all about energy, he should have been able to remember that was the third department he wanted to eliminate.
If you think “to simply winterize the natural gas production system” is a “low-cost solution”, you know far less than Rick Perry. Although trained as a farmer (a high-tech job these days) and a military pilot (even higher tech), I wager he learned a lot about energy as Governor of Texas. It goes with the job.
And YES, calling someone a political hack is an ad hominem attack, you ignorant slut (thanks, SNL).
If you think “to simply winterize the natural gas production system” is a “low-cost solution”, you know far less than Rick Perry.
Bullshit.
Bullshit. What do you think you know about the subject? What is your background?
More bullshit. Tim Gorman wrote:
Establishing whether Tim Gorman was correct or not correct about Rick Perry being a “political hack” with respect to being the Secretary of Energy is not an “ad hominen” argument. It’s a matter of opinion and evidence. And the evidence is pretty overwhelming that he is a political hack with respect to being the Secretary of Energy. He couldn’t even remember that it was one of the three agencies he wanted the federal government to eliminate!
Your opinion of Perry differs from the facts.
How does my opinion of Rick Perry differ from the facts:
1) Are you saying he really *could* remember that he wanted to cut the Department of Energy in his presidential debate?
2) Are you saying he has a degree in something related to energy, as opposed to Animal Science?
3) Are you saying he’s ever held a technical position related to electrical energy production?
4) Are you saying he’s not a Republican? Or that Donald Trump would have hired him if he was the Democratic governor of Texas?
???
Exactly how did the Dept of Energy (DoE) help to prevent this crisis or mitigate it? Seems to me it is a waste of tax money just like the Dept of Edumakashun (another worthless DoE). And I have heard the EPA denied ERCOT the option to fire up some older lignite coal generation plants early in the cold snap. Texas has its own grid to avoid many Fed regs but cannot avoid EPA..
That’s irrelevant to this discussion. This discussion is about whether Rick Perry’s “energy resilience” proposals regarding coal and nuclear would have helped in this situation. (They would not have helped.)
You’ll get no argument there from me. Both the Department of Energy and Department of Education are clearly unconstitutional to boot. (Both are prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.)
So having more coal and gas would not have helped? Really?
Your hatred of Perry has caused your brain to freeze up.
<blockquote>So having more coal and gas would not have helped? Really?</blockquote>
No, MarkW, I’m not saying that. Your reading comprehension is simply abysmal.
P.S. You still haven’t filled out your column in my table:
Let’s see who knows what they’re talking about
“No, MarkW, I’m not saying that. Your reading comprehension is simply abysmal.
Really, that is not what you are saying?
“That’s irrelevant to this discussion. This discussion is about whether Rick Perry’s “energy resilience” proposals regarding coal and nuclear would have helped in this situation. (They would not have helped.)”
Are there two different Mark Bahner’s on here?
It would appear that is your own memory that is abysmal. And you fault Perry for his memory?
Texas ran out of Wind, that is for sure.
If there had been a sufficient amount of RELIABLE coal and Nuclear this would NEVER have happened
GAS infrastructure was asked to do WAY MORE than it should have been asked for.
If you MANDATE UNRELIABLE SUPPLY .. this is what happens when you stress the supply system
Seems Rick Perry is WAY ahead of you, since it is apparent that you have absolutely no education at all.
You really have to get a brain cell from somewhere, and get rid of your ACDS mental affliction.
You’re an ignorant twit, “fred250”. I’ll put my education and experience doing energy analyses against yours and Rick Perry’s any day.
P.S. And you still haven’t filled out your column in my table:
Let’s see who knows what they’re talking about
Rick Perry managed an energy state. He know so much more than Obama’s honcho, and now Biden’s honcho that they aren’t even comparable.
As a governor of TX he had more experience running a large organization than either Obama or Biden, let alone any of their cabinet picks!
The issue isn’t “low-cost” picks. That’s just a red herring. The issue is a reliable grid and Perry’s plan would have pushed toward having a reliable grid in TX. It’s just that simple. And its just that plain.
Trump is gone. Let your Trump Derangement Syndrome go! You’ll be a lot happier!
That’s ridiculous. As I commented to Eric, the situation in February 2021 could have solved by Texas having 20+ more nuclear reactors at a capital cost of $100+ billion. (Of course, construction would have needed to be started well before Rick Perry’s proposal in 2017.)
The issue is not having a grid that’s reliable in the face of once-in-60 year cold snaps. The issue is how to do that in a relatively low-cost way.
