The Blog

2021-

2021-02-24 g
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES V

"The American Empire is crumbling under the weight of military overreach; the totalitarian synergy between Big Tech and Big Gov.; destruction of the Constitution by traitorous surveillance state apparatchiks; the burden of unpayable debts; currency debasement; cultural decay; civic degeneration; diversity and deviancy trumping common culture and normality; pervasive corruption at every level of government; globalist agendas; and the failure of myopic leaders to deal with the real problems." (read more)

2021-02-24 f
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES IV
"The reason you believe a Marxist revolution on these shores is far-fetched is that your faith in America’s institutions makes you believe the loss of your freedom and prosperity are impossible."
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“We will take America without firing a shot,” Khrushchev said. “We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.”

Four Stages of Marxist Takeover: The Accuracy of Yuri Bezmenov

The journalist and Soviet defector long ago pegged the current left-wing moment.

It’s important to understand that this is a revolutionary moment in American history, and it isn’t a bad idea to act in ways that would fall under the traditional description of “accordingly.”

But it’s also important to understand that the revolution taking place in America is not yet a “kinetic” one. That may come soon, or it may not. The battle taking place presently is a war of information — or disinformation, as the case may be.

And the revolution is a Marxist revolution. You should make no mistake about that. The groups fomenting it, the intellectuals promoting it, and the money financing it are all quite open about who they are.

The object of this information revolution? To begin with, defeating Donald Trump and installing Joe Biden as the Hard Left’s puppet president. Biden is, for now, palatable to the American people in ways that actual communist Bernie Sanders, spawn of a communist Pete Buttigieg, Sandinista sympathizer Bill de Blasio [His birth name is, Warren Wilhelm, Jr.], and other far-left revolutionary (remember: Sanders has spent years traipsing around the country calling for a revolution) figures were not. But despite his lack of bona fides, Biden offers something quite beneficial to the Left — he is wholly incapable of executing the duties of president of the United States owing to a clear deficiency of mental function that shows itself every time he makes a public appearance. Couple that with Biden and his handlers being so utterly devoid of principle and scruples that he and they are willing to serve as an empty vessel into which might be poured whatever horrors the Left is willing to use him to bring on.

Joe Biden isn’t Vladimir Lenin. Biden is Alexander Kerensky, the Russian politician who served as the vessel for the revolutionaries to overthrow the old guard in 1917 and then, once he had proven himself useful toward that end, was shuffled aside so the real power could assume control. And as in Kerensky’s case, what comes after will bring the end of all that we know.

They’re not even trying to hide this anymore. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullors repeatedly says “We are trained Marxists.” Antifa’s imagery, dogma, public statements — all straight from the Marxist playbook. The bleatings of the Democrat Socialist crowd, including AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and the rest — unabashedly Marxist. What do you think every one of these “community organizing” outfits catching oversized checks from the Soroses of the world are teaching to their new recruits? Where do you think critical race theory, repressive tolerance, and intersectionalism, the tools of the cultural revolutionaries setting fire to all our traditions and institutions, came from? They came from the Frankfurt School, all of whom were Marxists.

This playbook was written long ago. If you think that Bernie Sanders or Kshama Sawant or Alicia Garza are smart enough to dream up a plan for taking down the greatest society the world has ever known, you are out of touch with reality. The only way they could have been as effective as they have so far is to follow somebody else’s plan. Which they are doing.

The reason you believe a Marxist revolution on these shores is far-fetched is that your faith in America’s institutions makes you believe the loss of your freedom and prosperity are impossible.

That confidence isn’t a flaw in your character. To the contrary, it’s a sign of your patriotism. But this moment makes that confidence unwarranted, if not obsolete.

... There is a video interview from a long time ago that you should see if you haven’t already seen it. It’s one of those things that many of our readers may have seen years ago and then forgot about — but all of a sudden it’s incredibly relevant again. The interview dates back to 1984, and it was conducted by the author, filmmaker, and John Birch Society gadfly G. Edward Griffin with a Soviet defector and former KGB operative named Yuri Bezmenov.

Forget about Griffin’s background. He was something of an Alex Jones of his time, and he’s still around in his dotage, obsessing about things that cost him his relevance. It’s Bezmenov who matters. The Russian was involved at relatively high levels as a propagandist par excellence before leaving the USSR for Canada, and he laid out in excruciating detail the process by which a free society might be brought to collapse.

Bezmenov didn’t dream that up. It wasn’t even a secret. Nikita Khrushchev, who ran the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964, was quite open in predicting the destruction of the United States and furthermore said it would happen in the way that every society eventually collapses — internally.

“We will take America without firing a shot,” Khrushchev said. “We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.”

Khrushchev and the Soviets weren’t just bragging. What he was talking about was an entire system of Marxist indoctrination and takeover they had perfected and executed in country after country during the 20th century. Eastern Europe. North Korea. North Vietnam, then all of Vietnam. Cuba. Nicaragua. Later, Venezuela. Various African countries, including South Africa, the communist bloom of which has only recently come to pass. Some of those countries went communist because the Soviets rolled the tanks in; most went communist because the pre-communist society collapsed for various reasons. All went communist after they had been infiltrated with Marxist revolutionaries.

The point being that there was a template in place for how to penetrate a society with Marxist ideals and implode it so that the revolutionaries would control the ruins. Bezmenov, whose father was a high-ranking Soviet military official and who was trained to be an elite KGB overseas operative, was taught the template and put to work in India attempting to infiltrate that country and bring it into the Warsaw Pact. He also worked at the Soviet RIA Novosti news organization, editing and planting propaganda materials into foreign media. The man knew exactly what he was talking about when he outlined how a Marxist revolution might be America down without firing a shot, just as Khrushchev had predicted.

Of course, the Soviet Union didn’t take America down. We won the Cold War and they lost. The USSR collapsed before we did, mostly because America had a leader in Ronald Reagan who had the vision and will to pressure the Soviets into collapse and openly talked of a day when Soviet communism was on the ash-heap of history.

But Reagan also warned that freedom is a fragile thing, and that it’s never more than one generation from extinction. That warning expired when Reagan did, as Americans grew far too complacent after the USSR fell apart and forgot what communism means. And as the cold warriors of the 20th century passed into the history books, what replaced them was an American cultural and political elite either ignorant of the Marxist threat and how it might materialize, or far more concerned with the rise of Islam.

That’s how you got a red diaper baby like Barack Obama elected president of this country for two terms. It’s also how you got Republican state legislators, governors, and congressmen fully invested in throwing money into education, and particularly higher education, without a second of thought as to what they were funding. The teachers’ unions were the largest donors to Bernie Sanders. What do you think that tells you? Why are you surprised the schools are turning out students who think Washington and Jefferson were villains?

Back to Bezmenov, who warned us in 1984 that a free society collapses in four stages, and the first is demoralization. What he meant by demoralization is a process by which students in schools controlled by disciples of leftist thought would be indoctrinated into a set of values and beliefs foreign to those of the American tradition. Bezmenov said, in 1984, mind you, that this would happen when the 1960s and 1970s student radicals began to control the educational institutions, and their project would be to throw out traditional Judeo-Christian morality, classical education, and American patriotism. Is there any doubt this has happened? Our young people are the least patriotic in our nation’s history, and the most ignorant of the cultural, intellectual, and ideological patrimony of which they are heirs.

It’s even worse than that, because the cultural Marxist project not just in our schools but in our media and entertainment institutions has poisoned those against the country. Remember when the NFL was an escape from politics? Remember when the movies Hollywood made extolled American values and made viewers feel good about their country?

When was the last time you saw anything from American education or corporate media that made you feel good about your country?

The first goal of revolutionary propaganda, particularly the Marxist variety, is to demoralize. It’s to depress you and make you believe your civilization is lost. Once you succumb to that, you are, in the words of Ming the Merciless, “satisfied with less.” Why do you think ordinary white people are so willing to apologize for the sins of their ancestors and to confess to being racist without even knowing it? Why do you think corporate America is blindly endorsing a Marxist revolutionary organization that openly declares war on the nuclear family?

That’s demoralization, and according to Bezmenov it’s the first step in engineered societal collapse.

What’s the second step? Destabilization.

Bezmenov describes that as a rapid decline in the structure of a society — its economy, its military, its international relations. We’ve discussed in this space the unquestionable impetus on the part of Democrats to keep the economy as hamstrung as possible with COVID-19 shutdowns, and those continue despite a precipitous decline in death rates as testing ramps up across the country. It’s clear the virus is no longer a significant threat to the health of Americans who don’t already have serious medical issues, and yet COVID hysteria is increasing, rather than decreasing... The virus is the perfect platform by which to impose the economic destabilization the Left has wanted all along.

No, that isn’t a conspiracy theory. They’re telling you it’s what they’re after. Do you believe Ilhan Omar was off-script when she suggested dismantling America’s economy as a system of oppression? Ilhan Omar, who paid a political consultant $900,000 in fees last year, money that came from somewhere, isn’t smart enough to say these things without having the script written for her. She’s being trotted out to introduce them because she’s already radioactive and a lightning rod for criticism, and also because she’s (1) black, (2) Muslim, and (3) an immigrant, and even an illegal one. To criticize her statements as cracked bears the signature not of incisive reasoning but rather racism. So when other Democrats join her call you are no longer allowed to object.

Google Omar’s statements and what you’ll find is a loud cacophony of gaslighting by left-wing media outlets like Common Dreams, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others attacking Republicans for reacting to what they saw and heard on video as “meltdowns” and “losing their minds.” Even Snopes, the left-wing site purportedly acting as a fact-check operation, declared that Omar didn’t actually say what she said.

That’s destabilization. They’re fully engaged in it, whether you believe they’ve been successful or not. But ask Mark McCloskey, for example, whether or not he thinks it’s outlandish to suggest the American order has been destabilized. McCloskey told Tucker Carlson that after the police told him they couldn’t protect him after the incident where he and his wife used guns to protect their property from a mob of Black Lives Matter trespassers, he called around to private security firms for help and was given advice to get out of his house and let the mob do what they would. Does that sound like a stable society to you?

The third stage is crisis, the catalyzing event that builds on the first two stages to bring on the change the revolutionaries are looking for. Looking for a crisis? Take your pick. We barely even remember the fact that we just had only the fourth presidential impeachment in American history, a constitutional crisis that was wholly and completely manufactured directly out of thin air. We progressed immediately from the first Trump impeachment to COVID-19, which was unquestionably a manufactured crisis — not that the virus itself isn’t deadly to a certain portion of the population, but if you think the panic and destruction it’s planned over-reaction caused doesn’t smack of manufacture then it’s clear you’ve been demoralized.

And then the George Floyd riots and the paroxysms of violence and virtue-signaling those have brought on, complete with the current campaign to bowdlerize American history and culture in an increasingly indiscriminate fashion. That’s a crisis, everybody, and it’s a completely manufactured one. The speed of the cultural collapse that followed Floyd’s death from a fentanyl ovedose — when the legal system moved very swiftly against the police officers who arrested him — makes it undeniable this was planned and only needed a catalyst.

What’s the fourth stage? Normalization. As in, a “new normal.” The statues and monuments are gone, the ball games are out, or at least you aren’t allowed in the stadium to watch them (and you’ve got to watch them on TV interspersed with commercial spots and in-game messaging pushing whatever memes and narratives the ESPNs and NBCs of the world and their Madison Avenue partners wish to implant in your mind), the schools have purged American history and culture, the Universal Basic Income checks have replaced your job, which you can’t do because the small business where you used to work has gone under thanks to the virus.

And Biden is president. For a little while, until it’s clear he’s incapacitated per the 25th Amendment, and then somebody else that you didn’t vote for is in charge of the country.

Out goes Kerensky. In comes … [Comrade Kamala]. (read more)

2021-02-24 e
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES III

Entire Federal Reserve payment system CRASHES due to 'operational error' freezing $3trillion in daily transactions including paychecks, tax refunds and bill payments

•All Federal Reserve settlement services suffered disruptions on Wednesday
•The key banking systems were offline for more than three hours
•Fed says that the massive outage was caused by an 'operational error'
•Systems affected form the backbone of US banking and financial sector
•Fedwire is used by banks to transfer an average of $3.3 trillion every day
•FedACH handles smaller transactions such as paychecks and tax refunds

The Federal Reserve payment systems used to settle transactions between U.S. financial institutions has suffered a massive disruption due to an 'operational error'.

The system used by U.S. banks to execute some $3 trillion in transactions daily began suffering outages at around 11.15am Eastern time on Wednesday, and remained down for more than three hours.

'A Federal Reserve operational error resulted in disruption of service in several business lines,' a Fed spokesman told DailyMail.com in a statement. 'We have restored services and communicated with all Federal Reserve Financial Services customers about the status of operations.'

Most of the key systems, including the backbone settlement services Fedwire and FedACH, were back online by 3pm, but the Fed acknowledged that payment deadlines were 'impacted' during the outage.

The potential impacts on consumer banking services were not immediately clear.

Among the affected services was Fedwire, the system for large transfers between banks which last year handled 184 million transactions totaling more than $840 trillion, or more than $3.3 trillion daily, according to Fed data.

Other affected systems included FedACH, the clearinghouse which generally handles smaller transactions such as paychecks, tax refunds, and utility bill payments.

The National Settlement Service (NSS), used by depository institutions with Federal Reserve Bank master accounts, was also knocked offline.

Every other transaction service maintained by the Fed was also affected by the disruptions.

In a series of service alerts, the Fed said that its staff first became aware of a 'disruption for all services' at around 11.15am.

'The Federal Reserve Bank staff is currently investigating a possible issue or disruption to multiple services,' the Fed said in an alert at 12.43 pm.

An update at 1.18pm confirmed the disruption and added 'We will continue to provide updates as soon as they are available.'

'We acknowledge that payment deadlines are impacted and will communicate remediation efforts to our customers when available,' the Fed said in a service alert. 'Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'

'Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error. We will provide updates via service status as more information becomes available,' the Fed said in a service alert at 2.14pm.

Applications for the Central Bank, the bank-of-banks where financial institutions deposit funds, were back online as of 2.17pm.

By 2.46pm, Fedwire resumed processing as normally. FedACH was back online by 2.55pm.

'The Federal Reserve Banks have taken steps to help ensure the resilience of the Fedwire and NSS applications, including recovery to the point of failure,' the Fed said in an alert.

The Fed said that it would extend settlement deadlines on Wednesday to allow banks to clear the backlog of transactions that piled up during the outage.

It was not immediately clear whether the disruption would delay bill payments or paycheck deposits for consumers. (read more)

2021-02-24 d
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES II

Justice Thomas: SCOTUS Refusal to Hear Pennsylvania Election Cases Is 'Inexplicable'

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to reject the review of two 2020 Pennsylvania presidential election cases Monday, but Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas believe they should have been given hearings.

SCOTUS declines to take up a pair of leftover cases from the 2020 election.
They involved the authority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to extend the
state's mail-in ballot deadline. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch say the court
should have granted review. https://t.co/RkzsCeb1Hi

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) February 22, 2021

JUST IN - U.S. Supreme Court refuses to review #Pennsylvania election cases.
No standing before an election, moot after. Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas
dissent from the denial.

— Disclose.tv ?? (@disclosetv) February 22, 2021

In his dissent Justice Thomas argued mass mail-in voting, which was conducted in Pennsylvania for the first time ahead of the 2020 presidential election in November, combined with election rules being rewritten last minute, makes the process prone to fraud and mistrust.

"The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the 'Manner' of federal elections...Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes. The petitions here present a clear example. The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day," Thomas wrote. "Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future. These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable."

"One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us," he continued.

