It's an interesting case of one area trying to stay independent and deregulated, then failing in basic areas like low costs, and maintenance, leading to serious issues in recent winters. With certain media trying to turn the management failures into an anti-wind campaign thus not making things better.
Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally.
Those failures didn’t happen until they started shifting to so called “green” energy. And compared to California’s power woes, Texas is a model of efficiency.
With natural gas and nuclear, there would never be a power shortage in Texas. But for some reason people are obsessed with ugly, bird killing windmills and giant solar farms.
> These failing sources largely included nuclear plants, coal plants and thermal energy generators. Frozen wind turbines were a factor, too, but Woodfin said wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages.
That's ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. So no, it definitely would've happened with just gas and nuclear.
It's one of the larger ones in the world (same GW as the largest European countries), there's a lot of data available and it's the only one that recently collapsed. I cannot remember a similar collapse due to a mismatch of demand and supply in any other network that size, especially one where we get all the data for.
I believe the CA power grid gets similar attention here whenever there's any news. A post for a dashboard would've probably attracted as many upvotes.
A large number of fabs and other manufacturing facilities exist there.
Texas has had several power failure related disasters in recent years; which have cost many lives and much value, as well as caused shocks to the rest of the US.
Much of the rest of the US does not have those issues, or has them in only very small predictable circumstances, mostly caused E.G. by huge windstorms (trees), earthquakes, fires, other 'natural disasters'. Climate generally not regarded as a natural disaster since it's something that should theoretically be planned for. Even the windstorm example, for metro areas power should not go out. It's only poorly managed rural areas that tend to go off the grid.
Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally.
In case you're not familiar with Ercot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...