No, I challenge you to name anyone who is knowledgeable about the events in Texas this February who thinks that Rick Perry’s promotion of coal and nuclear would have helped.
I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I didn’t vote for Biden in 2020..or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is terrible on energy issues, just like Trump. They both imagine they know something about the subject. (Of course, Trump probably thinks he knows more than anyone about the subject!)
“Of course, construction would have needed to be started well before Rick Perry’s proposal in 2017.)”
You got to start somewhere. Using your logic nothing would ever be done because it should have been started yesterday!
“The issue is how to do that in a relatively low-cost way.”
Why? It just cost TX what? $50B. That’s halfway to the $100B you estimate for a reliable grid!
“No, I challenge you to name anyone who is knowledgeable about the events in Texas this February who thinks that Rick Perry’s promotion of coal and nuclear would have helped.”
I believe it. More coal and nuclear means that nat gas wouldn’t have had to ramp up as high to cover the wind/solar. And that is important cause the Feds wouldn’t let TX ramp up the nat gas as far as it would go for emission reasons (what idiots!).
“I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I didn’t vote for Biden in 2020..or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is terrible on energy issues,”
That doesn’t mean you don’t have TDS! And Trump knew he needed someone on the cabinet that knew about the issues – Perry.
If you are so knowledgeable then why didn’t Trump pick you?
Getting rid of the DoE, and about half the federal agencies would be a great idea.
However until the best solution can be implemented, running it competently is a good half measure.
“Trump was a business man first. He picked cabinet secretaries that actually knew their stuff and were not just political hacks.”
I disagree. He demanded loyalty and support to get him reelected.
Reagan did a much better job hiring people who put the job first.
I’m sorry. Reagan didn’t get black unemployment down to record levels. Reagan didn’t get Hispanic unemployment down to record levels. Reagan didn’t get the Abraham accords in place. Reagan didn’t keep China from stealing our knowledge.
Reagan did a *lot* of things admittedly. But Trump picked people that could get things done to. Your Trump Derangement Syndrome is showing.
Trump also made a real start at rebuilding the middle class (which includes all the left out racial groups, kept in limbo by years of Democrat incompetence and the prejudice of low expectations. People forget that the tax base is most stable when it comes from a productive middle class.
And don’t forget his “America First” policy.
I don’t get it. Why go to the federal government for back-up fuel funding. ERCOT could specify all producers put into a kitty. Seems more direct, self reliant and Texan-like than depending on remote self interested politicians to take care of you. Don’t be such a bunch of nanny clingers.
Just like telephone companies put into a kitty to fund universal service. Of course, ERCOT could do that. But they don’t care about their reliability mission. Only funding more and more intermittent, unreliable wind/solar.
“the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan”
Let’s keep referring to the above as a solution to what happened in Texas. To beat the left at their word games, we must adopt our own set of vocabulary and sound bites for more effective persuasion of public opinion.
Dominating the vocabulary is exactly what needs to be done. Marxism is spread by controling the debate with their own language.
Exactly, semantic games, conceptual corruption, and conflation of logical domains. They manufacture a frame of reference, then through mass inertia (e.g. established institutions), momentum (e.g. progressive processes), threats of cancellation, and actions of intimidation, force corporations, businesses, families, people to kneel.
Smaller country is the only way to go. The bureaucratic centralization on Washington is ongoing, they are now treating Trump as a speedbump on the way of their progress of co-ordination and control.
What happened to Eric Worrall of November 2017?
Rick Perry’s policy is the typical Washington solution of putting a patch on a bad policy, or as he says “rebalancing the market”:
The better solution would be to remove the subsidies on renewables which would kill the incentive to build them as Warren Buffet says:
The best solution is always to get rid of the bad regulations.
When that isn’t politically possible, trying to limit the damage of the bad regulations is better than nothing.
Yes, that is the proper way forward. Eliminate subsidies for renewables. And coal. And nuclear. And natural gas.
Eric Worrall was right in 2017. Propping up coal and nuclear because wind and solar are being propped up is not the way to go.
That wouldn’t solve the problem of encouraging power companies to keep an onsite reserve of fuel. I was wrong.
No, you were correct in 2017. You’re wrong in 2021.
On the nuclear side, there are four reactors in Texas in 2021…just like there were in 2017 when Rick Perry proposed his nonsense. One of the reactors actually went down in the early morning of February 15th…right when it started to be needed most!