This is what happens EVERY election. They refuse to deal with the problem at hand,
but it never gets fixed for the next time because it's moot. This is how the lower federal
courts and some state courts have screwed with legislatures and election law for the
past 15 years. https://t.co/o0yluSHf4r

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) February 22, 2021

(read more)

2021-02-24 c
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES I

Supreme Court Allows Manipulation of Elections

Decline and Fall of the United States

I find it very interesting that because Justice Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all dissented in denying review of the Pennsylvania election lawsuits which were clearly unconstitutional, suddenly Thomas is no longer black but called the “most conservative” member of the Supreme Court. I have stated before that the Judiciary Act of 1925 is in itself unconstitutional giving the Supreme Court discretionary jurisdiction when they take an oath to uphold the constitution not when they feel like it. What Justice Thomas wrote in dissent was precisely correct. The denial of the Supreme Court to get involved in this election of 2020 is outrageous and a total disgrace. The bias in Washington against any outsider is going to bring down the entire country. Once there is no rule of law remaining, then there is no point in maintaining a government.

The refusal to take this case means that any official can change the rules during an election at any time. They would only be challenged again in an untimely manner in the middle of an election ensuring there would be no time to get to the Supreme Court. This denial is simply casting all American elections from here on out into the dust-bin of history. Remember this day. For your grandchild will one day ask, where you there when the Supreme Court threw US elections under the bus? This is all because in Washington, they do not want any outsider to mess with their swamp of corruption.

Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with respect to Commodus who was the son of Marcus Aurelius whose reign is where the line is drawn for the beginning of the decline and fall. Of Commodus, he wrote: Every

“distinction of every kind soon became criminal. The possession of wealth stimulated the diligence of the informers; rigid virtue implied a tacit censure of the irregularities of Commodus; important services implied a dangerous superiority of merit; and the friendship of the father always insured the aversion of the son. Suspicion was equivalent to proof; trial to condemnation. The execution of a considerable senator was attended with the death of all who might lament or revenge his fate; and when Commodus had once tasted human blood, he became incapable of pity or remorse”

(Gibbon, Book 1, Chapter 4).

This is where we are at this point in the saga of the Decline and Fall of the United States. The Supreme Court has abandoned everything the Framers intended to preserve “We the People.” It was not even a matter of overturning the election. But in fact, what took place in Pennsylvania should have nullified the election results because they were simply corrupt. Justice Thomas argued that perhaps the net effect would not have altered the results. But that is really irrelevant because we will never know when you allow officials to act unconstitutionally, to begin with. Justice Thomas wrote in dissent:

Supreme Court Dissents: Sct Dissent Republican v PA

JUSTICE THOMAS, dissenting from the denial of certiorari.

The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the “Manner” of federal elections. Art. I, §4, cl. 1; Art. II, §1, cl. 2. Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes. The petitions here present a clear example. The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day. Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future. These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.

JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE GORSUCH joins, dissenting from the denial of certiorari.

I agree with JUSTICE THOMAS that we should grant review in these cases. They present an important and recurring constitutional question: whether the Elections or Electors Clauses of the United States Constitution, Art. I, §4, cl. 1; Art. II, §1, cl. 2, are violated when a state court holds that a state constitutional provision overrides a state statute governing the manner in which a federal election is to be conducted. That question has divided the lower courts,* and our review at this time would be greatly beneficial. In the cases now before us, a statute enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature unequivocally requires that mailed ballots be received by 8 p.m. on election day. Pa. Stat. Ann., Tit. 25, §§3146.6(c), 3150.16(c) (Purdon 2020). Nevertheless, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, citing a provision of the State Constitution mandating that elections “be free and equal,” Art. I, §5, altered that deadline and ordered that mailed ballots be counted if received up to three days after the election, Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar, ___ Pa. ___, ___–___, 238 A. 3d 345, 362, 371–372 (2020). Both the state Republican and Democratic parties urged us to grant review and decide this question before the 2020 election. See Application for Stay in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar, No. 20A54, pp. 2–3; Democratic Party of Pennsylvania Response to Application for Stay in No. 20A54, pp. 8–9. But the Court, by an evenly divided vote, refused to do so. Nos. 20A53 and 20A54, ante, p. ___ (THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH, and KAVANAUGH, JJ.,
noting dissents). That unfortunate decision virtually ensured that this important question could not be decided before the election. See No. 20–542, ante, p. ___ (statement of ALITO, J., joined by THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ.).

Now, the election is over, and there is no reason for refusing to decide the important question that these cases pose. “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.” Ante, at 3; see also Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd., 531 U. S. 70, 76 (2000) (per curiam). A decision in these cases would not have any implications regarding the 2020 election. (Because Pennsylvania election officials were ordered to separate mailed ballots received after the statutory deadline, see Republican Party of Pa. v. Boockvar, No. 20A84, ante, p. ___, we know that the State Supreme Court’s decision had no effect on the outcome of any election for federal office in Pennsylvania.) But a decision would provide invaluable guidance for future elections. (read more)

2021-02-24 b
THE COVID-CON I
"Well, here we are with a half braindead president, no Trump, and an emergency ethos that is killing jobs, our rights, and the American Dream."

Why the Left Is Doing Everything It Can to Keep Life from Going Back to Normal

I’m sure many of you already knew this, but as we look to the defenses and fear the worst from this administration and the health care professionals they’ve installed as a de facto French Directory, we can see the Biden White House is finding out just how hard this whole COVID debacle truly is. The Biden administration's recommendations, which have only propped up the COVID lockdown regime, have done more damage than any guillotine ever could. As we count the dead, the American Dream has become infected with COVID — and she remains in the ICU. The right to earn a living is now under threat. That’s the covert war being waged here, and if we know anything about wars, it’s that government powers become enormous when wartime conditions are declared.

When will we get back to normal? The experts don’t know. The Biden administration, unable to even get school reopening done right, isn’t rolling the dice on this one either. The expert community probably knows but is afraid to say. In the Wall Street Journal this week, Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, wasn’t afraid to offer a projection. By April, COVID will largely vanish. We might have herd immunity. He noted the massive drop in COVID cases, which stands at a 77 percent decrease over the past six weeks. With the infection fatality rate standing at around 0.23 percent in the US, he summarized that two-thirds of the population has already contracted the virus and has obtained immunity from it. Natural immunity is also not taken into account and you cannot get a true picture of it through testing alone. Makary urged public health officials to not bury or obfuscate the data. This is good news. It’s great news. Even in nations where there are new variants, cases are still dropping.

For normal people, this is great. For the COVID Nazis and Democrats, it’s terrible. It means their emergency decrees will come to an end. And then there are the teachers' unions, which are just outright lazy. They don’t want to go back to work. Not even Joe Biden can save them, as he admitted that kids are the safest group: they seldom contract it or spread the virus. In Northern Virginia, teachers here cut the line to get the vaccine, yet they still won’t work. And teachers, being major players in the Democratic Party base, are killing the Biden White House’s school strategy. It’s safe to reopen. This is the only area where the experts have been right since day one.

And now, we’re dealing with this science fiction that even if you get the vaccine, you can still spread the virus. We have the double-masking nonsense that has no real-world applicability. The study supporting it explicitly said so and the test subjects were mannequins. Oh, and now Dr. Anthony Fauci says that if a family is vaccinated, they can hug each other. Also, people who are vaccinated could curb the spread of this disease to those who aren’t. YES.

Why is it that we’re treating this virus as if it’s the first of its kind? We’re acting as if Hanta, Ebola, the Black Death, and other pathogens never existed. We have vaccines. They stop the spread. That’s how this works. Who didn’t know that a vaccine is effective in curbing viral spread? You don’t need to be a medical expert to know this. The pervasive reversals, the condescension, and the nakedly political power grabs have killed the expert class. Even now, they still peddle the line about masks working, though they keep leaving out a key part: It’s effective when speaking about custom-fitted masks which no one has, and we don’t have the capacity to give everyone a custom-fitted mask. I will always circle back to California. They had a near-universal compliance rate on their mask mandate and still had one million cases in six weeks over the holidays. Do masks work? I’ll let you debate that, but even the Danish are seeing how masks are not as effective as the liberal media would have us think.

Bars, restaurants, hair salons, and gyms are not major factors in COVID spread. All are responsible for less than 2 percent of new COVID cases in New York. So, why are they still closed? (via NY Post):

Today's cover: New York City businesses are barely hanging on https://t.co/g7P0dLTM4b pic.twitter.com/PZTyVW2oDM

— New York Post (@nypost) February 22, 2021

Nearly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, parts of the Big Apple look more like ghost towns, lined with shuttered storefronts, empty office buildings and businesses teetering on the edge of closure.

Now industry leaders and struggling store owners are calling on the city and state to turn things around — before it’s too late.

“I’m not saying there will be an exodus in the city or the city is going to die” without help, said Gino Gigante, owner of the Lower East Side’s Waypoint Cafe — where sales tanked from $500,000 in 2019 to just $80,000 last year.

“But you’re going to see a lot of unhappy people and a lot of empty storefronts.”

I bear some responsibility here. I supported the initial lockdowns, as did Trump, when the markets were crashing, and we didn’t know anything about COVID at the time. There’s still a lot we don’t know, but the draconian lockdown protocols aren’t working and need to go. That’s been clear since last summer. I didn’t abide by my own rule: never give the government an inch because they’ll take several hundred miles. Well, here we are with a half braindead president, no Trump, and an emergency ethos that is killing jobs, our rights, and the American Dream.

Maybe that’s what liberal America wanted all along. A diminished America on the world stage is what they want no matter how much they claim otherwise. How do you think you get a multipolar world in international affairs here? You have to have a controlled burn inside your own city to diminish its standing, especially regarding its economic capacity. With the Left urging a minimum wage hike, there’s no way those jobs lost to COVID are coming back. Maybe that’s the point. Democrats saw COVID as a way to kill Trump politically. It worked. Now, they want it to squeeze out working Americans in an effort to kill populism, which has been on the rise on both sides of the aisle.

The political class knows the people can eat them. They have to starve this beast. What better way to do that than by ensuring these people have no paychecks? Though, I could argue that by giving a man no options, the situation could become much more volatile.

This is what the people supposedly wanted. Fight where we can, concede on some other stuff, but let this White House crash and burn on COVID. The school reopening fiasco is surely going to have a sour reception among suburban moms. Let the Left hang themselves here. It’s bound to happen since Democrats can’t take a piss without the teachers' unions blessing on this one. (read more)

2021-02-24 a

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

2021-02-23 i
ENLISTMENT FREEZE

Our Military’s SJW-Driven Abandonment of Warfighting Is Going to Get Troops Killed

It gives me no pleasure to say that I no longer recommend that young people join the military, and I’m not alone. The non-Blue Falcon veteran community is in full revolt against the conscious decision to decline embraced by our current military leadership. After failing to win any war in the last 20 years – and don’t say Syria, because the second President * woke up in the Oval Office wondering how he got there, more of our troops were heading back into the hellscape for reasons no one has bothered to articulate – the military has decided to target an easier enemy, i.e., other Americans.

See, the problem with me and the other vets who are disgusted by the brass’s choice to focus on SJW priorities instead of, you know, successfully deterring or defeating America’s enemies, is that we actually listened to what we were taught when we were coming up. Most of us were trained by the heroes who put the shattered American military together after the Democrat war in Vietnam broke it. We learned about leadership, about putting mission first but taking care of people always, and about objectives and how to attain them.

None of that’s a thing anymore.

So, count us out from complicity with the degeneration of our proud institution into a giant gender studies struggle session. And that’s a big deal. Do you know where the military gets a huge chunk on its recruits? Legacies. These are young troops who want to be like their father or grandfather or big brother or neighbor or other role model. I was the third-generation commissioned officer in my family, on both sides. Guess what? Right now, if one of my kids goes in, it’s against my advice. And again, I am not alone. I hear this over and over and over from other vets. And it makes me furious.

Congratulations, Pentagon. This is all on you.

You put two divisions behind wire in D.C. to protect against phantom insurrections by guys who dress like Vikings. And then you can’t even feed the troops, or house them. Gosh, if only there was a great big five-sided building full of generals just a couple miles away to square that idiocy away.

Oh, wait, there is.

And now, though we have not won a war in two decades, our military has plenty of time to stop training and focus on purging the ranks of people who like the politicians the current [regime] opposes. I eagerly await the introduction to the new 69D MOS – political officer. A zampolit for every battalion – hell, why not every company?

And don’t patronize us with baloney about how this is just about rooting out all those secret “extremists” lurking in the ranks – that’s right up there with sending the new second louie down to the supply room to retrieve a box of grid squares. How about you stop trying to expel these mystery “extremists” and start firing the incompetents all around you?

Sadly, this trickle-down SJW foolishness is reaching what used to be the pointy end of the spear. Generals and colonels adopt it because if they don’t, they’ll get tossed out – if you invest three decades in the green machine, it must be awfully tempting to hold your tongue to nail down that retirement and then get the hell out ahead of the deluge. It’s the company grades who buy this pap who are most disconcerting. One lieutenant – for you civilians, lieutenants are the wisest officers in the military, according to lieutenants – went on Twitter to inform me and some other people who were actually alive and in the military the last time America won a war that when we Neanderthals were serving, the military was awash in “white supremacy.” Could have fooled me. When I got off active duty the first time 30 years ago this May, I was stunned at how often race came up back in the civilian world. It almost never did when I was in the service, though in basic training it would have been nice for the awesome power of my pallor to keep Drill Sergeant Whittlesey from dropping me for countless sets of 20.

But hey, some 23-year-old assistant S2 who operates the coffeemaker doubtless has better insights into stuff happening before he was born that those of us who were actually there. The only positive thing about my interaction with that guy was my relief in knowing that I was no longer the dumbest lieutenant in the history of the United States military.

We had our imperfections and misadventures back in the day, sure, but if some idiot had done something bigoted to another solder, we would have slammed him. The only thing that mattered when a new soldier showed up was whether or not he was squared away. But not now. No, winning battles is hard, but internal snipe hunts are easy and fun! Why focus on external warfare when the career payoff for witch-hunting within the organization is so much bigger? Check out this new Navy pledge – us vets’ enlistment/commissioning oaths were apparently insufficient for today’s woke battlespace:

“I pledge to advocate for and acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every Sailor in the Navy. I pledge to engage in ongoing self-reflection, education and knowledge sharing to better myself and my communities. I pledge to be an example in establishing healthy, inclusive and team-oriented environments. I pledge to constructively share all experiences and information gained from activities above to inform the development of Navy-wide reforms.”

The most disconcerting part of this is that it was apparently written on purpose. Is the next thing we’ll see some sort of mandatory woke Space Force interpretive dance?

No, I do not recommend anyone subject themselves to this sort of four-year camo sociology seminar in which they must “pledge to advocate for and acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every Sailor in the Navy” or any other branch. My intersectional identity is “America,” and I am utterly uninterested in any other identity.

Maybe the brass should focus on killing America’s enemies, and maybe not running ships into other ships? Both those things would be totally awesome.

War is a serious business, even for guys like me who ran heavily armed car washes. But this current tail-chasing is not serious. The military is hollowing out as people vote with their combat boots. Word from inside is that it can’t keep troops from ETSing – that is, leaving the service when their obligation ends. If our troops want their thoughts controlled and to be programed into little lefty conformo-bots, they can go off to college – the Dems want to give it away to slackers for free anyway, so who needs to ruck march and attend Bill Kristol’s latest war [on Israel's behalf] to get the G.I. Bill?

The military used to be a welcoming safe space for patriots. But no more. With this insane babbling about “internal enemies,” does anyone think that potential recruits do not understand that this slur is what the liberal elite that the military brass obeys calls people like them and their families? Why would you join an organization that sees you as an enemy?

I wish I could believe that the generals and admirals will en masse reject this sack race to failure, but it may be too late, at least until we get a real president determined to unscrew this cluster. It will be hard. The academies and war colleges are already full of the same kind of liberal hacks that civilian education is infested with. Michael Walsh’s hardcore new book Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost should be required reading for every military leader, but some professor at the Army Command and General Staff College (I’m a graduate, sigh) reviewed it and found it – I’m not kidding – “problematic.” You know what’s really problematic? Turning the military into a cauldron of neurotic SJW obsessions while our foreign enemies circle our senile CinC like vultures.

