“You want a prediction about the weather? You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day
Pugsley said it was so cold in the house that it was at absolute zero. I said, “That’s 0K.”
It has been cold. Really cold. The good thing about that is that I like the cold. It’s rarely cold enough for me – even now my fingers are nearly numb blocks of flesh mashing the keyboard and only occasionally hitting the right key.
Almost cold enough, but as I reach up I find that I still have feeling in my jaw and cheeks, so I’m not quite there.
But Texas is. Today at lunch The Mrs. and I were discussing that it was colder in Anchorage, Alaska than in Houston, Texas. That made me think. And then I ended up wondering if it was too cold for Jeff Bezos to sleep in his undies, or if he needed his pajamazon?
Okay, back to Texas.
When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house. The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.
If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.
And that’s just one problem.
The bigger problem is that Texas is supposed to be an energy source. Oil gets pumped there, sure. But the pipelines for all of that natural gas that is produced in Texas? All of those pipelines head out of state. Texas is silly with natural gas, and produces far more than it uses.
Natural gas has historically been used to heat houses. It’s relatively abundant, quick and simple to ignite, and generally relatively cheap*. It’s great for hot water heaters. It’s wonderful for forced air heaters, like we have here at Casa Wilder. Heck, in the 1970’s (I read once) they passed a law that restricted the use of natural gas so that its convenient, safe heat could be used by homeowners voters to heat their houses.
And one oil company was going to make renewable crude from insect urine. It think it was BP.
But somewhere that philosophy changed – mainly when natural gas became abundant with fracking, and when Global Warming® activists became obsessed with coal. Natural gas puts a lot less carbon into the air than coal per Btu (kiloparsec). So, it became common to build industrial plants that used natural gas for heat, as well as power plants that used natural gas instead of coal.
Natural gas is pretty nifty when you use it for a power plant. That same property of nearly instant heat is there, so if you use natural gas to drive an engine, for example, you can pretty efficiently use that fuel to generate electricity quickly. To start up a coal electrical generating plant takes a long time. To start up a natural gas electrical generating plant?
Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.
When The Mrs. and I met, I felt quite a spark. Who knew she had a Taser®?
But what happens when all of those Texas houses, not built for cold, crank up the natural gas heater? What happens when the people who use electricity to heat their house crank that up at the same time? And, what happens when all of those wind turbines that are supposed to be generating electricity become electricity sinks, since many of them have electric heaters to prevent the gears and bits from freezing up and breaking? And the wind isn’t blowing?
The system fails.
An aside:
As I wrote this, I realized that my heater hadn’t gone on for, oh, seven degrees. The internal temperature in the house had dropped to 57°F (2°C). Not good. As I went to my trusty heater, I found it flashing a series of codes over and over again like an autistic R2-D2™.
In the past, this was a failed part called a “flame roll out sensor” which appears to fail much more often than the penny I replace it with. Just kidding! I use stripped wire. Also kidding. I really don’t mess with the heater more than changing the filter every decade or so (Pugsley changes it twice yearly) and flipping the breaker on and off and then poking about the insides like an Albanian strip-mall lawyer trying to fix a copier.
Which, oddly enough, works. I know that there is some sort of computer logic that was finally satisfied – such as, “the gas is no longer explosive enough to launch Wilder into space in the most pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk since Wilder founded a company named Space Y.”
I make jokes about air conditioners, but not heaters. That’s not cool.
My guess? The gas pressure dropped a bit. Which never happens, except in February, 2021. I’ve never seen this particular error code, except the one time that I missed the exhaust portal near Yavin 4.
So, we have Texas, proud producer of natural gas, and now, neurotic consumer of natural gas. And we have all of these Texas generating stations that need . . . natural gas. And we have all of these Texas homes that need electricity to run the electric heaters (our house in Texas was one of those).
The system fails. Power goes out.
But the Germans are going to build a car in Texas. It will be called the Audi Neighbor™.
Thankfully the cold won’t last forever. And this is a cold that, in some places, has broken records that were 122 years old, so it’s not the usual sort of winter storm in any respect.
But it does show us the limit of our systems.
Dang. The heater is working again. I can feel my fingers now.
*One source I saw showed spot prices up 24,000% (LINK), from $4.00 per million Btu last week to $999 yesterday.