On the coal side in Texas, there were 10 coal-fired units operating 2017 that aren’t operating in 2021: Big Brown Units 1 and 2 (1208 MW total); JT Deely Units 1 and 2 (840 MW total); Monticello Units 1, 2, and 3 (1865 MW total); Oklaunion 1 (650 MW); and Sandow Unit 5 (600 MW). That’s a total of 5163 MW. Even if all of those had been kept online until 2021 (at a ridiculous cost), that would not have even touched the deficit between actual demand (i.e., ERCOT forecast demand) and supply, which climbed above 20,000 MW at 7 AM on February 15th, and didn’t drop consistently below 20,000 MW until 1 PM on February 16th. (And which is still approximately a factor of 4 more than the closed coal plants could have provided!)
Once again: You were right in 2017 when you wrote that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” It was and is wrong to subsidize wind, and it was and is wrong to subsidize coal and nuclear to “compensate” for the subsidies to wind. Stick to your guns. The events of 2021 don’t show your 2017 analysis to be wrong.
Thanks for reminding me Mark. I added an explanation and acknowledgement to the bottom of the article.
Omigod, Eric! 🙂
That’s a terrible addendum! 🙂
You were correct in 2017. It’s wrong to prop up coal and nuclear because wind and solar are also wrongly being propped up. You were absolutely correct in 2017, when you observed that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
P.S. It’s pretty funny that you now think you were wrong in 2017. I’ve just gotten done with berating two other bloggers for not admitting that their posts made simple and obvious errors. Now you’re “admitting” an error in 2017 that I don’t think you made. 🙂
Hockey sticks and vaccine development
Mark, I didn’t anticipate problems with gas supply. As you can tell from my 2017 comments I’m not a fan of subsidies, but the overriding concern is making sure this doesn’t happen again. If you’ve got a better idea, which would convince companies to overlook the dead money cost of maintaining a reserve, love to hear it.
This was a once-in-“x”-years event, where “x” is somewhere between 10 and 100+. I’ll call it once-in-60-years. It could be prevented in the future if Texas had builds about 20 nuclear plants at a capital cost of $100+ billion.
Would that be acceptable to you in terms of “making sure this doesn’t happen again?”
I certainly have a better ideas than Rick Perry. That’s because Rick Perry is a political hack. He started with a solution before he even understood the problem. I’m an engineer. I attempt to actually analyze problems before I recommend solutions.
I’m about 15+ hours into analyzing what happened in Texas. So far, a major component of the solution to what happened in Texas in 2021 appears mainly to be…surprise!…winterize the natural gas system.
If you If you MANDATE UNRELIABLE SUPPLY at the expense of RELIABLE supply from Coal and Nuclear…
WFH do you expect to happen when the grid is put under stress…
Perry was mostly on the right track, no matter what your manic ACDS leftist/marxist cultism tells you.
BUILD UP AND PROTECT RELIABLE SUPPLIES.
Fred250, you’re an ignorant twit. You obviously no nothing about me…as well as knowing nothing about energy production and use.
Perry as the Secretary of Energy was a political hack. His proposal for coal and nuclear would have done essentially nothing to help Texas in 2021. If you could actually perform an energy production and use analysis, you could easily see that.
P.S. You still haven’t filled out your column in my table:
Let’s see who knows what they’re talking about
Having more gas and coal and less wind would have helped.
Your hatred of Perry and refusal to acknowledge basic facts has been duly noted.
All in all, this is a very disappointing post. A 90 day stockpile of nuclear fuel is more clueless than Rick Perry, most of the commenters don’t realize the problems that cold weather brought or that they could – should – have been ready for. At least we discussed science back in the pre-Climategate days.
Why would anyone be ready for cold weather in Texas? There is a “consensus” that temperatures are increasing in record amounts, according to AGW true believers.
If not for the stupidity of not using highly enriched uranium in reactors as does the US Navy, civilian power reactors would almost always have 90 days supply on hand. And the reliability and availability would be worth some extra support.
Just require all energy suppliers to be able to provide contracted energy as needed, and let the different types of suppliers contract among themselves to meet the requirement. The market would set the price. Of course since unreliables would need to buy the “insurance” they would no longer be built and existing solar and wind would soon be retired to the trash bin of history since the components are largely not recyclable.
Yes, Rick Perry started with a solution derived from politics–that Donald Trump wanted to subsidize coal and nuclear–rather than actually starting from a desire to understand engineering/technological problems and recommend solutions.
Having more coal and nuclear and less wind would have helped.
Even someone who’s mind is filled with hatred should be able to figure that out.
America has to become Energy Wise. We have over 600 years of good quality coal available and in that coal are more Btu’s than in our natural gas and oil combined.