We can laugh at the antics, but the terrible reality is that this crap is going to get a bunch of our young people killed. Let’s be very clear – when your priority is social justice nonsense instead of preparing to fight and win, you are opening up a lane for the enemy and the enemy is going to drive right through it.

But look on the bright side. When something horrible happens – maybe the Chinese will send a carrier to the bottom, for example – we can all take comfort in the fact that our sons and daughters, because it’s us patriots’ sons and daughters who usually fight and die in America’s wars, perished because our leadership failed to prepare, but at least they died fully aware of trans intersectionality. (read more)

2021-02-23 h
TEXAS FREEZE III (NOT THE ONION OR BABYLON BEE)

Texas to boost grid resilience with more wind & solar, according to Clean Technica

Guest “I really couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying” by David Middleton

Reporting from Ice Mud Station Dallas… The pool is now ice-free for the first time on record (the record started very recently… ;).

Texas to Add 35 Gigawatts of Wind & Solar in Next 3 Years — Boosting Grid Resilience
By Zachary Shahan

Clearly, the news story of the week — well beyond CleanTechnica — has been Texas and some neighboring regions freezing over and losing electricity. The vast majority of the power plants that went offline were thermal power plants (mostly natural gas). They were not equipped enough for the cold. A number of wind turbines were also down because no one had bought the “cold-weather package.”
[…]
CleanTechnica

To the extent Texas is adding wind & solar to the grid, these plans were made long before Winter Storm Younger Dryas. The notion that this is for the purpose of “boosting grid resilience,” is totally fracking retarded.

Solar is flat-out not a factor in Texas’ electrical grid. While wind is a key component of our grid, generating 20-24% of our electricity over recent years. It totally failed over the past 10 days. As temperatures dropped below normal in the DFW [Dallas - Fort Worth] area on February 7, wind output dropped from 35-65% of capacity to 10-30% from February 9-18. Over the same time period coal and natural gas power plants ramped up to nearly full capacity very quickly. As of Sunday February 14, the system was functioning normally. As temperatures plunged from 20 to 40 °F below normal in the DFW area, some thermal power plants went offline for a variety of weather and demand surge related issues and by Monday morning ERCOT was in full emergency mode.

(graph)

The graph above is preliminary, a “work in progress.” I’m still working on gathering more detailed data on capacity by fuel type. However, it clearly demonstrates that more wind generation capacity would have been as useless as mammary glands on a bull.

ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions. It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather. This was not a realistic expectation. ERCOT also failed to be sufficiently proactive in implementing rotating outages and when they did, they were unable to adequately rotate the outages.

... So… Heating elements (which require electricity) melt the ice and the wind turbines have to be shut down to deice them? Maybe that’s why New York’s wind turbines generate almost no electricity all winter long.

EIA HOURLY ELECTRIC GRID MONITOR

Unlike New York, Texas doesn’t have a nice, steady, winter electricity load. Our load varies quite widely and our wind turbines can generate over 40% of our electricity on favorable days. Even at the peak of our recent deep freeze, Texas wind turbines generated more electricity than New York’s. There are days when Texas wind turbines generate more electricity and then all of NY ISO.

EIA HOURLY ELECTRIC GRID MONITOR

Texas needs to winterize at least some portion of its most reliable generation capacity: natural gas, coal and/or nuclear. Texas doesn’t need to emulate what doesn’t work in New York. (read more)

2021-02-23 g
TEXAS FREEZE II

The Texas Energy Disaster

I live in Texas and write about climate science and energy, so I get a lot of questions about the recent problems. My wife and I are OK, we have a natural gas powered generator and did not lose power like most people did earlier this week. We also had a broken pipe, but it was outside the house, and I was eventually able to cap it, with the help of a neighbor, after the normal (for me) three trips to the hardware store and two failed attempts.

As usual these days, discussions of natural events quickly devolve into useless political arguments about who or what is to blame. Little thought is put into the technical or scientific issues, instead everything is viewed through the prism of Democrat or Republican political agendas. Ideology trumps common sense. Thus, we have Democrats blaming natural gas shortages and coal downtime and Republicans blaming the wind power collapse. What really happened?

The Chronology

Texas is a big place; it is 862 miles (1,387 km) wide and 23% larger in area than France. The weather varies a lot from Northwest Texas where the wind turbines are to Austin, San Antonio, and Houston where some of the worse problems were. So, let’s look at the data, in Figure 1 we see electricity generation from February 7 through Thursday February 18.

(two graphs)

Figure 2 shows some of the critical weather statistics for Midland, Texas, near the West Texas wind turbine country. What isn’t shown is the humidity. The sudden drop in temperature began Tuesday, Feb 8, and humidity quickly rose to 100%. No measurable precipitation occurred between February 8 and February 13, but condensation froze onto the wind turbine blades. The condensation generally concentrated on the leading edge of the blades, which direct the wind around the blade and produce the spin and the power. The ice on the blades, especially the ice on the leading edge, caused the blades to stop spinning.

As Elliot Hough, an engineer, put it:

“the turbine blades and more importantly, the leading edge that directs airflow around the blade to create lift, will cover with ice and eventually lose all lift. In the case of a turbine blade, that means the turbine stops turning. In the case of an airplane, the airplane falls to the ground. If air is well below freezing point, there is little to no moisture in the air and blades won’t freeze over. Such are the conditions much further north in North Dakota where temps can be sub-zero F and turbines don’t ice over.” Elliot Hough on Linkedin

When these conditions occur on airplanes about to take off, the wings are de-iced with a chemical that melts the ice and stays on the wings long enough for the plane to reach an altitude where the humidity is low enough that no ice will form. But wind turbines are on the ground and if the humidity stays very high, as it did in West Texas for three days, and the temperatures continue to drop, they fail.

As the wind turbines froze, natural gas combined cycle backup generators kicked in. These were all over the state. Natural gas generation is normally a very good backup. It is flexible and can increase or decrease its generation on demand, nearly instantly, unlike coal or nuclear. These latter two sources have lots of fuel on site and are normally safe from disruption, but they are slow to change their output. Thus, they are considered “base load” sources of power. Natural gas is very flexible, but since its fuel is delivered by pipeline, on demand, it is vulnerable to supply disruptions. The Texas weather was bad enough that even some nuclear and coal generation was affected on February 15th, the coldest day.

As Figure 1 shows, natural gas ramped up to make up the loss of wind, in fact it increased 450%, as shown in Figure 3 from the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 17.

(graph)

So, the sequence of events was, wind turbines iced up from February 8 to 10 and their power output dropped 93%. Natural gas ramped up quickly to cover the shortfall, increasing an incredible 450%, but the pipelines feeding them fuel iced up, especially the valves on the pipelines and put the natural gas generators out of commission. [Update: As Marc notes in the comments, this is an oversimplification of what happened. Also see this article in the San Angelo Live for more details.]

If the Texas grid generation mix had more coal and nuclear this problem with cold weather would have been much less. But coal and nuclear plants have been decommissioned to make room for more wind power. To make matters worse, some coal and nuclear plants had cold weather problems themselves.

Conclusions

The proximate cause for the Texas grid collapse was the very cold weather from February 9 to 17. The initial problem was that wind was producing over 25% of Texas’ power and it is intermittent. Knowing it was intermittent, ERCOT ramped up natural gas generation as an instantaneous backup for the wind, but they forgot that natural gas is supply-on-demand, and the pipelines are vulnerable to disasters, especially cold weather. Disaster power sources are coal and nuclear, they have fuel on site for days or weeks and do not require a pipeline or a backup.

Policy implications

Texas has encouraged the building of wind turbines. They do this, in concert with the U.S. government, through direct subsidies and by paying for wind generation, rather than paying for electricity purchased. This guarantee of revenue means generating companies do not have to consider market demand, they can build wind turbines endlessly with no risk. They can even pay others to take their power and then be reimbursed by the government with our tax dollars! Since 2006, federal and Texas subsidies to wind power, have totaled $80 billion, this foolishness is explained well on the stopthesethings website.

The wind power excess capacity has distorted the generation mix in Texas to a dangerous and unbalanced level. Natural gas, coal and nuclear generating companies have too little revenue to increase or fortify their plants, since wind can generate as much as it wants and is guaranteed revenue for the electricity it generates.

The subsidies and mandates must be stopped and our baseload (aka emergency) capacity increased and fortified. Coal and nuclear power generation must increase. It should be clear to everyone now that, while natural gas is a perfect minute-by-minute grid stabilizer, since it is an on-demand electricity generator, it is vulnerable to weather disruptions. Texas’ current emergency baseload capacity is too small and too vulnerable.

Politics has thoroughly corrupted climate science as I explain in my new book: Politics and Climate Science: A History. The thoroughly corrupt field of climate science politics is now corrupting the fields of engineering involved in power generation. This is dangerous, engineers must make engineering decisions, not politicians. Reliable electricity is essential to our prosperity and well-being, our various governments should not be purposely destabilizing our electrical grid with dumb renewable policies, they should be strengthening the grid to make Texas more resilient. (read more)

2021-02-23 f
TEXAS FREEZE I
“The only reason people are not rioting in the streets about the unjustified increase in their power bills is that they simply have no idea what is going on.”

The Big Subsidy Steal: Texan Taxpayers Fork Out $80,000,000,000 to Wind Power Outfits

When it comes to massive subsidies to wind power outfits in the US, the Lone Star State led the charge. Since 2006, the wind industry has managed to snaffle over $80 billion from Texan taxpayers, and they’ve only just begun.

Generating a product that’s only ever available in chaotic fits and spurts, means that endless subsidies and mandated targets are the only reason there’s a ‘market’ for chaotically intermittent wind power, at all.

Bill Peacock tallies up the extraordinary cost of the largest example of state-sanctioned theft in American history and begs the question just how things got so out of hand and why the situation continues unchecked?

... For the first time last year, electricity produced from wind in Texas almost equaled the amount produced from coal. This year, it appears as if wind is going to blow coal away.

Last year, both sources produced about 20% of the electricity used on the grid. For the first three months of 2020, however, wind has produced 26% of the power versus only 16% for coal.

Lest you be taken in by the wind energy industry’s market prowess, this has nothing to do with wind energy being cleaner, more affordable, or more reliable than other sources of energy. Rather, it is because the renewable energy industry is using the government to steal billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year.

This year, federal subsidies for wind and solar, in addition to Texas state and local renewable subsidies, may be about $9 billion. Since 2006, those subsidies have totaled $80 billion.

That is $80 billion being stolen from tax payers by these major companies (and others):

Bright spot?

One challenge to hitting the $9 billion subsidy mark this year is a bit of good news: the COVID-19 lockdown is making it difficult for the renewable industry to build more generation:

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. renewable energy industry is reeling from the new coronavirus pandemic, which has delayed construction, put thousands of skilled laborers out of work and sowed doubts about solar and wind projects on the drawing board.

In locked-down California, some local agencies that issue permits for new work closed temporarily, and some solar companies furloughed installers.

In New York and New Jersey, SunPower CEO Thomas Werner halted installation of more than 400 residential solar systems, fearing for his workers’ safety.

As many as 120,000 jobs in solar and 35,000 in wind could be lost, trade groups say.

I called this a “bright spot on Twitter:

One commenter asked, “Why is this a bright spot? You want the energy industry to fail? You want people to lose their jobs?

Fair Field, No Favor

No, I don’t want the energy industry to fail. I don’t even want the renewable energy industry to fail. Or people to lose jobs. What I want is for the corporate executives, stockholders, and workers at these companies to stop making their money through the government’s theft of money from Americans.

Paul Gaynor, CEO of Longroad Energy, a utility-scale wind and solar developer, recently said, “Pre-pandemic, there were great dreams and aspirations for a record-setting year.” Indeed, the renewable industry was well on its way this year to a new record; the $9 billion subsidy mark would have been the highest on record. Mr. Gaynor’s dreams and those of the industry are a burden to the rest of us.

What I also want is for the renewable energy industry to to stand (or fall) on its own. If it brings value to consumers and to our country, it will do so. However, as is well documented, wind and solar energy are unaffordable, unreliable, and inefficient. Without the subsidies, it is almost certain it would be only a niche industry, supplying perhaps a percent or two of our energy, rather than the 26% it is currently supplying in Texas.

Texas Public Policy Foundation

The [left-leaning] Texas Public Policy Foundation has one of the best collections of research in the world on the problems with renewable energy. Here is a list of some of them:

    • Renewable Energy in Texas

    • The Cost of Renewable Energy in Texas

    • ERCOT’s Growth and Adaptations to New Markets

    • Purpose-Driven Economic Development: A Guide to Reforming Chapters 312 and 313

    • The High Cost of Renewable Energy

    • Assigning Property Rights Through Wind and Solar Easements

    • Local Tax Abatements and the Texas Wind Industry: How Chapters 312 & 313 Are Scarring Rural Texas

    • The Economic Fall and Political Rise of Renewable Energy

    • The Production Tax Credit: Corporate Subsidies & Renewable Energy

    • The Cautionary Tale of Wind Energy in ERCOT

    • The Texas Wind Power Story: Part 1

    • The Texas Wind Power Story: Part 2

People who care about liberty, people who care about prosperity, people who care about the poor should be people who want to eliminate renewable energy subsidies. Yet taxpayer billions continue to flow to this corrupt industry. Thus, there are two possible reasons why this continues:

    • People who care about liberty, prosperity, and the poor don’t understand what is going on; or

    • There just are not that many people who care about liberty, prosperity, and the poor.

Take your pick.

Let’s pray that as the country recovers from COVID-19 and our government’s response to COVID-19, the recovery does not extend to the renewable energy industry UNTIL it stops living off of American taxpayers. But that might not be the case: the Energy Information Administration predicts renewable energy will grow 11% this year, despite recent setbacks. (read more)

Read additional wind-related articles:

Coal Comfort: Total Collapse in Wind & Solar Output Leaves Freezing Germans Desperate for Coal-Fired Power

American & German Renewables Disasters Drive Demand for Ever-Reliable Nuclear Power

America’s Big Chill: Wind Turbines Frozen Solid & Solar Panels Plastered In Snow & Ice

2021-02-23 e
THE COVID-CON IV

NOT "HEARD" IMMUNITY TO PANDEMIC OF LIES

heard immunity

THEIR PROPAGANDA WON'T AFFECT YOU IF YOU DON'T HEAR IT.

2021-02-23 d
THE COVID-CON III
"Even given all of this, the drop is so precipitous as to cry out for explanation. It is hard for the politically minded not to notice the timing."
+
"The CDC itself has made it clear that only in 6% of death cases is SARS-CoV-2 mentioned as the only cause. "

Covid Cases, like Political Careers, are Dropping Like Rocks

ew York governor Andrew Cuomo, who bears so much responsibility for the mess in his windswept state, last year wrote a book celebrating his role in managing the Covid crises. Now he is facing several investigations and unrelenting media criticism for his management of nursing homes. Not only did he force infected patients back into homes, resulting in many thousands of deaths; he is alleged to have worked to cover up his role and doctor the numbers to make the grim toll look less bad.

And he is not the only lockdown government facing serious problems. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is sinking in popularity and facing a serious effort to recall him – the state’s equivalent of an impeachment. It’s quite the fall from grace for a man who prided himself on his courage in locking his citizens in their homes. Meanwhile, the lockdown state’s Covid numbers look worse than Florida’s, a state with similar weather and demographics that has been fully and beautifully open since September.

At the very time when once-loved heroes of the lockdowns are facing political crises, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is riding a wave of love within his state and around the country. He took a bold stand for science and his gamble seems to be paying off for him. People are pouring into the state in hopes of living a normal life. While commercial and residential real estate are in deep trouble in New York, home prices around Miami are up 25%.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott faces his own issues; catastrophic freezing in his state with millions losing water and power, and facing life-threatening conditions. He wants to blame everyone but his own lockdowns that delayed maintenance on power plants and disrupted normal functioning of the energy sector throughout 2020.

