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WTF It's Seriously &^$%^ Cold Outside


Texsox
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We just spent over 24 hours below freezing and it's getting worse. I've seen forecasts of it getting down to 9 by tomorrow afternoon here in south central Texas.  I can't believe I would be out ice fishing in this shit. I'm huddling in my upstairs staying warm. Holy crap y'all must really be suffering up nort'

I did buy a new shirt. It's a big ol Texas flag with Secede? Y'all Better Hope We Don't Invade across the front. Now I realize you'll stop us with this cold weather crap. 

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46 minutes ago, Texsox said:

We just spent over 24 hours below freezing and it's getting worse. I've seen forecasts of it getting down to 9 by tomorrow afternoon here in south central Texas.  I can't believe I would be out ice fishing in this shit. I'm huddling in my upstairs staying warm. Holy crap y'all must really be suffering up nort'

I did buy a new shirt. It's a big ol Texas flag with Secede? Y'all Better Hope We Don't Invade across the front. Now I realize you'll stop us with this cold weather crap. 

Hasn't been above freezing here since the 4th and not expected to get back above until the 21st. Oh, and about 18 inches of snow on the ground.

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Yuch. Several inches of snow overnight. Lost electric several times. Fortunately not for too long each time and the house stayed warm. 

This is a student holiday and teacher workday. I was going to be on Zoom conferences all day anyway.

My landscaping is taking a pounding. I'm estimating $1,000 and a couple years growth time will be lost. The growth time is the saddest. No instant fix at any cost. 

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I'm just looking forward to April 15th (ish) when my campground finally opens back up. Hopefully...

Although there's no guarantee that the snow will be gone by then. I have pics on my phone from the last 2 Aprils where it snowed on the 17th one year and then the 27th the next year.

Edited by Iwritecode
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21 hours ago, Texsox said:

We just spent over 24 hours below freezing and it's getting worse. I've seen forecasts of it getting down to 9 by tomorrow afternoon here in south central Texas.  I can't believe I would be out ice fishing in this shit. I'm huddling in my upstairs staying warm. Holy crap y'all must really be suffering up nort'

I did buy a new shirt. It's a big ol Texas flag with Secede? Y'all Better Hope We Don't Invade across the front. Now I realize you'll stop us with this cold weather crap. 

Hope you all stay safe!  Its just winter here, but for you guys, its new and dangerous.  Accelerate slowly, and turn slowly.   Make sure you have weight over the wheels (in a RWD vehicle)

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Thank you.  It's been 25 years since I drove regularly in snow.  We're all staying home.

The biggest challenge is most of Texas heats with electric.  Our electric grid is in a stage 3 emergency situation which means rolling random blackouts. We have about fifteen minutes of electricity every hour. Most of the wind turbines are off line due to freezing. 

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This situation is the direct result of Texas exceptionalism and years of coddling Big Oil/ignoring climate change. It's up to the people of Texas to realize the error of their ways and hold the leadership accountable for this horrible situation.

This WILL happen again in a few years and I can only hope that more people in that state wise up. 

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37 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

This situation is the direct result of Texas exceptionalism and years of coddling Big Oil/ignoring climate change. It's up to the people of Texas to realize the error of their ways and hold the leadership accountable for this horrible situation.

This WILL happen again in a few years and I can only hope that more people in that state wise up. 

While it has been suggested that the severe bends in the jet stream are climate-change related, that isn't fully accepted in in the literature yet. Intense weather systems hitting Texas aren't impossible every 10 or 20 years under the previous climate regime. It may not have happened this year without the changes humans have put in the atmosphere, but it would have eventually. There's a lot more work to be done to be able to attribute this one strongly to a human-driven climate change effect.

If you want to talk about the poor design and multiple failure points in the Texas electric grid regulations and how that was the direct trigger for this, go for it. 

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ERCOT being it's own thing and not subject to FERC certainly doesn't help. 

 

More on how the failures here are by and large from fossil fuel plants, not a small amount of offline wind that people are trying scapegoat.

 

 

If the grid crashes hard enough, everything starts tripping offline. And most power plants rely on off-site power to get started up, so restarting capacity is limited. Balancing across the entire grid is a very slow and delicate process.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by StrangeSox
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On 2/15/2021 at 4:29 PM, Texsox said:

Thank you.  It's been 25 years since I drove regularly in snow.  We're all staying home.

The biggest challenge is most of Texas heats with electric.  Our electric grid is in a stage 3 emergency situation which means rolling random blackouts. We have about fifteen minutes of electricity every hour. Most of the wind turbines are off line due to freezing. 

The turbines failing is the least significant cause of the TX power outages, but for some reason they're getting the most publicity. How come they don't freeze up in Iowa?

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6 hours ago, Stinky Stanky said:

The turbines failing is the least significant cause of the TX power outages, but for some reason they're getting the most publicity. How come they don't freeze up in Iowa?

Because you can winterize them to run but it costs money to do so. Same with all these plants.

If regulations don’t require the utility to spend the money to prepare for extreme events, they won’t. 95% of the winters, that won’t matter and it keeps your costs low and profits high, but when it does, it can cascade into a giant failure. Anywhere else in the country, they could buy backup power from elsewhere at least to limit the hazard, but that’s where the isolated grid comes into play.

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10 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

While it has been suggested that the severe bends in the jet stream are climate-change related, that isn't fully accepted in in the literature yet. Intense weather systems hitting Texas aren't impossible every 10 or 20 years under the previous climate regime. It may not have happened this year without the changes humans have put in the atmosphere, but it would have eventually. There's a lot more work to be done to be able to attribute this one strongly to a human-driven climate change effect.

If you want to talk about the poor design and multiple failure points in the Texas electric grid regulations and how that was the direct trigger for this, go for it. 

That's what I meant by Texas exceptionalism. They're too busy being economic libertarians and playing Republic of Texas to actually be prepared for a situation like this. They think that's what makes them special. 

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