We need our coal for producing America’s Electricity.
Clean Coal Is Possible. https://youtu.be/RQRQ7S92_lo
Clean coal is already here. There is no need to sequester CO2.
Yes, CO2 is not evil. It is not poison. It is not causing climate catastrophe. It is plant food. It is primary contributor for greening the earth for decades. It helps extend growing season. It is good for plants thriving and thus good for animals too.
Clean coal is already here as long as we scrub emissions to remove real poison (ash, sulfur compounds…). There is no need to sequester CO2.
For those thorium power fans ….Molten Salts Reactor fans….Kirk Sorensen has a couple of recent videos on Youtube 2 months and 4 months old.
Coal plants generally have a couple months worth of coal on site.
Common best practice.
Just part of responsible O&M.
Texas needed way more COAL-FIRED power plants.
Global ACDS (Anti-CO2 Derangement Syndrome) is preventing this.
Chinese seem to be unaffected by this insidious mental disease.
fred250,
Just as with the ChiCom-19 virus, the Chinese are heavily involved in the development and spreading of Global ACDS!
Thank God they don’t have anyway of controlling Zhou Bai Den!
Why coal at nuclear plants?
It seems being a dropout has cognitive consequences.
Please read the second sentence of the article…
Coal is needed as a fuel for nuke plants? Now that is major news. I suspect there is something missing from the article above.
Yeah yeah 🙂
90 days of coal on site at a nuclear powered electrical generation plant?
Please clarify.
What good would stockpiling coal at nuclear power plants do?
come on guys, it was just bad wording ! 🙂
Yes bad working & ridiculous on the face of it.
Imagine 40 years ago, if someone would have suggested creating wind generation facilities with public loan guarantees, and paying them not run.
Yeah yeah 🙂
The longer Trump is gone, the smarter he’ll look.
Hell, he already looks like a genius. The US will never live down the shame of installing a president already succumbing to dementia … who never did understand what truth meant.
A 2 week supply would be a good start and saved a ton of frustration during this storm. Ensuring the logistical supply chain had low temperature resillancy would probably be even cheaper.
90 days of coal at coal-fired power stations,will not make much difference if you only have a small percentage of coal in the mix.
Beefing up coal’s contribution should be the first item on the agenda, then mandating their full capacity use and 90 day supply for RELIABILITY.
Those sources that can guarantee RELIABILITY of supply should get the first run at the grid.
Having UNRELIABLE supply mandated, is a recipe for disaster.
Umm, answer to question at the end is “NO”. That is all.
Eric, I’d like to see a little more detailed analysis of Texas grid failure. I can see where Rick’s plan would have kept the coal plants operational but I don’t see how it would effect the nuclear and gas operations. According to CNN the nuclear plants shutdown because their cooling water pipes froze and the gas plants shutdown because their gas lines froze. Granted CNN is wrong most of the time but this article doesn’t provide inough information to debate their garbage. Could you point us to a more detailed analysis of what took down the Texas grid? I’ve got a couple of family members that think CNN is ‘cat’s meow.’
Nobody has performed such an analysis yet to my knowledge. As far as I know one of two nuclear plants shut down at South Texas Nuclear Power Station because its feed water pump froze, the rest kept operating.
Feedwater for steam plant usually comes from a HOTwell. Better thermal efficiency to maintain the feedwater temperature as high as is possible consistent with avoiding pumping cavitation problems! Cannot imagine it freezing!
See https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-tripped-at-0537-on-feb-15-2021/
The design criteria for Nuclear power plants is controlled by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Nuclear power plants elsewhere operate uninterrupted through conditions far worse than Texas experienced. If nuclear plants in Texas fell offline because of inadequate weatherization it’s not a failure of design, it’s a failure of NRC’s design criteria.
From the link posted by niceguy: “The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured. “
The “freeze-offs” in the gas supply may be water and other liquids freezing at the well head. I don’t know if that contributed to the gas fired plant problems. They did have problems with gas being sent for space heating as a higher priority. Also, gas plant output soared, it’s just that other supplies failed and demand soared too.
Here’s a good article: https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/the-texas-energy-crisis-its-causes-and-consequences/
Yep – moisture contamination in the gas itself freezing and blocking the pipes.
I think that the gas pipelines didn’t really start causing extensive problems until after the main chunk of power outages had occurred. That meant power cuts to gas pipeline compressors, and reduced gas deliveries, and did indeed lead to some of the later CCGT shutdowns.