It’s not just political careers that are dropping like stones. The same is happening to Covid cases in the U.S.. The trend seems to defy prediction from January 20, 2021: the [illegitimate] US president said this about Covid-19: “things would get worse before they get better.” Then something very interesting happened. The number of cases of recorded infections of SARS-CoV-2 took a startling dive, falling fully 80% from the daily high on January 8th.

(two charts)

Keep in mind when you look at all these charts that they must always be viewed with awareness that they never perfectly reflect reality. They are only as accurate as the inputs. For example, the case numbers are completely off for the first quarter of 2020 simply because there were few if any tests available. It’s entirely possible that cases during this period reached a high in the Northeast of the US that was never seen since, but we cannot know. If that is true, the perception of whether and to what extent we did experience a wicked second wave could be profoundly affected.

Case data are also affected by how many tests are actually administered. Those too are falling dramatically but not enough to account for the drop in cases. Testing can be impacted by people’s willingness to get tests (which in turn reflects fear of the quarantine) and the extent to which professions are requiring them. The results of the testing are also highly sensitive to the settings of the test itself (the “cycle threshold” used to detect the presence of the virus).

Death data seems more decisively accurate but there are reporting lags that can delay accuracy by many weeks. In addition, there is an error term (how large?) due to misclassification. The CDC itself has made it clear that only in 6% of death cases is SARS-CoV-2 mentioned as the only cause. Those are the easy ones to classify. After that, it gets more complicated. “For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 3.8 additional conditions or causes per death,” says the CDC. Sorting all this out will require years of work in looking at death certificates and weighing factors.

Even given all of this, the drop is so precipitous as to cry out for explanation. It is hard for the politically minded not to notice the timing. It roughly coincides with the inauguration of the new president. If they really are so sensitive to factors like the Cycle Threshold in the PCR tests, would it not be relatively easy to dial up and dial down the appearance of a pandemic based purely on software settings? The dramatic drop then could in theory be orchestrated. And it is rather amazing that on the day of inauguration, the World Health Organization released a clarification on tests, urging testers to reduce the number of false positives by paying greater attention to Cycle Thresholds. Anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered suggests that testing labs have responded in kind.

If the WHO and the CDC wanted to avoid conspiracy theories that the pandemic was made to disappear with the incoming administration, they could have better timed this change in the Cycle Threshold.

Another explanation of the drop in cases is not contingent on such a cynical view toward public health. It relies on the tried and true observational truth about the behavior of viruses. Getting them and getting well means acquiring lasting immunities. That combined with vaccines leads to the endemic equilibrium known as herd immunity: the virus finds fewer and fewer hosts in the general population and becomes much more manageable.

This is the view of Professor Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he highlights the role of a concept that has almost been absent from public discussion over the course of the last 12 months: natural immunity. He writes:

Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March….

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

Many experts, along with politicians and journalists, are afraid to talk about herd immunity. The term has political overtones because some suggested the U.S. simply let Covid rip to achieve herd immunity. That was a reckless idea. But herd immunity is the inevitable result of viral spread and vaccination. When the chain of virus transmission has been broken in multiple places, it’s harder for it to spread—and that includes the new strains…..

Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth. As we encourage everyone to get a vaccine, we also need to reopen schools and society to limit the damage of closures and prolonged isolation. Contingency planning for an open economy by April can deliver hope to those in despair and to those who have made large personal sacrifices.

All of which is to say that we might be in the last days of the pandemic and the early days of seasonal endemicity – which is the natural course of every widespread respiratory virus ever studied. Why anyone imagined that lockdowns, political edicts, coercive controls, and the ruining and wrecking of normal social and economic functioning would change that is beyond comprehension.

Whatever your theory as to why cases are dropping like rocks – natural immunity, PCR testing changes, drops in tests, seasonality – none of it can be credited to political interventions. What the interventions might do, however, is cause dozens if not hundreds of political careers also to drop like rocks. (read more)

2021-02-23 c
THE COVID-CON II

The ZeroCovid Movement: Cult Dressed as Science

his past year has given rise to some strange and novel methods of disease containment, including lockdowns and mask mandates. It is unsurprising that the natural next step in this progression has been the development of a movement known as “ZeroCovid.” Its growing influence is, perhaps, predictable given that for nearly a year we have been inundated by the views of so-called experts seeking to legitimize their myopic worldview that public health is determined solely by prevention of Covid-19.

Rather than acknowledge to a weary public that their approach has been a failure, they are doubling down and attempting to save their reputations by claiming that the problem is not that lockdowns do not work, but that they have not gone far enough.

There is, apparently, some diversity of opinion among the ZeroCovid crowd as to whether the term is to be interpreted literally, as some of its most impassioned and vocal proponents argue, or whether it simply means a more extreme version of the ideology that has dominated societies around the globe for the past year: the belief that suppressing the coronavirus is a singularly important goal, to replace all others and to be pursued with no or only minimal consideration of the effects of doing so.

ZeroCovid promoters appear to agree that much stricter border controls, lockdowns, and mask mandates are needed than exist in most nations today. Sam Bowman, one of the most prominent ZeroCoviders, claims for instance that the only way to address the coronavirus problem is with “lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, mass testing, contact tracing, and masks.” Likewise, former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair’s think-tank has stated that the only way to avoid another lockdown is to bring coronavirus cases to zero. China, Australia and New Zealand are portrayed as successes by ZeroCovid proponents, and prove that suffering now brings with it the promise of eventual freedom.

While marketing themselves as theoretically opposed to lockdowns, ZeroCovid adherents actually aspire to implement a totalitarian-style state, which we are supposed to believe will exist only temporarily. For example, Devi Sridhar, one of the movement’s most public faces in the United Kingdom, has claimed that the only way out of endless lockdown is a “crude, harsh, catastrophic lockdown” now, the first phase. Given that the third phase of Sridhar’s plan entails an “East Asian and Pacific model of elimination” that prohibits travel abroad, I can only imagine precisely what sort of totalitarian nightmare Sridhar envisions during phase one.

Those who follow this philosophy fail to recognize the glaringly obvious truth that suppression tactics have not succeeded because they run contrary to human nature (as well as basic cell biology) and entail severe deprivations of human rights and liberties. They also do not acknowledge the fact that if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) managed to eliminate the coronavirus (a questionable assumption given the CCP’s tenuous relationship with the truth), it did so using tactics that prima facie constitute human rights violations.

Even Australia and New Zealand, which before 2020 were considered beacons of liberal democracy, have recently been the subject of investigations or inquiries by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The ZeroCovid proponents do not address the reality that China, Australia, and New Zealand have continually had to implement lockdown policies in response to new cases arising even after declaring victory over the virus, and that the latter two are island nations able to effectuate border control in a way that cannot possibly be applied to nations that are geographically proximate to others and in which the virus has already become endemic.

The “Covid Community Action Summit,” a conference held at the end of January, and led and attended by many of ZeroCovid’s main players – needless to say, over Zoom – offers a glimpse into the warped worldview that pervades the ideology.

The architect of ZeroCovid, and the first speaker at the Summit, was Yaneer Bar-Yam, an American scientist who specializes in complex systems and quantitative analysis of pandemics and founded the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI). The participants came from a variety of backgrounds: in addition to doctors and scientists, political consultants and communications specialists were in attendance. Many presenters had business interests in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, and those from the United States tended to be affiliated with Democratic Party politics and campaigns.

One of the most disturbing presentations was delivered by Blake Elias, a researcher at the NECSI who works directly under Bar-Yam. Given Elias’s position, it is fair to assume that his views, as articulated at the Summit, reflected those held by its organizer.

Elias, like numerous other “ZeroCovid” advocates, believes that the “lives versus economy” framing of the problem is incorrect (notably, many lockdown opponents also consider this the wrong lens through which to view the issue, but for different reasons; namely that the economy and people’s lives are inextricably intertwined and lockdown policies do not take into account crucial considerations such as mental health and civil liberties).

Valuing each life–somewhat arbitrarily and without regards to life expectancy–at $10 million, Elias plugged a bunch of numbers into a machine and voila! came up with irrefutable proof that locking down hard and fast is less costly than failing to do so. Elias earnestly stated that his airtight equation demonstrates that if you are against elimination (ZeroCovid) the only conceivable reason could be that you dispute one of his premises, so you therefore believe one of the following: the cost of infections is lower than it is; the cost of lockdowns is more; hospital capacity is greater; the importation rate is higher; or complete vaccination is achievable in a shorter time frame.

At no time did he mention psychology, human rights, or civil liberties. If Elias had the slightest understanding of these concepts, he did an exceptional job of hiding it.

Michelle Lukezic and Eric Nixon, like Elias, gave a presentation akin to what I imagine it would be like to watch aliens discuss human psychology and behavior. Presumably a couple, Lukezic and Nixon founded a company called MakeGoodTogether, and believe that the coronavirus problem boils down to a lack of individual discipline and accountability. They acknowledged that the extreme social distancing they touted as the answer to the world’s woes is contrary to our nature, but insisted that we simply must try harder.

We could eradicate coronavirus, they solemnly instructed us, if only we would insist upon declining social invitations, and suggested that people post pledges on social media to that effect. They apparently spent little time considering the plight of essential workers whose employment does not allow them the luxury of distancing, apart from a comedic description of the psychic discomfort they experienced when the mask of a workman in their home slipped down his face. Lukezic was very proud of Nixon for refusing to shake the man’s hand upon his departure. I had to double-check the link a couple of times to make sure I had not inadvertently stumbled upon a Saturday Night Live episode.

Another noteworthy contributor to the ZeroCovid Summit was Michael Baker, the architect of New Zealand’s coronavirus strategy. Baker insisted that “following the science” indisputably leads to the ZeroCovid strategy, as though science alone informs policy. He made several stunning admissions, among which are that containment should also be the strategy for influenza, and that the coronavirus pandemic has given us the opportunity to reset in order to address inequities in society and threats posed by climate change. In other words, Baker does not foresee a return to normal life.

As demonstrated by its presenters at the Summit, ZeroCovid is the unfortunate end result of the inexplicable belief held by too many people that it makes sense to fixate upon one problem to the exclusion of all others. No one at the Summit, or in any other context for that matter, has ever made a convincing case for elevating the coronavirus pandemic above all other considerations. There is a reason for this: the facts and logic all point in the opposite direction.

An argument could certainly be made that a virus or other threat calculated to wipe out humanity or a significant portion of it, across age ranges, warrants exclusive focus on that threat for its duration. As I and others have written before, the coronavirus simply does not constitute such a danger. We now have a year of data from which to conclude beyond all doubt that exposure to the virus only poses a significant risk, beyond those we are accustomed to taking in everyday life, to the very old. The overwhelming majority of those infected with the virus suffer not at all, or minimally, and recover within days or weeks. This does not mean that the problem should be ignored, but rather that it should be addressed utilizing the same methodology with which we approach all public health matters: by taking into account the effects of the policies enacted in response to them.

ZeroCovid adherents are not qualitatively different from the epidemiologists and politicians who have advocated for and imposed lockdowns and mask mandates across the globe. They all believe that they can force billions of people to behave, for an indefinite time period, in ways that are contrary to our nature and deleterious to our well-being. They see nothing wrong with assuming control over every facet of our lives.

They are maniacally focused upon theories and models, and uninterested in what works in practice. They have no conception of human liberty or dignity. Rather than recognize that lockdowns, forced human separation, and masks are ineffective at quelling the spread of the coronavirus, while carrying enormous costs, not least among them the erasure of liberal democracy, the most fervent adherents to this ideology believe that the answer is more, and harder. That means deprivation of our rights and liberties, and denial of our basic human needs, until the coronavirus is eradicated from the globe. If they get their way, that may well be until the end of time. (read more)

2021-02-23 b
THE COVID-CON I
"Their disparities elucidate the enduring costs of lockdowns with regard to the economy and livelihoods of residents. "

The Florida Versus California Showdown

lorida and California are remarkably similar for their warm climates, beaches, tourist destinations, immigrant populations, and more, but both states could not be more different with respect to the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. Florida operates on close to zero pandemic-related restrictions whereas California maintains strict lockdown policies.

In California, virtually all public schools are closed, restaurants must follow unwavering capacity limits, travelers must quarantine for ten days, and on the list goes. Meanwhile, Florida’s schools are all open for in-person instruction, state-wide restrictions do not exist for restaurants, and there is no travel quarantine implemented by the state. All of these details point to Florida’s current stringency score being low at 33.8 compared to California’s 58.8.

While the media labels California Governor Newsom a “lockdown fanatic” for his authoritarian approach, they call Florida Governor DeSantis “DeathSantis” for being too relaxed. The two governors are polar opposites in how they handle Covid, but their outcomes are peculiarly similar.

In total, California experienced more cases per 100,000 people, while Florida had more deaths per 100,000 people. During the summer of 2020, cases and deaths spiked higher in Florida, but the course switched from November through January as cases and deaths peaked in California.

One reason why Florida has more deaths but not cases is that the elderly – those who are more vulnerable to the virus – account for a larger portion of Florida’s population. In fact, Florida has the second largest 65+ population at about 16.5%, but ranks #27 for deaths in the US. The elderly in California, on the other hand, comprise 14.8% of the state population. Still, California has worse outcomes within nursing homes at 2.27 deaths per 100 residents, while Florida sees 0.72 deaths per 100 residents. The chart below provides a side-by-side comparison to show that the statistics are similar and that one state did not clearly do better than the other.

Rather, the outcomes suggest that lockdown measures might not have a significant impact on lowering the number of Covid cases and deaths. But a more comprehensive look at the economic and social well-being of the states potentially reveals a greater disparity.

First, the unemployment rate in Florida remains consistently lower than California’s. As of December 2020, Florida’s (preliminary) unemployment rate was at 6.1% while California’s was 9%. This means that a staggering 1,700,383 people are unemployed in California, compared to 614,327 in Florida. (The gap between the states is still immense when the numbers are adjusted for population.)

The gross domestic product (GDP) of both states is similar, though Florida’s annual rate is slightly higher. California ranks as the largest economy – in terms of GDP – of all US states and even exceeds the United Kingdom’s. So, the drop in California’s GDP is not only steeper than Florida’s but also takes a greater toll on the entire United States economy.

Another revealing factor is inbound and outbound migration. According to 2020 data collected from two moving companies (U-Haul and United Van Lines), Florida is among the top states for inbound migration, and California ranks high for outbound migration. While these migration patterns follow previous 2019 moving trends, lockdown policies still might play into other factors for why people are leaving California, including taxes, cost of living, and affordable housing. Florida conversely attracts movers for having no income tax, low housing prices, and agreeable climate.

Mobility may also indicate some level of economic activity by showing the degree of movement made by residents through cell phone data. The graph below specifically looks at travel to retail and recreation locations, which ultimately is telling. Between April and June 2020 and November 2020 up to now, Florida evidently experienced more movement.

This data indicates that Florida residents are more mobile than Californians and are thus generating more economic activity within the state. Not only does this have important implications for how policy influences human behavior, the data also shows that Floridians are more comfortable moving around in their state, which could be attributed to reliable information about Covid or higher risk tolerance among the population.

While Governor Newsom keeps his state at high level of lockdowns despite glaring consequences, Californians are becoming increasingly irate as they sign a petition for a recall against him. As of February 2nd, Newsom’s approval rating rests at 46%, a sharp drop from September’s rating of 64%. Meanwhile, DeSantis is in the green with an approval rating of 54%.

The states’ contrasting lockdown policies may lead to a future that looks very different. More and more people flee California to places like Tennessee, Texas, and Florida as they continue to be restricted in their freedom to work and go to school. For example, California is home to numerous tech companies, employing millions of people, but with remote working and a desire for cheaper living conditions and less authoritarian governments, Californians may continue to exit.