Coming soon to US taxpayers everywhere will be the “2021 Equity Electrical Bailout” legislation that overtly concerned but obviously corrupted Congressswine will be pushing. Why? Because it will give them a chance to buy votes using your grandchildren’s tax dollars to pay for the stratospheric high home electric bills that the entire mid-West will receive next month.
When there is an unusually high demand for electric power, privately owned stand-by electric generating stations get swiftly operating to meet the demand ordered by nearby electrical utility companies. They almost all burn natural gas to power the stand-by generators and have little nat-gas stored on site. Thus they have to go to the spot market to buy the fuel needed to provide the power required. When nearly all these stand-by generating plants turn on and demand nat-gas that is already in short supply due to frozen wellheads, the price of nat-gas goes stratospheric. Those costs get passed on to the utility that received the extra electrical power and then those costs get shoved down onto the homeowner-consumer.
So, next month sticker shock in the form of outrageously high electric bills will be hitting folks already reeling from economic shutdowns due to a flu bug that has a 99.4% survival rate…..Those accustomed to seeing a high utility bill for 2-3 Winter months of $300 to $00 a month wil be seeing bils approaching $1000 or more !! Talk about STICKER SHOCK…..WOW !!
Those anguished cries of the homeowners will be amplified by a plethora of corrupt mediaswines. Awakened from their drunken sexparties, the Congresswine will seize upon another crisis to throw your money at, so as to buy them votes.
Watch and you will see occurring exactly what I have predicted….it is as sure as the fact that AOC has two brain cells.
You’re giving AOC way too much credit.
I’m with headsman here. When I lived in minnesota (for 43 years) I kept 5 or 6 cords of oak ahead at all times. It was great exercise in the summer and it sure was nice in the winter. We lived in an old (1912) farmhouse, had our own wells, etc. and routinely saw temps in the 20-30 below range every winter. I’m sorry for people who aren’t prepared, but that was a choice.
I know of several schools that have shut down because heating them would cost tens of thousands of dollars in current natural gas cost.
On the other hand, when we lived in northern Michigan well past the 45th parallel most homes didn’t have central air conditioning because it rarely got all that hot in the summer. Every once in a while we would get a really hot day or two and be sweaty but 99.99% of the time it wasn’t an issue so we never bothered to put in central air. But cold and snow? When there was still snow on the ground in May, you build your houses to withstand the cold weather.
You can’t affordably build a house that is perfectly suited for every possible weather event and you can’t build infrastructure like that either. Meanwhile retired tavern wench AOC is claiming that the Green New Deal would have prevented this from happening by building even more wind turbines that froze in place.
Yup, same with us in Fairbanks. We got a fan out one day in the summer. I think it was 90F.
The kids moved from New York to South Texas years ago because they were fed up with our winters. Since then, they’ve experienced murderous hailstorms, biblical flooding, a couple of once-in-a-lifetime snowfalls and now record-shattering cold (with no heat and no running water due to the rolling blackouts). I am actually tiring of sending neener-neeners their way, and chuckling over the fact that a thin coating of ice on the roads literally paralyzes the city they live in. We eat that s**t for breakfast in winter up here in the frozen north, but “Texas tough” soils its chaps on a coupla flurries.
We’ll be moseying down that way ourselves, however, the wife and me, in retirement. Ironically, I feared their wicked summers and never gave winter a thought, as its always been 70 and mild at the holidays when we visit. Since 2021 is nothing more than the spawn of 2020 I really have to wonder if all this disaster-on-demand is merely heralding the End of Days.
0Kelvin. ***snort*”*
Our boiler blew a couple of weeks ago. The best part was the dog pushing past us to stand in the flooded garage.. And pee in it.
Ha! And our furnace was on. And then off. And then on . . . .
When we moved there from Fairbanks, we ended up in the pool in December. All the Houstonians thought we were nuts, but the water was in the upper 70’s.
I still like the cold . . . .
I am a little skeptical. Worked in a related industry to power generation for many years. Texas and Oklahoma were and still are a net exporter of power. You mean to tell me that in those hot summer days when electricity is being used by the compressors and the fan motors their is enough power but now only having to power the fan (gas heat) motors and profitable prices sky high their is a power shortage. Sounds a little like an Enron scenario, but I could be wrong.
Or payback for being republican run and pro freedom (Supporting Trump) …
That’s what happens when a quarter of your state’s electric generation is wind turbines – that have frozen solid. And another significant percentage in solar panels – that are under an unexpected layer of ice and snow.