The evidence is mounting that ERCOT tried too hard to avoid imposing blackouts, let the grid frequency fall to dangerously low levels which then resulted in lots of generation being tripped off line almost simultaneously (they lost 9.2GW just after 2 a.m. on the 15th), increasing the amount of blackout they needed to impose to stop the grid from collapsing completely. Indeed, it looks highly likely that there were cascading trips, with each one driving the frequency lower and causing more trips.
That is not to say there would not have been rolling blackouts, but if they had gotten on and imposed them, then the overall loss of power and gas supply would have likely been much less.
Thanks Eric,KAT, niceguy, Paul and Itdoesn’t addup for all the data and references.
Ater diggin’ in a bit it looks like CNN was partially right. Interpretation of the data currently available is purely subjective. About all I can add is that looking at it from a total systems approach it most likely would not have happened without the current (what I would call totally irrational) drive to solve the ‘Global Warming’ crisis.
I read that refinery restarts in the aftermath of the disaster will take several weeks.
https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/weeks_to_restart_damaged_texas_refineries-19-feb-2021-164671-article/
fortunately stocks of gasoline
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WGTSTUS1&f=W
and distillate (diesel)
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WDISTUS1&f=W
are reasonably healthy. The SPR, being crude oil, is of little help when you don’t have refineries to process it. However, supplies will quickly become tight in many areas East of Rockies as there will be reduced shipments on the Colonial pipeline and a need to rebalance supplies
This Texas debacle is what happens when you give grid priority to UNRELIABLE supplies.
Dropping reliable supplies in preference to UNRELIABLES…
…. and not looking after the reliable supplies you have left.
What do you expect to happen when the system is put under stress. D’oh!
Wind farms are like the Maginot Line against a global warming enemy that is not coming. Building an offshore Maginot Line is more folly. Putin is still smiling from his castles.
“….paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal onsite, for disaster resilience.”
Aside from the mystery of stockpiling coal to build nuclear “resiliency” (a Perry faux pas?), the Texas fiasco was not due to shortages – please cite any sources that say they ran out of or even ran low of fuel. I haven’t seen any proof of this yet on WUWT. This was an outage, not a shortage. Texas grids shut down because they were ill equipped to deal with extreme cold.
The discussion about renewables is an important one, and supplies need to be adequate. But no emergency stockpiles of fuel will mitigate downed line (from ice storms), frozen water pipes and other mechanical failures that come about from the likely far more expensive itinerary of winterizing their grid. That is the discussion that most people are avoiding.
These are hardware issues which come under the heading of “Fix the infrastructure”.
Almost agree. As far as I know NG ran out of available NG for generation, as it had to go to heating homes in the black out areas.
On the 15th when the wind did not blow, ( yes, even winterization of wind would have meant nothing on the 15th) forced black outs caused compressors to fail. A big oops. Had those NG plants remained operational it would have reduced the harm.
Causes of NG failure to completely bail out failed wind…
1. Diversion of generation NG to home heating.
2. Power to compressors cut.
3. Freezing valves.
I think this is the correct sequence of failures to fully bail out wind. Would love to see it quantified.
“Texas Crisis Exposes a Nation’s Vulnerability to Climate Change”the NYT
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-crisis-exposes-a-nation-s-vulnerability-to-climate-change/ar-BB1dRsgm?ocid=Peregrine
“The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events,”
Except that is not happening. It is a figment of the New York Times writer’s imagination. History shows there are no “more frequent” or “more intense” storms or other extreme events happening today. The current extreme cold in the central US has happened before in the past. It’s not unprecedented.
The numbers for all these categories tell a completely different story than the story the alarmists tell.
“Except that is not happening.” Right, Tony Heller has done a great deal of work on this issue – finding old newspaper’s from around the world- telling of severe conditions exceeding or at least equaling anything in recent years. Watching his videos for months finally convinced me how insane this new religion is.
A thread about Texas …
https://threader.app/thread/1362626074622877696
I don’t buy his explanation. I am fairly sure that the major loss of plants at 2 a.m. on the 15th was the result of a trigger event that resulted in a loss big enough to kick the frequency sharply lower, followed by too slow reaction in cutting demand through blackouts, resulting in many other plants tripping out on underfrequency. Earlier plant outages had been dealt with by ramping up coal and hydro, but they ran out of options. After losing 9GW probably in less than 5 minutes, power to gas pipelines would have been compromised. So we then see a more gradual falloff of other plants in the subsequent hours as they suffer the consequences of the major power loss. What we really need to see is a chart of grid frequency at say 15 second intervals (though every second would be better).