California and Florida provide a clear example for the dubious efficacy of Covid-19 restrictions. Their disparities elucidate the enduring costs of lockdowns with regard to the economy and livelihoods of residents. The states also pave the way for us to better understand whether authoritarian measures truly work in controlling a virus and, on a greater scale, the trajectory of human behavior. (read more)

2021-02-23 a

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
- Daniel Webster

2021-02-22 f
DESERT FREEZE

Record Breaking Snows across (West Asia) Middle East and North Africa.
Please ignore the UN "climate change" propaganda at the end of the news clip.
(watch video)

2021-02-22 e
TEXAS FREEZE V

Lockdowns and the Texas Power Disaster

exas is right now consumed in debate over the question of how the catastrophic power and water outages could have happened. Some people are ready to put the blame on the fragility of wind power while others say that this is unfair scapegoating. It’s a hugely important discussion, given that at least 24 deaths are due to loss of power and that is probably only the beginning.

What seems to have escaped notice, however, is the role that Covid-related lockdowns may have played in reducing inspections and preparations for a possibly brutal winter. With so much of normal life shut down during the spring and summer, and so many people finding every excuse to Zoom meet rather than go to work, power plants were subject to neglect.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) – a quasi-government entity – “manages the flow of electric power on the Texas Interconnection that supplies power to more than 25 million Texas customers – representing 90 percent of the state’s electric load.” It is also responsible for inspections, training, and maintenance such as preparing for extreme weather.

An investigation by NBC found that ERCOT “did not conduct any on-site inspections of the state’s power plants to see if they were ready for this winter season. Due to COVID-19 they conducted virtual tabletop exercises instead – but only with 16% of the state’s power generating facilities.”

Thus in compliance with all the restrictions, and possibly also in order to avoid a germ, ERCOT shelved all its usual preparations in favor of pretend exercises. You can even see this from its board minutes dated October 8, 2020. Many of the regulations operations are suspended or made virtual. Some training was extended from 6 to 12 weeks with the option of being online. Board member Erik Johnson raised a warning flag: “This would significantly impact our ability to conduct continuing training for ERCOT operators.”

There is of course no way to know just yet whether lockdowns and virtualization of just about everything had the decisive impact on causing vast swaths of the state to go dark in the midst of life-threatening temperatures. The demand for power in Texas was unprecedented. The system had never been tested so hard. The unexpected freezing of wind turbines did not help.

In the search for answers here, lockdowns should be considered as a probable contributing factor. It should not be a surprise that when you forcibly shut down normal life functioning, normal life functioning shuts down. That includes hugely important operations that we otherwise take for granted, such as making sure a region’s energy and water supply are prepared to deal with extreme temperatures.

Lockdowns have led to a grim litany of horrors. Some of these are expected, such as an increase in hunger, drug and alcohol abuse, suicides, trauma in children locked out of schools, unemployment, and bankruptcies. That lifespans in the US may have suddenly taken a deep dive, not wholly due to a virus, would hardly be a surprise.

In addition, there might be many more unforeseeable relationships between lockdowns and other terrible outcomes that might otherwise not have an obvious direct relationship.

It was a massive priority of the earlier generation of public health experts that society continue to function as normally as possible during a pandemic. A new infectious disease, they believed, should be treated as a medical problem to manage, not an opportunity to try out a new socio-political experiment in shutting down life itself. That power plants did not undergo routine inspections prior to the devastating freeze makes the point well.

Lockdowns are an attack on civilization, as their proponents promised them to be. The now-fired New York Times reporter Donald McNeil called on governments to adopt a Medieval strategy in dealing with disease.

That one of the results is the loss of power and water for millions of people, endangering lives across the whole state of Texas, is fully in keeping with the Medieval approach to pandemic management. They demanded that governments roll back progress hundreds of years and, sure enough over time, there was no electricity or running water. The lockdowners deserve partial blame.
_____

After posting this, I received a fascinating note from a specialist in Texas who wrote me as follows:

“The news article from NBC in DFW was fairly misleading. The article assumes that ERCOT is responsible for physical inspections of generation assets, and it is not. ERCOT could have made an improved effort in winter readiness of g&t (generation and transmission) assets by holding g&t owners responsible for proving natural gas fuel assurance before the storm hit and during the declared energy emergency.”

Lockdowns have “made life more difficult for grid operators. PPE shortages and travel restrictions have made generation maintenance more difficult to schedule. There have been concerns early on last spring about deferred generation maintenance. ERCOT among other grid operators should have been concerned and I am sure they probably were. Here is an article from last spring about concerns over supply chain to the energy sector a possible lockdown impacts.” (read more)

2021-02-22 d
TEXAS FREEZE IV

Wind Energy Fails: Grading the Reliability of Energy Sources During the Texas Power Outages

Commentary surrounding the Texas power outages has been wide-ranging, making it relatively difficult to make sense of what happened.

Here were the major factors contributing to the energy crisis:

•Because Texas doesn’t “winterize” its electricity infrastructure, around 45 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity became inoperable the morning of February 15, 2021, due to extreme weather. Included in this capacity was: ◦30 GW of fuel-based energy sources (mainly natural gas) that became unable to produce electricity due to frozen natural gas pipelines and safety mechanisms that shut down nuclear and coal facilities to protect against extreme cold temperature. This is nearly 30 percent of all nuclear, coal, and natural gas capacity on the Texas grid.

◦15 GW of wind energy that could not generate electricity due to wind turbines freezing. This is roughly 50 percent of all wind and solar capacity on the Texas grid.

•Because neighboring states and Mexico were also experiencing energy emergencies of their own, in addition to the independent and isolated nature of the electrical grid in Texas, electricity imports were largely out of the question to mitigate the significant loss of generating capacity.

Renewable energy advocates were quick to come to the defense of wind and solar energy sources, while others were quick to blame them for the energy emergency that unfolded in the Lone Star State.

With so many competing narratives floating around, it’s helpful to see the data. As such, we created a reliability grading scale designed to judge which energy sources came to the rescue, and which ones were largely no-shows, during the statewide power outages that rocked Texas.

Reliability-Based Grading Scale

When it comes to power outages of this scale during a winter storm, all that matters to the millions going without power and heat is which energy source can provide immediate relief and bring the lights back on.

This is important to consider, as many in the media were applauding wind turbines for “over-performing” forecasts made the day before. However, over-performing forecasts means little to those going without electricity if the forecast was essentially nothing to begin with – which was the case in Texas heading into the emergency crisis. If I were to “forecast” the Vikings to win zero games in the 2021-22 football season, I wouldn’t be celebrating a record of 1-15 simply because they did better than my prediction.

This fact is lost on advocates for renewable energy, who in recent years have attempted to normalize the lack of performance for intermittent energy sources during energy emergencies in Minnesota, California, South Australia, and now Texas.

Therefore, we based our grading scale on reliability, as opposed to historical output or meaningless forecasts.

For our grades, we looked at electricity generation data provided by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) during the energy crisis in Texas – from 3:00 A.M. Monday morning to 12:00 A.M. on Wednesday – and compared them to the following reliability grading scale based on capacity factors.

Capacity factors are a metric showing how much available capacity was producing electricity during a given timeframe. For example, in a one-hour period on Monday morning, wind energy produced 649 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity out of a potential of 28,064 MWh that could have been produced. Thus, wind energy during this one-hour interval had a 2.3 percent capacity factor – a score of an F on our reliability grading scale.

For our grades, we used average capacity factors over the course of the Texas power outages to showcase which energy sources were performing the best, and which ones were non-factors. The graph below displays these capacity factors.

(graph)

As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.

(graph)

Remarkably, natural gas still generated electricity at 38 percent of its total capacity throughout the energy emergency – providing on average over 65 percent of all electricity generation through Monday and Tuesday – despite roughly 30 GW being inoperable due to frozen pipelines holding up fuel. This means that the natural gas facilities that could still receive fuel were operating at capacity factors of more than 62 percent.

The three worst-performing generating assets, on the other hand, belonged exclusively to renewable energy sources: solar, hydro, and wind. Had Texas been even more reliant on these energy sources, as renewable energy advocates around the country desire, the energy crisis in Texas would have been even worse.

Based on these capacity factors, reliability grades during the Texas power outages are:

(chart)

Nuclear scored the highest grade of an A, followed by natural gas and coal with C’s. Solar was the only renewable energy source to score higher than an F with a grade of a D, while hydro and wind scored F’s.

Grading the Highest One-Hour Capacity Factors of Each Source

Now that we graded the average capacity factors for each source, it’s now time to score each source according to their highest and lowest one-hour capacity factors during the energy crisis in Texas.

Why do this? Because some energy sources, such as solar, work very efficiently during certain times of the day, which provides a degree of reliability when the sun is shining. Even wind can, at times, produce electricity fairly efficiently (if and only if the wind is blowing, which isn’t as much of a for sure thing as the sun rising and falling). As you can see from the graph below, however, this was not the case during the energy crisis in Texas.

(graph)

As you can see, wind energy in Texas only managed to produce a maximum of 19 percent of total potential output during the entire energy emergency in Texas. Wind energy is the second most abundant energy source in Texas in terms of capacity with over 28 GW – or nearly 21 percent of all capacity in Texas. The fact that at least 81 percent of this capacity sat dormant during a time when Texans needed electricity the most is simply inexcusable.

Comparatively, all other energy sources produced a high of over 40 percent of their total potential – even natural gas, despite 30 GW of natural gas capacity unable to receive fuel.

Based on the highest one-hour capacity factors for each energy source throughout the energy crisis, the grading scale is as follows.

(chart)

Nuclear and solar scored A’s, natural gas, coal, and hydro took C’s, and wind energy once again took a grade of an F.

The Lowest

In a similar fashion, there are times when some energy sources produce little to no electricity at all. In the case of solar, when the sun goes down, it stops producing electricity altogether, as shown in the graph below. As you can imagine for millions of Texans who spent the night with no electricity (which I was one of), it didn’t matter how efficient energy sources like solar were during the day. They needed immediate relief from the energy emergency, and couldn’t wait for the morning.

(graph)

In addition, notice that wind energy had a low capacity factor of only 2 percent, while the low for natural gas, coal, and nuclear was 33, 34, and 74 percent, respectively.

Based on one-hour low capacity factors, reliability grades are:

(chart)

This was the only category in which nuclear scored a grade lower than an A (although only by 1 percent).

Coal and natural gas followed nuclear with grades of D’s, while all three renewable energy sources scored grades of F’s.

Fuel-Based Energy Sources Passed, While Wind Energy Failed

In case you missed it, wind energy scored an F in all three categories – the only energy source to perform so poorly during the power outages in Texas.

As such, you can rightfully label wind energy as the most unreliable energy source during the Texas energy crisis. While it may not have been the primary cause of the power outages, it certainly wouldn’t have done Texas any good to have more wind capacity on the system than fuel-based energy sources. In fact, that would have only made things worse.

More nuclear power, on the other hand, would have made the world of difference, as it was the most reliable energy source on the grid during the energy crisis and by a large margin. Unfortunately, Texas only has about 5,400 MW of nuclear capacity on the grid – making up just under 4 percent of total capacity in Texas.

While coal and natural gas didn’t do nearly as well, they still passed with C’s. Furthermore, because Texas has nearly 20 GW of coal capacity and over 77 GW of natural gas capacity, a C effort still led to natural gas and coal being the largest suppliers of electricity throughout the energy emergency.

If this grading scale tells us anything, it’s that relying on intermittent renewable energy during extreme weather events is not the answer to maintain reliability, and fuel-based energy sources are required in order to keep the lights on. (read more)

2021-02-22 c
TEXAS FREEZE III

The Texas Blackout and Preparing for the Past

One lesson of the Texas energy crisis is surely a need to make infrastructure robust to the past in order to better prepare for the future

As I write this, about 500,000 people remain without power in Texas resulting from some of the coldest weather to hit the region in at least 30 years. There will be many investigations as to what happened and how this type of electricity crisis can be avoided in the future. Here I focus on what may be an important factor in the crisis — a failure to fully consider history as a basis for understanding near-term risks. Many years ago I called this “preparing for the past” in the context of extreme weather.

Texas is well known for sweltering summer weather, with corresponding high demands for electricity for air conditioning. But Texas can also experience cold extremes, which require its grid operators to prepare for both increased demand and impacts on generation. According to the New York Times, for 2020 “Texas’ grid operators had anticipated that, in the worst case, the state would use 67 gigawatts of electricity during the winter peak.”

I was curious as to how ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) actually defined such a worst case scenario. It turns out that this scenario is based on using an extreme cold period of 2011 as an analogy (see this ERCOT spreadsheet).

The first week of February, 2011 indeed saw an extreme cold front descend throughout the United States, resulting in significant impacts to electricity generation across the Texas region. However, despite its severity, an after-event review estimated that it “was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration.”

A one-in-ten year event is not generally considered a “worst case scenario” in planning for extreme weather events. For comparison, the insurance industry typically considers one-in-100 and one-in-500 year events to estimate maximum possible losses. And even these rare events could be exceeded. There are always important debates to be had over what level of hardening to build into infrastructure, typically based on cost considerations. But it will surely be a rare case where that level is defined only as the 1-in-10 year event.

It appears that ERCOT based its assessment of preparedness for winter 2020-21 on a historical period of 2004 to 2018. Imagine if Miami based its hurricane preparations on the past 14 years of hurricane experience — decision makers would dramatically underestimate possible risks. To understand climate variability in extreme events requires a long-term perspective, many decades and even longer. However, even without a long-term perspective, he experiences of 2011 did provided clear lessons that the Texas grid was unprepared for a deep cold snap.

Looking a bit further into the past shows that 2011 was far from a worst case scenario. In fact, 1989 saw a cold snap that was considerably more widespread and severe than 2011, leading to an 84% reduction in Texas electricity generation versus a 68% reduction in 2011. According to Bloomberg the Texas weather of the past week, “which caused temperatures to fall two degrees below zero in Dallas on Tuesday -- is far worse than 2011.”

The ERCOT 2020/21 winter weather outlook acknowledged that “there’s enough of a chance for a period of extreme cold that the possibility cannot be discounted – even in what may otherwise be a mild winter.” However, it also emphasized that cold weather was decreasing rapidly in Texas, warning, “You should have strong supporting evidence if forecasting a colder-than-normal (coldest third) season.”

Indeed, a 2020 report by the Texas State Climatologist made little mention of cold weather risks, aside from the fact that they were decreasing, and predicted that, “the expected warming of extreme wintertime temperatures would make typical wintertime extremes by 2036 milder than all but five of the winters in the historic record.” Others argue that extreme cold weather in the continental United States should actually be expected to increase, although the evidence for that hypothesis is weak at this point.

Whether cold outbreaks are decreasing or increasing due to climate change should be beside the point. We know that extreme cold events can still happen and will continue to happen regardless of the precise human effects on climate. We also know that such cold events can be very severe and, as we have seen, can have significant consequences. Climate change is of course important, and we should prepare for an uncertain future. But the recent Texas electricity crisis should remind us that we still need to prepare for climate, not just climate change.

Part of that preparation requires making better use of hindsight. Because if we are not even prepared for the past, it is certain that we won’t be prepared for the future. (read more)

2021-02-22 b
TEXAS FREEZE II
"Most of the nation needs more than intermittent electricity from wind and solar, they need continuous and uninterruptible electricity from natural gas, nuclear, and coal to support the health and economy in their state to survive extreme weather conditions year-round."
+
"There’s no place for intermittent energy in a reliable grid."

Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas

The story from some media sources is that frozen wind turbines are responsible for the power shortfalls in Texas. Other media sources emphasize that fossil fuel resources should shoulder the blame because they have large cold induced outages as well and also some natural gas plants could not obtain fuel.

