[stephen_g]

We have this problem with coal plants in Australia - in Summer often there are unplanned coal unit outages on hot days (due to this kind of thing, among other reliability issues with the aging plants - I don’t think ours use river water but this kind of cooling issue), and it’s always right when the grid is stressed with all the air conditioners running…

And of course the rightwing media starts the chorus of ‘those bloody renewables’ causing problems, even when solar especially is actually helping us ride through some of the coal unreliability!

[taylodl]

Look what happened in Texas - major Winter storm hit and it froze the gas generation plants. Of course all the right-wingers could talk about were those "frozen windmills" failing them. Meanwhile in my state, which is considerably further North than Texas, the temperature was even colder yet our windmills were spinning just fine. Of course they "forgot" to mention that. They also "forgot" to mention all the gas generation plants that couldn't operate in subfreezing temperatures. You can better believe when generation is taken offline due to the river water being too warm or the water level being too low they're going to blame solar and wind generation for the outages. It'd be funny if it weren't for the fact that there are idiots who believe what they say.