From this
http://web.archive.org/web/20210216031534/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
we can note that frequency had been running slow enough that grid synchronous clocks would be 40.331 seconds slow when the snapshot was taken. That’s evidence of a lot of stress from underfrequency. Here’s a capture at 1:52 a.m. showing frequency struggling at 59.334Hz
http://web.archive.org/web/20210215075245/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
That’s only just above the 59.3Hz at which automated load shedding trips in.
In which case its an Open & Shut case of Social Mruder
The guy in this ## video very effectively admits it.
## Its from the BBC, get barf-bags ready otherwise time 2:49 onwards
Personally I think it was very good of Texas and Texans to have retained their independence and gone it alone.
If their grid had been tied into the other grids (they struggled also) is it beyond possibility that this event would have pulled down a much larger grid area and taken out a lot more people than it did.
The rest of the country owes Texas a huuuuge debt of gratitude for taking this this on the nose, for actually handling The Buck.
And NOT passing it
The Southwest Power Pool north of Texas had its own problems. We had rolling blackouts around our region (eastern Kansas), and for the same reasons as Texas had its problems.
I’m disappointed that so many people, even here, are so focused on Texas as though it was the only state impacted by the cold.
Thank you for chiming in. Several other states, in the USA and Mexico, were also greatly impacted.
How many Texans died of cold?
It will take some time to assemble the figures. I’d be looking at excess deaths on a weekly basis: there is a good chance that in addition to obvious cases of literally freezing to death, and deaths caused to those who used inappropriate measures to keep warm (CO poisoning, house fire, etc.) there will be many whose underlying illnesses pushed them over the edge in the cold. Excess winter deaths are a commonplace in colder climates: I would almost be surprised if they didn’t show up for these events.
I must admit to changing my mind about events in Texas.
I am old school and think good utilities will have a 25% reserve margin. Part of the reserve margin is having workers who fix things when things get bad.
Since retirement I have not been keeping up with industry trends.
One of the advantages that natural gas plants have over coal and nuclear is much fewer workers. Talked to a friend at the nuke plant I used to work at. He had 44 hours overtime by the middle of the week. His normal job does not include worrying about ice and snow at 4am.
One of the things about the cost of workers at nuke plants and workers keeping an old plant in rolling reserve, is that the money goes back to the community.
I have read the detailed reports on the last two two large area and multiple days outages. Penny wise and pound foolish policies to reduce electricity cost resulted in cascading failures.
In simple terms, if an electric motor is need to pump water or compress gas to make electricity, that motor needs a reliable source of electricity.
FERC regulations required reliability. EPA wanted to reduce greenhouse gases. There is a death toll that is real.
If you can avoid paying spot energy prices of $17k/ MWh you could afford to sit on a pile of coal. You just need to have enough forsight to hedge instead of running your entire energy supply on a critically balanced, just-in-time strategy.
Our entire society is run like this now , not just electricity generation.
The Climate Crusaders only want to plan for warming and their carbon tax revenue windfall. Climate cooling and weather cold snaps are noise to them.
And what does the nuke site do with all that coal ? Wait until it’s cold and lend it to the coal powered plant?
Perhaps they could burn it around their cooling systems to prevent them from freezing; like a Florida citrus smudge pot!
I meant fuel 🙂
Biden is busy ripping down anything good that Trump put in place – I doubt he will resurrect one of Trump’s ideas that didn’t even come to fruition
Yeah, it’s just as stupid as Trump trying to rip down everything that Obama did.
Not stupid at all. The things Obama did harmed the United States and should have been ripped down.
Did Obama do any good or just lefty idealist stuff?
Just dangerous leftist stuff.
“Biden is busy ripping down anything good that Trump put in place “
Shouldn’t take too long.
I can’t wait till black unemployment skyrockets due to open borders. I can’t wait till Hispanic unemployment skyrockets for the same reason. I can’t wait till Iran gets its first nuke under Biden. I can’t wait till America starts losing manufacturing jobs to China again.
Biden has already been a disaster and he’s only been in office for a month. It will take generations to undo his idiocy.
I don’t know, DJT will be able to fix most of it in the first 60 days of 2025. Harris/Biden are giving him the blueprints to follow.
“I don’t know, DJT will be able to fix most of it in the first 60 days of 2025”
That’s for sure. The year 2022 might be a banner year for Repubicans, too. It would be nice to gain control of the House of Representatives and that would allow us to fend off two more years of Biden destruction. It would be nice to shut Nancy Pelosi up, too.