Extreme cold should be expected to cause significant outages of both renewable and fossil fuel based resources. Why would anyone expect that sufficient amounts of natural gas would be available and deliverable to supply much needed generation? Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions. While some degradation should be expected, what is happening in Texas is a departure from what they should be experiencing. Who or what then is responsible for the shocking consequences produced by Texas’s run in with this recent bout of extreme cold?

TRADITIONAL PLANNING

Traditionally, responsibility for ensuring adequate capacity during extreme conditions has fallen upon individual utility providers. A couple decades ago I was responsible for the load forecasting, transmission planning and generation planning efforts of an electric cooperative in the southeastern US. My group’s projections, studies and analysis supported our plans to meet customer demand under forecasted peak load conditions. We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand. Our forecasts showed that we would need to plan for extra capacity to meet this potential demand under extreme conditions in upcoming winters.

I was raked over the coals and this forecast was strongly challenged. Providing extra generation capacity, ensuring committed (firm) deliveries of gas during the winter, upgrading transmission facilities are all expensive endeavors. Premiums are paid to ensure gas delivery and backup power and there is no refund if it’s not used. Such actions increased the annual budget and impact rates significantly for something that is not likely to occur most years, even if the extreme weather projections are appropriate. You certainly don’t want to over-estimate peak demand due to the increasing costs associated with meeting that demand. But back then we were obligated to provide for such “expected” loads. Our CEO, accountants and rate makers would ideally have liked a lower extreme demand projection as that would in most cases kept our cost down. It was challenging to hold firm and stand by the studies and force the extra costs on our Members.

Fortuitously for us, we were hit with extreme winter conditions just when the plan went in place. Demand soared and the planned capacity we had provided was needed. A neighboring entity was hit with the same conditions. Like us they had significant growth in heat pumps – but they had not forecasted their extreme weather peak to climb as we had. They had to go to the overburdened markets to find energy and make some curtailments. The cost of replacement power turned out to be significantly greater proportionately than we incurred by planning for the high demand. They suffered real consequences due to the shortcomings of their planning efforts.

However, if extreme winter had not occurred, our neighbor’s costs would have been lower than ours that year and that may have continued many years into the future as long as we didn’t see extreme winter conditions. Instead of the praise we eventually received, there would have at least been some annoyance directed at my groups for contributing to “un-needed expenditures”. That’s the way of the world. You can often do things a little cheaper, save some money and most of the time you can get away with it. But sometimes/eventually you cut it too close and the consequences can be extreme.

The Approach in Texas

Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) looks at potential forecasted peak conditions and expected available generation and if there is sufficient margin they assume everything will be all right. But unlike utilities under traditional models, they don’t ensure that the resources can deliver power under adverse conditions, they don’t require that generators have secured firm fuel supplies, and they don’t make sure the resources will be ready and available to operate. They count on enough resources being there because they assume that is in their owner’s best interests. Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down. While generally markets are often great things, providing needed energy during extreme conditions evidently is not their forte. Unlike the traditional approach where specific entities have responsibilities to meet peak levels, in Texas the responsibility is diffuse and unassigned. There is no significant long term motivation for entities to ensure extra capacity just in case it may be needed during extreme conditions. Entities that might make that gamble theoretically can profit when markets skyrocket, but such approaches require tremendous patience and the ability to weather many years of potential negative returns.

This article from GreenTech media praises energy only markets as do many green interests. Capacity markets are characterized as wasteful. Andrew Barlow, Head of the PUC in Texas is quoted as follows, “Legislators have shown strong support for the energy-only market that has fueled the diversification of the state’s electricity generation fleet and yielded significant benefits for customers while making Texas the national leader in installed wind generation. ”

Why has Capacity been devalued?

Traditional fossil fuel generation has (as does most hydro and nuclear) inherent capacity value. That means such resources generally can be operated with a high degree of reliability and dependability. With incentives they can be operated so that they will likely be there when needed. Wind and solar are intermittent resources, working only under good conditions for wind and sun, and as such do not have capacity value unless they are paired with costly battery systems.

If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources. It does this because it rewards only energy that is fed into the grid, not backup power. (Side note-it’s typical to provide “renewable” resources preference for feeding into the grid as well. Sometimes wind is compensated for feeding into the grid even during periods of excess generation when fossil fuel resources are penalized. But that’s another article. )

Traditional planning studies might recognize that wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel (more so under extreme conditions) such that if you have these backup generators its much cheaper to use and fuel them, than to add wind farms with the accompanying significant investment for concrete, rare earth metals, vast swaths of land …. . Traditional planning approaches often have to go to get around this “bias” of favoring capacity providing resources over intermittent resources.

When capacity value is rewarded, this makes the economics of renewables much less competitive. Texas has stacked the deck to make wind and solar more competitive than they could be in a system that better recognizes the value of dependable resources which can supply capacity benefits. An energy only market helps accomplish the goal of making wind and solar more competitive. Except capacity value is a real value. Ignoring that, as Texas did, comes with real perils.

In Texas now we are seeing the extreme shortages and market price spikes that can result from devaluing capacity. The impacts are increased by both having more intermittent resources which do not provide capacity and also because owners and potential owners of resources which could provide capacity are not incentivized to have those units ready for backup with firm energy supplies.

Personal Observations

Wind and solar have value and can be added to power systems effectively in many instances. But seeking to attain excessive levels of wind and solar quickly becomes counterproductive. It is difficult to impossible to justify the significant amounts of wind and solar penetration desired by many policy makers today using principals of good cost allocation. Various rate schemes and market proposals have been developed to help wind and solar become more competitive. But they come with costs, often hidden. As I’ve written before, it may be because transmission providers have to assume the costs and build a more expensive system to accommodate them. It may be that rates and markets unfairly punish other alternatives to give wind and solar an advantage. It may be that they expose the system to greater risks than before. It may be that they eat away at established reliability levels and weaken system performance during adverse conditions. In a fair system with good price signals today’s wind and solar cannot achieve high penetration levels in a fair competition.

Having a strong technical knowledge of the power system along with some expertise in finance, rates and costs can help one see the folly of a variety of policies adopted to support many of today’s wind and solar projects. Very few policy makers possess anything close to the skill sets needed for such an evaluation. Furthermore, while policy makers could listen to experts, their voices are drowned out by those with vested interests in wind and solar technology who garner considerable support from those ideologically inclined to support renewables regardless of impacts.

A simpler approach to understanding the ineffectiveness of unbridled advocacy for wind and solar is to look at those areas which have heavily invested in these intermittent resources and achieved higher penetration levels of such resources. Typically electric users see significant overall increases in the cost of energy delivered to consumers. Emissions of CO2 do not uniformly decrease along with employment of renewables, but may instead increase due to how back up resources are operated. Additionally reliability problems tend to emerge in these systems. Texas, a leader in wind, once again is added to the experience gained in California, Germany and the UK showing that reliability concerns and outages increase along with greater employment of intermittent resources.

Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?

The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy. The purpose of which was to aid the profitability of intermittent wind and solar resources and increase their penetration levels. I don’t believe anyone has ever advanced the notion that fossil fuel plants might operate based on altruism. Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete. (read more)

Additional Articles of Interest:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/08022021-noreasters-would-be-disastrous-to-a-green-america-oped/

https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-capacity-market/

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/18/midwest-have-no-surplus-power-for-texas/

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/23/solar-plasma-temperature-is-plunging-should-we-worry/

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-our-downfall/

https://talkmarkets.com/content/commodities/how-wind-power-caused-the-great-texas-blackout-of-2021?post=298668&page=3

http://landscapesandcycles.net/cold-snaps-expose-climate-science-fragillity.html

https://joannenova.com.au/2021/02/texas-was-prepared-for-global-warming-but-not-the-return-of-the-cold/

https://www.rt.com/usa/516079-texas-cold-food-shortages/

http://www.moralindividualism.com/monopol3.htm

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/17/the-day-after-tomorrow-ercot-fail-edition/

Selected Comments to Original Article:

President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were absolutely correct when they asked the FERC to ensure that our coal-fired and nuclear power plant be kept in service. If coal generation had not been reduced, and compressors operated directly from NG production, and wind and solar never built, this cold would have been easily endured.
... And even sans the cold, on the wee morning hours of the 16th, the wind dropped to two mph and all wind failed. This was NOT a spare capacity problem!

xxx

I think the implication is quite clear – nuclear power, in one form or another (properly designed plants can be accomplished these days, France has a lot of them, still), must become a bigger part of our power generation mix in the United States. How much of a percentage of the mix, of course, will depend upon how much people are willing to invest in these facilities. And how much the U.S. Government can be convinced that its nuclear regulatory policies are currently far more of a hindrance than a help.

xxx

Good analysis. The capacity market has been devalued relative to an energy only market for the same reason that savings is devalued relative to consumption, or employment relative to welfare as an anti-poverty program. It is a sort of adolescent mindset that has gripped much of the world, especially the West since WWII.

xxx

According to the ERCOT web site:

“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is a nonprofit organization that ensures reliable electric service for 90 percent of the state of Texas. The grid operator is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature.”

“ERCOT has four primary responsibilities:
• Maintain system reliability.
• Facilitate a competitive wholesale market.
• Facilitate a competitive retail market.
• Ensure open access to transmission.
———————————–
“Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one.”

This article is wrong from the beginning. ERCOT is assigned the responsibility for maintaining system reliability in Texas.

They have shirked their duty for over a decade, spending money to add wind/solar instead of winterizing infrastructure. The winterizing of infrastructure was one of the main recommendations to come out after the 2011 weather fiasco. ERCOT is the *only* one to blame for the conditions in TX currently.

xxx

As a lifelong Texan living through this mess, actually you are both right. The problem is that ERCOT does not designate which generators are responsible for emergency generation -ergo “no one is responsible”. They rely on the conglomerate of generators to supply varying loads in various areas based on demand. One report I read said they had planned only for 10% excess of forecast from the whole of the system then 26% of the system went down (25% wind, 1% solar) and the actual peak demand was double forecast. (We have LOTS of Peoples Republik of Kalifornia transplants) The result was that most generators were overloaded and failed in a cascade throughout the grid. Like doubling the load of your house and cutting the available power by half, you cant keep the main breaker on.

If 100% of the power generation were traditional, there still would have been outages due to forecast deficiency and poor safety margins but the outages would not have been nearly as severe or long. There are still a huge number of people without power and may not get it back for weeks.

It should also be noted that most members of the board of ERCOT do not even reside in Texas.

Of course there will be an investigation and lots of finger pointing.

Me, I live in hurricane alley so I have my own generator because I know from experience to be self sufficient.

xxx

I agree that “no one is responsible” is a BS answer. This mindset makes organizations/bureaucracies inefficient and slow to make needed changes. I agree that ERCOT is to blame directly and Utility Commission indirectly.

The Texas Comptroller states ERCOT is responsible for:

– Dispatch (scheduling and managing how electricity will flow through the network – telling producers how much to generate and utilities if necessary how much to cut demand)
– Planning new power plant additions and ensuring that the mix of generation technologies is suitable for Texas,
– Operates the electricity market in Texas, performing financial settlements for sellers and buyers

What is their primary obligation with these responsibilities? MAINTAIN SYSTEM RELIABILITY.

It’s the second bullet above where they have screwed up the whole interconnect system by not planning power plant additions properly to maintain a reliable system. This Planning Engineer author type would be first on my list to axe if involved in the ERCOT planning new power additions over the last decade.

xxx

[T]he ERCOT board is right now comprised mostly of officials from the utility companies themselves. The self-serving descriptions of ERCOT and the Texas Comptroller are just that: self-serving and designed to support and maintain the current deregulated system and its mythology. They mean little or nothing in terms of actual day-to-day operations. And there is, in a system that is an “energy-only market” (generators get paid for only what power they actually generate, not for facilities to provide built-in reserve or excess capacity) by law, this is what you get. ERCOT didn’t create the system, the Legislature did. And it is the Legislature who will have to fix it. Whether or not they have the stones to change or fundamentally alter ERCOT’s role is another question entirely.

xxx

ERCOT has the responsibility…. but read the monthly meeting agendas for both the board of directors and the operating committee. there is no mention of reliability, adverse weather or spinning reserve for the last 8 months. the agenda focus is special interest commercial issues 80% and tech relay coordination 15%. ERCOT needs to be reconstituted before it will include reliability.

xxx

“No one is responsible” may be a BS answer, but it’s the truth – no one is responsible because (a) nobody takes responsibility and (b) nobody gets held responsible.

xxx

I agree with the assertion that “no one” is functionally responsible for providing adequate capacity. While they can say that on the “website states the responsibilities” obviously running a energy only instead of having a capacity option in the market was intentional. They do not reward capacity, and thus rely upon the suppliers to give them the energy they need. I do not care what they say they are doing or their responsibility in their documents. What they do and how they react are what defines them. They do not guarantee a stable system by their actions, and thus no one is responsible.

Should they be using sound engineering practices and planning around having capacity? Yes, of course, but their politically correct and green credentials will not allow them. Until that changes no one will be responsible to make sure that there is capacity to deliver power in times of need.

xxx

ERCOT, especially the BOD, *is* responsible for:

“Facilitate a competitive wholesale market.”

That includes having a market that provides proper capacity, including reserve capacity in the case of a situation.

I agree they will be defined by what they do now. But I have absolutely no hope of the right thing happening unless every member of the existing BOD is replaced.

xxx

This was an engineering failure, inherent to the non suitability of wind and solar to the grid, not a spare capacity failure.

I do however agree that ERCOT is and was responsible.

xxx

[T]hose four responsibilities have precious little to do with creating system reserve capacity, a “readiness to serve.” The Legislature gave ERCOT absolutely no teeth to enable them to do what you are describing; on the contrary, the Legislature assumed that there would be little need at the time of ERCOT’s creation to do the kinds of things that the notion of “ready to serve” entails. The Legislature is the one who created the current deregulated system. When deregulated generation companies only get paid for the actual amount of electricity they produce, without any concept of compensation for insuring capacity to cover excesses in existing peak demand, they will do only what the market encourages them to do and no more. ERCOT is not the one encouraging and spending money on wind/solar power – the Legislature and the other governing regulatory bodies in Texas who oversee utilities, and the electric utilities themselves, are the ones encouraging and doing that. ERCOT is far more guilty of propagandizing and sitting on their hands when they were in a position to see that Texas was heading down a bad road. But the ERCOT governing board itself is full of officials from electric utilities themselves. Not a very good prospect for saying that the emperor has no clothes.

xxx

I just don’t agree. ERCOT is assigned the responsibility for a reliable grid in Texas. They can do this by controlling the wholesale market, i.e. what is capitalized and what isn’t plus what is incentivized and what isn’t. ERCOT controls where capital is applied in the grid – and that includes providing capital for needed reserve power when intermittent, unreliable energy generation falls by the wayside.

The legislature didn’t deregulate anything. They assigned responsibilities to ERCOT and ERCOT reports to the TX Public Utility Commission.

The ERCOT Executive Committee is full of officials from electric utilities, not the ERCOT Board of Directors. You can’t find out who is on the Board or what their profiles are any longer because they deleted all that from their web site on Wednesday morning. A sure admission of guilt!

xxx

Hedging their bets with the “unreliables” to please political constituents is something they could have refused to do.

xxx

“It was an engineer’s wheelhouse to see that the infrastructure is capable of getting the power from generators all the way into people’s homes.”

Not anymore. The problem was explained in a previous post on this subject. In the old days, you had a local electric company who generated the electricity, sold it to you, and then delivered it to you over it’s distribution system. Everything was local, they “lived’ in the local community, and were answerable to them.

That is no longer the case. The electrical generation is done by a separate company whose owners may even be in a foreign country. The company that sells you the electricity is a separate company, that again, may be a company far away from your local community. (In lots of areas you have a choice of what company you buy your electricity from). The company you buy your electricity from, then pays the distribution company (the “wire guys”. Which is probably all that is left of your old local electric company) to deliver the electricity to you.