Same generating capacity, but now houses that are designed for 50F are struggling to stay warm at 10F, and using the gas (at the low supply availability point) that would have gone for electrical generation. Only gas use in summer is for water heaters.
I feel sorry for all the folks that are learning their preparations aren’t as thorough as they imagined. I’ve heated with wood since the ’70’s. I can see two years of heating just looking in my backyard. If this is a taste of the coming Eddy solar minimum, I’m going to need to rework my chicken pen, as about 25 starlings have moved in to avoid freezing/starvation. I suppose we’ll see, in time.
I miss heating with wood – every place but Modern Mayberry that I’ve ever lived has had a stove or fireplace, and most of the time that was our primary source.
Don’t get me wrong, we have a CFA heat pump. I have always preferred heating with wood to central heat. If you’re cold, you can stand by the stove. It costs nothing except some sweat, and I need the exercise anyway. Lastly, I have a secure energy source for 2 years, come hell or high water, or both.
And we might get both, at this rate.
The media is the only thing generating hot air here…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/fact-check-texas-using-helicopters-chemicals-de-ice-frozen-wind-turbines-1569762%3famp=1
Ha! Yeah. The media hates the idea that their pet projects might have negative consequences.
I remember my mother sending me a news clipping back in the late 70’s when I was in Germany.
On that particular day, Sylva NC had a temperature of negative 45 degrees with the wind chill at the same time Anchorage AK had a balmy positive 45 degrees.
I was flabbergasted as I read this, right before I climbed on top of our radar van in the middle of a blizzard, to replace a vacuum tube and repair the safety interlock. ( The interlock is what keeps the radar from transmitting when someone is up on the roof.)
I’m betting that we’ll have more bad weather next year. Global Warming, right?
Down where I live, which is further down in Texas, we receive a cost of energy adjustment in our electric bills. When energy prices go up, the Public Utility Commission allows adjustment to cover the cost of fuel. Considering the amount of problems, the current market price of fuel, and the fact overtime is eating up the yearly budgets, next month will yield some ticked-off people, with vengeance on their mind.
Government officials will demand an investigation; the investigation will demand a committee: the committee will come up with a knee-jerk solution; the knee jerk solution will end up in court; the courts will declare the knee-jerk solution illegal; and three years will pass.
Austin is a bastion of idiocy. Since it was contaminated by the liberal pandemic, intelligence was reduced to just above that of garden vegetables. This concerns those that live beyond the edges of the pandemic, and they’re seriously considering building a moat around the city, with armed guards to keep them in. It’s for the good of the children, and pregnant teenagers…just like the lottery.
I heard today that hotels in Texas, which have been empty for a year, are being accused of price gouging.
Wasn’t gonna read at all but the word “bikini” was in the headline. Scrolled down til I found it, then to the bottom to let you know that it was a bit disappointing. Not a graph to be seen. I’m sure the article was great though.
Oh, and still can’t log in to WordPress from your page. Which is on-going weird since I can click the button over on Sarah’s site and it takes me right in.
Wasn’t gonna read at all but the word “bikini” was in the headline. Scrolled down til I found it, then to the bottom to let you know that it was a bit disappointing. Not a graph to be seen. I’m sure the article was great though.
Oh, and still can’t log in to WordPress from your page. Which is on-going weird since I can click the button over on Sarah’s site and it takes me right in.
Another point. Most of the wind generation was installed since the Enron debacle which was Oct. 2001 after the 2000 Cali blackouts. First there was 9/11 then Enron. Prior to that 250 megawatt generation plants were being installed 4 at a time. Bush jr. said we will turn on 1 per month which was impossible but many had already been built. Enron killed the construction of plants but the capacity was already there. Like the commentor above said the new higher bills are going to piss people off, and it has been said greed is good. Well it is but not for the little people. Only central banks then hedge funds front running robin hood stock orders is guaranteed profit.
Ha!
I’ll see what I can do about the login . . . that’s been a problem I have, too over at other places.
This is a once in a lifetime thing down here. Hell, I’ve been in DFW over 20 years and it’s never happened. Worst we have ever gotten was a day of ice, which melted by afternoon.
What’s different is our membership in an idiotic electric reliability board – Ercot, Which has failed their one job. That said, the best explanation I heard for this cascading failure is that power companies typically do maintenance around this time.