Trump is going to give a speech at CPAC next Sunday, his first public speech since being censored by the Left, so we’ll get to see what the future holds for conservatism/freedom.
Guess what folks? No modern life without FOSSIL FUELS full time. Why can they not figure that out? Rose colored glasses, and blurred thinking.
Headline on fake news.
“<b>Texas Crisis Exposes a Vulnerability to Climate Change</b>”
It was snow and low temperatures you idiots!
First the straw man-
Texas power disaster may be strongest case yet for renewable energy (msn.com)
but we will have to think about unreliables
‘“The loss of power has been a warning of the issues that will be raised as the proportion of renewable generation on the grid rises,” said Crooks of Wood Mackenzie.
Generation, transmission and distribution equipment, and the design of the electricity market, will become even more important to cope with the challenges created by a renewables-heavy grid.
“Distributed resources including storage and demand response will also have to play a greater role. Texas renewable capacity would need to increase more than 10-fold to provide the same amount of energy produced by the fossil fuel fleet on Monday, even at reduced levels,” Wood Mackenzie analysts said.
Because this would prove excessive at some times of the year, storage will matter immensely, including batteries, hydrogen or another technology.’
Another technology! Now what could that be? Horse driven….oxen…pedal generators…?
Mind you the climate changing Facebook fatties could do with some Green exercise and back to the future for an energy lesson-
Alfred Hermann Traeger, OBE | SA History Hub
“the design of the electricity market, will become even more important to cope with the challenges created by a renewables-heavy grid.”
To hell with that! Keep it Simple, Stupid, as they say, and leave unreliable generation out of the mix.
News update: no bail for climate activist in India
Common sense is right wing.
Engineering and technical competence are right wing.
Or in current parlance, “problematic”.
So both are now being systematically cancelled.
Replacing engineers with CPAs nevers pays off in the long run.
Anyway, Hunter is rushing to Texas because he heard there are lots of crack pipes everywhere.
If I understand things correctly, they did not run out of coal, rather the coal pile, kept wet so it won’t catch fire, froze into a solid pile.
I assume there are augur feed systems, they may have emptied out a cavern of unfrozen coal under the coal pile. I’d think twice about running a bulldozer on the pile to break it up. Heck, I’d think twice about taking a shovel to it.
I’m looking forward to the post mortem on the situation. If this was an issue, and there is no easy solution, maybe nuclear is the answer.
I guess its a good thing you aren’t in charge of the coal piles I guess. Have you actually ever seen one?
Nuclear plants don’t just “empty the tank” like a car or lawn mower does. They can easily defer a refueling cycle to get past a cold spell or hurricane. A refueling lasts 12-18 months.
In fact, operators schedule refueling during mild weather periods, e.g. spring or fall.
I read somewhere that the nuke that was forced offline had a freeze up in the return water flow from the cooling tower.
Having a 90 day supply of uranium on hand would have done no good whatsoever.
The disaster was due to ignoring the risks of another freeze like they had in 2011, not the coal or uranium supply.
See https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252 for more on nuclear plant outages, including refueling scheduling.
Seems to me, that there was absolute incompetence that caused the return water feed to freeze.
When a simple by pass system would have solved the return water temperature being to low.
Like only using a smaller percentage of the cooling tower?
Yes I know that could lead to problem in the cooling tower.
But there are things called modulating valves and temperature sensors.
That would automatically keep the tower from freezing.
That is, if there was enough hot water in the first place?
I was wondering how northern nuke operators deal with that. I suppose one possibility is to close off some of the vents at the base of the tower to reduce the amount of cold air being admitted.
Insulating the return line might also a good thing to do.
Or perhaps something I don’t know enough about froze one way or another.
niceguy posted a link above about the Reactor shutdown. Excerpt: “South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured.”
There was a choice between more safety and more “renewables” (intermittents).
Texas chose poorly.
https://youtu.be/0H3rdfI28s0
In other news, Mark Zuckerberg is deported to Germany for crimes against humanity
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56140903
Politicians don’t understand business people, and by the way business people don’t trust politicians.
Nobody trust politicians
Several of Texas’s LNG export terminals were originally built as import terminals with re-gasification equipment connecting to major gas distribution networks. Reactivating this capacity would enable stored LNG to be returned to the pipeline system in the event of a production shortfall.
Isn’t it wonderful how Ted Cruz can suddenly think Mexicans are OK. What a guy he is. Leaves his constituents to freeze while he suns it across the border.