So you see, it’s nobody’s job to plan. The generation company just generates the electricity, and does not care about anything but meeting it contractual obligations to generate a certain amount of power. The company that sells you the power just cares that it has contracts with the suppliers to deliver so much electricity to the grid. The distribution company just has to maintain the wires to get the electricity to your house.

We need to go back to the old days.

xxx

Those companies, be they generators or retailers operate, in the marketplace dictated by the ERCOT. It is the ERCOT that determines the rules for playing in the TX market. ERCOT can lay out rules for reserve power capacity to be able to compete in the TX market. And the bottom line is that ERCOT was more interested in incentivizing the addition of intermittent, unreliable wind/solar than in ensuring the reliability of the TX power grid.

Every member of the BOD of ERCOT should be fired and replaced with people more interested in reliability than in being green. Then the TX PUC should be investigated to find out why they let ERCOT cause this debacle, ERCOT reports to them and apparently there was insufficient oversight of ERCOT by the PUC.

xxx

Texas in not part of a multi-state pact/grid. It operates its own stand-alone grid. I’m not sure they could have gotten enough capacity anyway from other states.

I suspect we will find that a lot of the black outs were due to load shedding to maintain frequency and phase. Sub-stations overloads were probably a problem too.

Losing 15% – 20% of load capacity would be difficult to cover in any case. I am surprised they didn’t lose the whole shebang back to ground zero. Relying on gas with just in time delivery was a disaster in and of itself.

Now that they know it is possible to lose massive parts of the system they should include reserve sources with local stored fuel, namely nuclear and coal.

xxx

I think there should never be any reliance on interconnecting supplies, because that possibility relies on a catastrophic weather event not affecting adjacent areas as well as the preparedness of the neighbours to help you in an emergency when their own circumstances may be approaching a critical stage. Relying on interconnectors merely gives politicians an “easy way out” to avoid essential expenditure. The answer, as usual, is more coal-fired generation.

xxx

Yes to more coal-fired generation, but no, you must continue to rely on interconnecting supplies sometimes, just to insure the balancing out of the electric grid. Especially when you have more demand than generation in a given hour of the day. Even a 50 MWh deficit/imbalance could seriously compromise the grid.

xxx

The fault lies with ERCOT, pure and simple. Their mission is “We serve the public by ensuring a reliable grid, efficient electricity markets, open access and retail choice.” They did NOT ensure a reliable grid. End of story. No more B.S. By the way, the Board Chair is Sally Talberg…..in her bio, it says “she co-led the development of Michigan Saves, a nonprofit green bank that has financed over $200 million in energy efficiency projects, while also helping staff the state’s wind zone board and offshore wind council.”

Getting the picture?

xxx

It is becoming more apparent that people in charge of making energy decisions are not up to the task. They are caught up in the hype of going green and don’t understand how they are setting themselves up for failure. And I suspect, that more and more, they don’t care if there are failures. They have little regard for the average citizen. We are just people they have to put up with. They are definitely not interested in making America great again.

xxx

I would submit that the people who are really in charge of making energy decisions know little about where energy comes from and how it is transformed into the forms we actually use. They don’t understand any of the limitations of the system, and they don’t care if those limitations create problems. So, yeah, we the little people are on our own.

xxx

The ERCOT electricity peak load is summer AC, met by seasonal natgas peakers. It appears they did not plan for a winter peak when there is additional natgas heating demand. Therefore the gas reserve capacity was inadequate.

The ‘crime’ is that this was foreseeable. There were rolling ERCOT blackouts Super Bowl week 2011 for the same weather reasons as this week. Every ten years is something that should have been planned for. The reason 2011 did not end in complete disaster like this week is simple: there was much less unreliable wind on the grid, and much more baseload coal that has since been retired.

xxx

Yep. ERCOT had a dress rehearsal for this in 2011. The causes were very similar. However, it was over a much shorter duration and not nearly as cold as 2021. Wind had a much smaller share of our capacity and coal had a much larger share. The overall grid was more resilient.

Most of us shared in the rolling blackouts. It was annoying, but not a “crisis.”

xxx

In Alberta, wind power gets “first access” to the grid and is paid a preferential high rate vs other generation. Natural gas and hydro generation are shut in to make room for wind. When wind dies, natural gas and hydro generation are ramped up. This is an enormous hidden subsidy for wind power. Ratepayers would pay much less for power if we simply never built the wind power in the first place.

xxx

I nailed the current global cold Winter forecast in August 2020 below. The hard part is forecasting where the polar vortex is going next – but those who forecast a warm winter were delusional.

Regarding the warmist loons who claimed “Global Warming caused this extreme cold” – their lies are not even credible enough to be specious.

From previous posts on wattsup:
CO2, GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE AND ENERGY
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., June 15, 2019
[excerpts]

This formula works reasonably well back to 1982, which is the limit of my data availability.

5. UAH LT Global Temperatures can be predicted ~4 months in the future with just two parameters:
UAHLT (+4 months) = 0.2*Nino34Anomaly + 0.15 – 5*SatoGlobalAerosolOpticalDepth (Figs. 5a and 5b)

6. The sequence is Nino34 Area SST warms, seawater evaporates, Tropical atmospheric humidity increases, Tropical atmospheric temperature warms, Global atmospheric temperature warms, atmospheric CO2 increases (Figs.6a and 6b).

I wrote in August 2020:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/23/solar-plasma-temperature-is-plunging-should-we-worry/#comment-3068819
Check out NIno34 temperatures, again down to Minus 0.6C – winter will be cold.comment image

Nino34 SST anom’s hit minimums of minus1.4C-1.3C in Oct2020 and Nov2020 – so global coldest temperatures (+4 months) should be Feb2021 and Mar2021.*

xxx

Reserve power for emergencies is critical – just ask those people who spent two or three days without any power during an epic cold streak in Texas.

Wind and solar really have no place in large scale energy grids – they are niche technologies that make sense in unusual circumstances. Stop the subsidies for wind and solar (and electric cars while we are at it).

xxx

It was falsely reported that only 5 gw of wind went offline, leaving 5 gw remaining. That is a fiddled figure – a typical MSM fiddle.

Texas installed wind capacity is 30 gw, which COULD have all operated given the right conditions. So in reality 25 gw of wind was offline – which demonstrates the complete unreliability of wind. And wind suppliers have done NOTHING to build in backup storage facilities. If Texas went all renewable, it would require 6,000 gwh of backup energy – just for electricity, not including transport or heating. At present Texas has less than 10 gwh of storage facilities.

What happened is that there was a lack of storage – for both renewables and gas. Wind was offline due a lack of wind and and lots of blade icing. Gas went offline due to everyone turning on their gas heaters, so no gas was available for the power stations. As far as I can see the Texas electrical mix totals went something like this – for the 15th Feb…

Wind ……. 30 gw installed – 10 gw expected – 5 gw online .
Solar ……… 2 gw installed – 0.5 gw expected – 0 gw online (day only)
Gas ..……. 35 gw installed – 35 gw expected – 15 gw online
Coal ……… 15 gw installed – 15 gw expected – 15 gw online
Nuclear … 11 gw installed – 11 gw expected – 10 gw online
(Note: a total of 25 gw dropped off the grid during the freeze.)

So wind and solar COULD have alleviated this situation, if they were remotely reliable. But they are not reliable, so Texans froze.

Note that coal and nuclear were doing fine, because they have sufficient fuel storage facilities. While gas does not have so much storage, as it is expensive. And domestic gas usage went through the roof, depleting supplies to the power stations. But if gas had any incentive to invest in storage, it could. Meanwhile wind and solar make no effort whatsoever to construct backup storage systems, because they are hugely expensive and would make them totally uneconomic.

So wind and solar only remain sort-of economic, because they are wholly dependent upon fossil and nuclear fuels to back them up. Were they to construct sufficient backups, they would be 10x more expensive. This is NOT a sustainable electricity production system.

And we have not even begun to look at enough renewable energy to cover transport and space-heating requirements.

Addendum:

Another problem is that gas suppliers CANNOT allow the domestic gas system to lower in pressure, otherwise air will get into the pipes. This is a MAJOR deal, and can take weeks to rectify.

So what they did is to call the gas power stations and told them to close down – to reduce demand.
So gas-fired power reduced by 30%.

xxx

The Texas grid is about the same size as the UK grid. The UK would need 3,500 gwh of backup energy, if it ever went 100% renewable, and at present we only have 10 gwh of backup – Dinorwig. But Dinorwig was the most expensive power station ever constructed in the world, so expanding that model would be completely uneconomic.

But that is only a fraction of the problem. If the UK (or Texas) went totally renewable (including transport and heating) they would require 8x their current renewable generation capacity. Plus they would also need some 14,000 gwh of backup supplies to allow for renewable outages. And that is simply uneconomic.

The alternative is to maintain a parallel fossil fuel backup system which, as we have just seen, would need to be able to supply 95% of required consumption. So running two energy systems, to provide the energy of one system. The whole thing is madness.

I wrote about these problems back in 2004: WUWT – Renewable Energy, Our Downfall.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-our-downfall/

xxx

The reduction in output of wind by 93% (from close to it’s average production – which itself is quarter of nameplate capacity) was initially handled by other generators ramping up, but demand for electricity and gas was skyrocketing. While all the generators appear to have had problems from not being sufficiently weather hardened, the massive drop in wind output put extra strain on the gas supply just as it was already being stretched.

xxx

And we all know that you can NOT rely on getting any output at any time it is needed, so there is no point in connecting the whirlygigs to the grid in the first place if you actually want a reliable electrical supply.

xxx

It seems ironic that the Trump administration tried to slow the demise of coal and nuclear by placing a value on plants that could store 90 days of energy on-site. The plan was opposed by both the natural gas lobby and the green energy lobby, the same people who failed in Texas.

xxx

It was opposed by almost everyone except the coal and nuclear lobbies. However, the past week has demonstrated that grid resiliency is essential and it is critical to maintain a fleet of coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

Perhaps the most galling thing, is that they expected the wind turbines to fail.

xxx

Sweden and Norway do not have problems with their turbines, and they operate them in much colder environments. The problem with Texas operators is that they were dedicated to cutting costs instead of focusing on reliability: https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001147/37957.pdf

So if they “expected” them to fail, they must have calculated the cost/benefit of de-icing systems and choose not to have them installed so that their bottom line didn’t suffer.

xxx

On the contrary. Sweden and Norway do have problems with their turbines despite the heavy investment in heaters for turbine blades, nacelles, bearings and gearboxes, and motors. The added costs, reduced performance and extra maintenance all figure in to decisions about including cold weather protections into wind turbines. Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas has produced over 132GW of turbine capacity – of which just over 1GW has the cold weather options installed.

Fortunately neither Sweden nor Norway have much dependence on wind as yet, although Sweden is considering the foolish route of shutting nuclear capacity and replacing it with wind.

xxx

And electrical power (batteries) could be stored on site by the windfarm operators, but they chose not to because there is no incentive for them to provide even an approximation of reliable power. Had battery storage held even a single day’s worth of average wind output – let alone a week, the power dropout from wind could have been eased. However the batteries would have probably frozen in Texas, so this would have just been another expensive failure.

xxx

Why do you keep going on about de-icing?
It doesn’t matter
When the wind doesn’t blow they don’t turn.
On Monday I was using my Weather Channel app looking at different locations in Texas
No wind

Same as we had here in Alberta for 9 days from the exact same weather system.
Our turbines are rigged out for cold weather
And we had between 0-10% of nameplate for over a week.

Utterly useless in a cold winter system like that

Beyond useless as they are drawing power from the grid to keep warm until the wind blows again

So they were a negative for over a week!!

So useful right?

xxx

I have been in the power industry for over 40 years and have seen the evolution (de-evolution?) of the industry. Before deregulation occurred in the 90s each state had a Public Utilities Committee (PUC) that would oversee the electric utilities in that state. In their analyses the utility committed to having a reserve over the maximum anticipated load. This would help in overcoming the extreme conditions that could be experienced. The utility that I worked for had a standard 20% reserve.

Also built into each fossil fuel power plant was spare equipment to make sure that outages from equipment failure was limited. The failure of one pump would result in a decrease in load until the spare pump would be started up. The repair of the damaged pump would then take place with the unit still on line at full load.

The plants were designed for a 30 year life, which meant robust equipment. A lot of plants built during that time have exceeded that design life with many operating over 50 years.
All of this cost money and the movement to deregulate caught on and the power of the PUCs decreased. Supposedly to reduce electric rates. Well to reduce rates you have to reduce costs. Plants being built after that time period were not designed for the long life or with the spare capacity of equipment. Why spend money on freeze protection for an event that will occur only every 10, 20 or 30 years and is temporary condition as an appropriate example? There is no payback. And, of course you could not have much reserve, it would be too expensive to have spare plants sitting around not generating electricity but every few years.

Over time the older plants have been shut down and the more modern plants that were less robust became the standard bearer for power production. Of course the plants that were extremely old also became less reliable. Resulting in more shut downs and trips.

Now add wind and solar and those fossil fueled power plants have to vary load, sometimes hourly, to meet the intermittent loads of the wind and solar plants. This is extremely hard on plants that have not been designed to have this fluctuating load. Making them even less reliable.

Texas and California are not alone in making their electric grid less reliable. This is occurring throughout the U.S. and the World.

xxx

As someone involved in energy industry and regulatory affairs I see another issue responsible for the state of our rotting infrastructure.

For decades the people in government understood the value of maintaining and expanding
infrastructure to meet our needs. But keeping the lights on or maintaining
roads, etc has become boring. People in public service want to change the
world, I call it the Avenger Syndrome, so they are cajoled and flattered into
climate issues or eliminating poverty.

What is more exciting saving the world or keeping the sewage plant operating? Politicians
must always be marketing themselves to keep their jobs. Unfortunately being an
Avenger is much sexier than making sure the things that make daily life better
for all of us work efficiently.

xxx

It says they have to shut them off to de-ice
No power generated when they are off

Based on the size of them I bet it takes more power to run the de-ice heaters than the turbine can produce, even a small induction motor space heater takes 1200-1400w, driving heaters for those massive blades has to be a lot of power.

So they detect ice, shut them down, draw power from “reliable” energy somewhere to melt the ice off but I doubt they can run again until the ice weather passes.
I guess they could run and use the power it generates to keep the ice off but what would be the point?

I drove by a lot of shutdown turbines on a windy day in Saskatchewan last week when it was -36 and lots of ice crystals in the air.

xxx

How about this thought experiment:

Assume a fossil fuel/nuclear power grid that fully meets demand. Add a unicorn intermittently providing 20% to 50% of demand for free with semi-predicable outages of minute, hours, or days.

What happens to costs? In the real world, all the existing equipment would still be needed to cover unicorn shortfall/outages. Capital, operating, and maintenance costs remain the same or increase due to cycling. Only fuel costs are reduced.

Thus, the value of non-dispatchable power is at most the avoided fuel cost for the back-up systems.

xxx

Any such analysis comparing Mw to Mw cost is false due to intermittency.

I’ll even allow that 100mw of wind power is cheaper than 100mw of coal

But to get 100mw of power from coal I need to build 105

To get 100mw of wind over the year I have to build 250-300 and I must widely space them out to get even that, so more grid connection.

And then even though you built the 300mw you still need the 105mw of coal as the wind will be zero much of the time.

Show me the saving in there compared to just building the 105mw of coal needed for reliable power?

Poof goes the ridiculous myth once again

xxx

Wind can’t make electricity in a useable load-following way. It makes it in a useless whimsical random way unconnected with demand. A true unbiased cost analysis will show the intermittents to always a crease the price of electricity and decrease its reliability. That’s what happens to electricity bills.