One would think that with COVID and the odd intense storm people would learn and prepare. It didn’t take much effort to lay in grub, paper products, water, and whatnot. And if you bought an all electric house here, well, that was dumb.
What’s worse, by far, is the bullshit I’m hearing from yankee transplants.
“Well! This would never happen in Connecticut” (I’m sure it would if you had a string of 110 degree days).
“Texas sold out to big energy for cheap electric rates! Now look at them!” – (I’m sure you’ll enjoy that 9 Cent/KWH pricing come July/August.)
There are several threads of bickering, retarded transplants on my NextDoor feed. My advice – Go home. Please.
There were also tons of – “My pipe burst! Does anyone know how to turn the water off?” and “I have turn the water off, does anyone have one of those keys?”
Good lord. These are adults. The first thing you have to do when you buy a house is find out how to turn off the water/gas/electric if you have to. Wow. And going on NextDoor when your pipe burst? I’d be pecking on my neighbors door.
Having grown up outside Houston and now surviving in N.E. Ohio, I can honestly say, COLD SUCKS.
I was 9 or 10 when I saw my first snow. 20 when I saw the next one. Now I live next to a huge body of water that freezes on a regular basis. Yes, freezes!
A lot of homes up here have no central a/c. A lot of homes down there have no central heat.
Huge cost to build for fluke weather. Not so much cost to prepare for it.
That’s really true – I was nearly 30 the first time I moved into a house with air conditioning.
But I’ll take cold any day over heat.
Lots of reasons for the difficulties here in Texas, not just one, and many related to the laws of physics, economics, and not just politics. I’m sure there will be millions of billable hours expended in the coming years– and it matters not one bit.
No time machines exist, that we know of, so all the finger pointing is of little use.
If you insist on looking outside and wasting valuable prepping time and energy, then please consider that anything you see in the news is agenda driven. Stop repeating the lies. Don’t let them color your thinking. Don’t let them distract you. But if you must, please consider the following when weighing the news.
There are many things that came together to create this disaster. Some of the factors include —
It really was seriously cold. Record setting cold. Freaking Chicago would have street people dying in 14F weather, so anyone who accepts the idea this is a Texas thing should ask themselves why that idea is in their head. Seriously. And then work to modify their media inputs. Same note for why all the coverage is of TEXAS when there were a dozen states affected.
Lots of capacity was OFFLINE for required maintenance, which is done in the winter because summer is our normal high demand time.
Everyone is short staffed because getting sick from covid is in fact a real thing, and the requirement to quarantine if you or someone in your household gets sick is a real thing. Changing out gear oil in pumps is not something you can do from home over zoom.
One week of warning is not a lot of man-hours to get thru a MASSIVE list to prepare for an unusual event, especially when short staffed and especially under the work rules associated with covid response.
The weather liars are ALWAYS WRONG – by degree if nothing else, and I’m sure that played into any preps. The screeching about a massive OVER-reaction and all the wasted money getting prepped for a non-event would have been epic too.
There are reasons for the phrase “act of God” in contracts and insurance. This was a classic “act of God.”
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In my neighborhood in Houston we did what we always do in a disaster– we checked on our neighbors and helped where we could. As we enter the “Recovery” phase, we’ll be fixing stuff and getting back to normal.
(link to FEMA training re: disaster management https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjN_rjHqPnuAhXQVs0KHaabAGwQFjABegQICRAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftraining.fema.gov%2Femiweb%2Fdownloads%2Fis111_unit%25204.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0MA7EK1rLlKMCr3O6RXNo9
TL:DR Preparedness -> Response –> Recovery –> Mitigation –> repeat
I’m sure there will be a bunch of stuff proposed/demanded/imposed during the Mitigation phase, and there will be additional costs imposed as the utilities begin the Preparedness phase, and it will all likely affect us as rate payers only negatively.
If you’re reading this — take the hint to get your own house in order. The Emgmt cycle isn’t just for trough slurpers, it’s for you and me too. (We paid for a lot of that material, so read it and apply it as needed to your own life.)
Very rare things happen. Even the well prepped can suffer from Mr Murphy. Have multiple levels of redundancy. Have multiple sources of heat, light, cooking, etc. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not building resiliency, it’s building a single point of failure.
Help yourself so that you can help others.
And for God’s sake and your own, if you aren’t already prepping, get started.
nick
Excellent, excellent comment, Nick.
The best time to start prepping is yesterday. The second best is today.