Funny, from all I have read he flew down to see daughter/friends to their destination and flew back. What, precisely, could he have done at home to change anything about the statewide situation? Really like to know. He damned well could have taken actions during the preceding several years that would have helped, what exactly could he have done DURING the outage. That is the actual question everyone is ignoring.
The MSM doesn’t care about being rational, only about condemning GOP.
What could he have done? Stayed and consoled those who were struggling. People are looking for answers at this time not for a wealthy representative to wave bye-bye on their way to a warmer place. It’s about the optics as much as anything. Basically he is saying stuff you lot I’m outta here. Cruz is a hated by many we all know that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnGNSDlZJU) but this doesn’t help his image one little bit.
So, again, feelings not actual help. And I can’t stand the man, he is a duplicitous backstabbing scumbag. Does not change the fact that he could do nothing in this greentard Democrat created disaster. But hey! Your feelings are hurt and that is all that matters.
That Cruz is hated by all progressives is self evident. Then again, progressives hate anyone who threatens their supply of free stuff.
Apparently his original plan was to fly back Friday, but when the snowball hit the frozen fans, he hightailed back a couple days early. The last I saw of him was when he was passing out cases of drinking water to constituents at a relief pick up area.
Once again, the progressive reveals that in it’s pitiful excuse for a mind, all conservatives are racist, and they won’t let anything as trivial as mere facts move their opinions.
Sky News reports:
So instead of blaming the situation on unreliables, they imply reliable fuel was unreliable.
More coal plants wouldn’t have avoided this, would they? and since it is natural gas which has edged out coal in Texas anyway…
Yes, yes they would. More nuclear and gas generation will help, too. A new industry, though short lived, will crop up with the tearing down and recycling of wind turbines. Solar in Texas has a future, a niche, hobby sort of future, a future all the same.
having worked in manufacturing where they got the JIT stock supply bug and then having our entire production line utterly stuffed around when just one critical component didnt arrive and we had ZERO spare stock on hand,,,Ive been highly critical of the idiocy of save a dollar today and them lose far more later that this stupidity pretty much g/tees with the slightest glitch
if you think long term , you have to consider renewable energy any how , as fossils are not permanent ! that’s the truth , who is pretending the opposite is a liar !
Coal is minimum hundreds of years supply
Nuclear is many thousands.
That isn’t permanent but it’s long enough that no one alive needs to worry about it
You can have all the wind turbines you want, properly winterized, and if the wind isn’t blowing you get frozen dead people
Until you also have workable affordable grid scale batteries wind and solar are just a second mostly useless generating system
We’ve got enough oil and gas to last for hundreds of years.
We’ve got enough coal to last for at least 1000 years.
We’ve got enough uranium to last for many 1000’s of years. When you add the other isotopes, that number gets increased greatly.
There is no reason to install wind and solar now.
Sure, do some basic research, maybe in a few thousand years, wind and solar might be ready for prime time.
Then again, by then we might have fusion working.
PS: Nobody has ever made the claim that oil and gas are permanent.
The fact that you have to lie about the other sides argument in order to make your case just proves that even you know that your argument is too weak to stand on it’s own.
So, a plan was put forward, roundly criticized by the environistas and competing gas interests, poopooed by the Trump Haters and the citizens of Texas got thoroughly screwed? Bet the media will refuse to cover this, farcebook and twatter will block all mention of it and griffie et al will repeat endless lies about it. Same old same.
“I had a vision of Perry’s plan kicking of[f] a subsidy race, between proponents of renewables and proponents of fossil fuel and nuclear. What I didn’t realise was how limited reserves would be in a severe weather event. Perry was right, I was wrong.”
You were both right. Government intervention always requires government intervention in expanding amounts on expanding levels.
This event is a homage to T. Boone Pickens, “the father of wind energy”.
The father of wind energy subsidy mining.
Nobody has mentioned Ohio. I believe that many advocates for renewables were quite angry when Ohio decided to subsidize non-renewable energy.
Now there is movement in the related bribery case:
https://www.wkbn.com/news/ohio/dark-money-group-admits-racketeering-in-ohio-bribery-case/
Do we need bribery to keep the lights on these days?
Apparently; I think that’s called ‘globalism’.
Biden administration blocked Texas from increasing power as Texas begged for help a week before catastrophic polar vortex.
Texas asked to temporarily lift regulations on energy output to avoid disaster. Biden’s DOE refused to help due to “green energy standards”.
https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/federal-power-act-section-202c-ercot-february-2021
You’ll never hear about this on the MSM. I wonder how this can be publicized more widely?