Anyway “ERCOT”, “Electric reliability” has now provided the whole world with a good laugh during this dark pandemic period so we should thank those not-so-bright Khmer Vert idealists for that at least.

xxx

No windmill in use in Texas has or ever will return it’s cost of installation. Rather than passing off speculation about the attitudes of Texans as some sort of factual argument, I challenge to to present a single data point that disputes my claim. Sure 100 of them may return the cost of 50 of them but there is no single ONE that has returned the cost of itself.

xxx

I had to read the article three times but I think I have it figured out. Essentially when traditional energy sources (oil, gas, coal hydroelectric) are devalued (which includes condemning them for something, reducing their ability to produce, adding more and more requirements on them to exist, taxing them for carbon etc) and non-traditional sources (such as wind and solar) are promoted including providing lots and lots of subsidies, don’t be surprised when the electrical grid fails. Because suppliers will have gone where the money is and the subsidies given to wind and solar is where the money is. At the same time, pay no nevermind to the fact that wind and solar are inefficient and unreliable in emergency circumstances.

So a perfect storm was created in Texas – traditional energy sources were reduced (because of increased costs) in favour of renewables (because of increased subsidies which gave the appearance renewables were stable and just the bestest thing ever) and in the end Mother Nature is a bitch and doesn’t really care what havoc she causes.

xxx

Fair competition is capitalism. The push by Democrats is of course to diminish capitalism, because capitalism has placed most political power in the diffuse middle class. To concentrate power into the hands of the elites means by definition taking it away from the middle class by destroying the middle class and in doing so create a command economy controlled by bureacrats that transfers political power to central authorities. You and I are the problem in their minds. They want (need) to break us.

I can only hope this ERCOT fiasco wakes people up to the stupidity of more wind and solar. It is not only more expensive, it destabilizes grids and increases the likelihood of black-outs. And in the bigger picture of what the Democrats are intent on bringing, it is a central part of eliminating affordable energy for the middle class.

xxx

[W]ind and solar actually destabilize the grid in two different ways, both bad.

First is intermittency, which requires backup. Depending on grid details, renewable penetration less than 10% of normal capacity isn’t destabilizing, because normal grid reserve capacity can cover with no extra cost. Higher penetration means additional underutilized backup cost to the grid, NOT the renewable operator, as things now stand.

Second, renewables by definition provide no grid inertia (frequency control) that is provided free by the kinetic energy in large heavy rotating generators.

There is a solution that again the renewable operators do not provide: synchronous condensers. These are ‘just’ large generators without the driving turbine. Almost as e pensive as backup power.

Why, given these unavoidable electrical engineering deficiencies, renewables are subsidized is climate madness.

xxx

Referring to the announced closure of the Coleto Creek coal power plant by 2027
https://ieefa.org/vistra-to-close-648mw-coleto-creek-coal-plant-in-texas-by-2027/ this article by the “Energy Collective Group”, part of Energy and Sustainability Network, proposes an all-solar replacement for 17 GW of retiring coal capacity…

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/can-texas-shut-down-its-remaining-coal-2030

“With this announcement the list of TX coal closures continues to grow. Currently there is still about 17.4 GW of coal capacity left in TX and half of this capacity now has an announced closure date.
What would it take to shutdown all of the remaining coal capacity in TX by 2030 and replace the current coal generation without adding new NG plants? 40 GW of new solar capacity in TX or about 4GW/year.
Current capacity of solar in TX is about 4GW and another 4 GW will be added next year. Can this pace be maintained for the full decade?

xxx

Because of intermittency, ERCOT has always calculated a very low capacity factor for wind (i.e., fraction of nameplate capacity that can be relied upon). On their generation webpage, ERCOT even calls them what they are, Intermittent Renewable Resources. Coal and nuclear on the other hand usually run reliably with capacity factors of about 90% or better. Most gas units could achieve nearly the same, except they must ramp up and down to compensate for the variability of intermittent renewables. If gas shows capacity factors substantially below coal and nuclear, it is largely artificial due to renewables, not because of inherent technology deficiencies.
At best, they only expected about 33% of nameplate from wind on that fateful day, but actually got about half of that, a small fraction of demand. During the week afterward, wind varied tremendously, but never made a significant difference in the load recovery. Coal and nuclear kept churning out power reliably, and gas slowly ramped up to make up the shortfall. In a disaster, intermittent renewables are just that, intermittent and unreliable.

Aside from poor real-time performance in this crisis, this article rightly holds intermittent renewables indirectly to blame for their negative impact on the overall generation portfolio that set up this disaster.

Aside from inconvenience, when the toll in damages to infrastructure, economy and human life are counted, Austin is going to hear about this. You can’t just scapegoat the ERCOT board, even if they are accountable and should be fired (and sued personally?) Our legislature and executive branch, yes even Republicans, have failed their constituents by bowing to the Green Dragon.

xxx

Who cares what bullshyt name alarmists choose for the scam of manufacturing alarm from naturally chaotic weather and climate?

Correlation may not be causation, but in countries like Germany and Australia, electricity bills go up and grid reliability goes down in direct proportion to the percent of intermittents “supplying” the grid. How spectacularly stupid do you need to be to imagine that adding intermittent supply unrelated to demand will have any positive effect on either price or reliability?

Your Khmer Vert mob rule the media and politics so you and your thug friends can fiddle the numbers and re-write the rules all you like. Then go a-gaslighting to tell us all how right and wonderful this ecofascism really is.

But this Texas fiasco is a dose of reality that you wont be able to gaslight your way out of. Citizens are now receiving electricity bills 30 times higher than normal.

xxx

Here in the UK 23% of every domestic electricity bill is for ‘environmental and social obligations.’ and environmental levies are forecast to be £11.2 billion in 2020/21 and £12.5 billion in 2024/25.

xxx

Bethan, clearly you are a child or young adult. Many on this blog have lived long enough to have seen multiple extreme weather events. Being from Texas, this week’s weather was rare but not “unprecedented” nor unexpected. I have lived through at least two such events long before anyone was talking about alleged manmade climate change.

If you would calm down, listen and learn, you would frequently find people on this blog repudiating, with ACTUAL DATA, the many false claims of the climatariate and their media mouthpieces.

Live, learn and gain some wisdom and humility. I am an environmental professional (a meteorologist and soil scientist by degrees) with over 40 years in the field, yet one learns humility when faced with the sheer magnitude and complexity of this blessed world in which we live and one’s own inability to fully measure, explain, understand and model it.

Maybe you have grown accustomed to the ugly world of social media and want to play those childish games, but that will not get you far on this site. People here are on a journey of learning and discovery, with input from some of the world’s best scientists, engineers, economists, business people and thoughtful laypersons. We tackle important issues with grace and humor, and we have some fun along the way. So why don’t you set your preconceived notions aside and have a mature conversation?

xxx

One of the things that few people understand, whether in Texas or outside, is that no matter how much we try to plan things out carefully, nature does not always follow the game plan and bites us hard in the butt. All you have to do is look what happened during the East Tohoku earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011. The Japanese were probably the most prepared people on earth for a big earthquake and tsunami (and I give them credit, too: if they had not been prepared as they were, the death toll would have been more like 219,000 or more instead of 19,000). But the tsunami in question overtopped almost all of their sea walls and caused frightening damage and chaos for months thereafter, despite their best-laid plans.

These historical lessons, along with the observations in the article above, explain why it is so important to provide a sufficient reserve/excess capacity in all of our utility systems. While there is never any guarantee that some disaster may come along that destroys everything anyway, if responsible public utilities provide a way to be “ready to serve” when the vast number of crises come along, you will not see the number of problems that come along like the ones we in Texas are having right now.

Unfortunately, this means that the State of Texas and its Legislature are going to have to take steps to make sure that public electric utilities/electric generation companies provide that “readiness to serve” I am talking about. Because they will not do it on their own without some regulation in that regard – there is no immediate return in doing it right now – and without some guarantees from the law in return. Yes, by all means, public electric utilities/electric generation companies will need to be additionally compensated in some way to stand ready to serve with a much bigger reserve generation capacity than Texas has right now.

As a former municipal utility attorney, I know that the compensation, regardless of who it hits first, will be passed on to the ultimate consumer. But I know how that stuff works, too, and public input will be needed into how this gets compensated for, so that the public is not gouged and abused.

This time, I was lucky I did not lose my electric power this time around. But when I owned my own home, I lost my power due to storms, brownouts, blackouts, and allocated outages a number of times (not just in the winter, either). Far too many times – it reminded me sometimes of a stinking third world country.

This must end.

xxx

“One thing that happened was the false story of global warming diverted over 1 trillion dollars of money that could have been spent on resolving real problems.”

xxx

Texas gets 20% of its energy from intermittent sources. Usually that is where the indigestion is noticeable. Other grids with higher penetration of intermittents rely on interconnections with other grids to hold them up.

The costs of integrating intermittents skyrockets once penetration goes above 20%. There needs to be a sophisticated market in what is known in Australia as FCAS – Frequency Control and Ancillary Services.

When South Australia was islanded this time last year due to an interconnector outage, the FCAS charges went sky high. So much so that wind and solar generators, that bear a portion of the FCAS costs, just voluntarily curtailed (they were initially ordered off so the system could be kept in control). For the two week period that the line was out, the FCAS charges were as much as the wholesale price. Over that two week period, the Hornsdale battery recovered its entire capital cost by serving a good portion of the short term FCAS market, much more significant than the price arbitrage it makes its daily income from.

The political recognition of FCAS followed the blackout in South Australia in 2016 although there was an existing market. But the blackout made the need “real” not just something that electrical engineers think about. I expect ERCOT will be looking closely at its market design. Of further note is The Australian grid operator’s administration costs have increased 30% year-on-year for the last three years as managing the FCAS market is getting increasingly complex.

Australia regularly goes through a period of warm days each summer that stretches the grid with air-conditioning demand – probably not as bad as freezing to death in Texas but still tough on people who normally live in air-conditioned rooms.

xxx

There are two facets to the Texas energy catastrophe that I’ve seen on this site: the delivery problem and the capacity problem.

The “Planning Engineer” dismisses delivery problems in Texas thusly:

“Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions.”

With that issue resolved, he proceeds to ask, “Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one.” He turns the rest of his discussion solely to questions of capacity and market forces.

From all that we’ve seen of the Texas emergency, it appears that they had more problems with delivery than capacity. It doesn’t matter how much fuel you have in reserve if your turbines or water cooling systems freeze up, or your power lines go down. Systems set up to shed heat in a Texas summer need a whole different approach to handle cold. Generators failed because of the way they were housed and winterized.

The problems in Texas began with infrastructure weaknesses and cascaded outward from there.

I’m not sure what a “planning engineer” does, but I wonder if he ever goes out in the field and actually fixes things.

xxx

I think that is ERCOT getting their retaliation in first, or putting up a smokescreen. My guess (looking at the EIA hourly generation data) is that events went something like this:

On the afternoon of the 14th, with demand forecast to hit records in the evening, the ERCOT control room was manned by the most experienced team, and they succeeded in meeting the demand peak (8 p.m.) by cranking up the available gas generation pretty much to maximum and with the aid of still about 8GW of wind generation. There will have been a shift change, and with the expectation that overnight demand would fall back, but the following daytime would again be very challenging, it’s likely a less experienced team took over.

To begin with demand did ease off slightly, and dropping wind generation still allowed a small easing of gas generation as well. Then sometime after midnight the first gas generator tripped out – a plant failure of some kind, perhaps due to a problem with inadequate water feed for cooling. No problem in the control room: they rustled up some hydro and asked for a bit more coal burn. Between 1 and 2 a.m. they lost almost 2 GW of gas generation, and they ran out of spare coal capacity which they maxed. It’s already possible that these were cascading trips and at least partly motivated by underfrequency.

Just after 2 a.m. all hell broke loose, with 9.2GW lost including 7.3GW of gas and 1.75GW of coal. That was almost certainly mainly caused by cascading trips for underfrequency. Underfrequency occurs when supply is less than demand, and when the frequency drops too far plants start tripping out for safety reasons: they are not designed to operate at full load at rotation speeds that can set up mechanical instabilities and lead to the plant destroying itself. There are two ways to deal with underfrequency: find some spare generation capacity PDQ to restore balance – or start instituting blackouts to curb demand below the available supply. A bit like flying a large aircraft or piloting a large vessel, system response is lagged, so it can be difficult to guess whether you have done enough or not, especially with the risk of other trips worsening the situation.

My guess therefore is that the inexperienced team did not impose blackouts fast enough to restore grid balance, and that in consequence more plants were tripped out, requiring even more blackouts to restore balance. I suspect they may not have been helped by there not really being a plan in place to dictate where blackouts should be imposed when they suddenly had to run much deeper. Grid management software normally operates to have contingency set for the loss of the single largest element on the system, and to cater for any individual loss whether of transmission, generation or demand. Although there were clearly some plans to maintain power to critical users (e.g. hospitals), it is doubtful that anyone had really considered the effects of knocking off over 10GW in short order.

What we see in the hours after that are mostly more sporadic losses, including one of the nuclear plants (known to be a frozen water feed problem), some coal and another 5GW+ of gas. This is where there is a combination of plant failures and gas supply problems, likely caused by loss of power to gas pipelines. Some of these losses might not have occurred had earlier losses been stemmed more quickly.

xxx

I don’t believe we can trust government utilities to deliver the promised energy. The failure in Texas should be a wake up call for all of us. We have an 8K generator that will power much of our household. I recommend now that people visit harbor tools, northern tool, Home Depot and Menards and look at the Portable generators that can be used to keep your family safe when government utilities fail.

xxx

Reading the article, and then reading the comments depressed me enough to put pen to paper – or arthritic fingers to keyboard, anyway.

We would all like it to be a problem caused by one simple thing – renewable energy – and with one simple answer – e.g. coal. Or nuclear power. But the reality is more complicated than that, and it behoves us to look closely at our political philosophy to understand how such a thing could happen and what are the options to prevent its re-occurrence.

Firstly what is becoming apparent to the ordinary person, as opposed to electrical and other engineers, is that the sort of reliability that accrued from conventional thermal power stations running off local stores of e.g. coal and uranium with nice large spinning masses giving a decent measure of short term frequency stability on a grid, costs extra when applied to a renewable grid.

This is the dilemma between energy markets and capacity markets: Capacity markets are a way of pricing and selling reliability. More on that later.

Now it is a general axiom of engineering that is so basic no one ever bothered to quote it or give it a name but it goes like this. As an engineering service the income derives from the average usage case, but the cost derives from the worst case.

For example, most income from running an airline comes from boring uneventful three quarters full aircraft flights, or thereabouts. But nearly all the cost in the aircraft business comes from ensuring that it can take 2g positive and 1 g negative loading – the sort of turbulence that can kill passengers – the duplication of flight controls and instruments in case one set goes wrong, the excessively conservative maintenance schedules that are supposed to guarantee nothing breaks in flight and indeed the extra fuel carried to allow contingency routing. Add in the pilot hours on simulators to ensure that the pilots are trained on that one in a thousand freak event….What your airplane ticket buys you is not just a flight, it is a safe flight.

In the context of the current crop of near failures on the grid, irrespective of causes, ultimately any solution is going to cost money, and add to the cost of electricity.

So that is the first fundamental point that cannot be gotten around – how much (more) is the US consumer willing to pay for a more resilient electricity supply?

Again, having had that political debate, the question arises of how – should the answer be ‘enough to do the job’ – are the changes to be implemented? Irrespective of blame or causes.

Now there are a range of solutions on offer, and no doubt I will get downvoted for advocating them when in fact I am not.

Firstly the way the Texas grid seems to operate is a very free market in energy. Free markets work very well when there is potential diversity of supply, and no natural monopoly, and the customer is free to pick any supplier in an emergency who can meet his demands – albeit at a higher price.

The United States loves its free markets. So do I, but I am a pragmatist and a realist, and with certain sorts of product a free market doesn’t work as it should.

First of all the electricity grid itself – the distribution mechanism for the product, electricity, is a natural monopoly. Free market ideology cannot get around that simple fact. Secondly, the way electricity is sold people do not have a trading platform attached to their electricity meters so they can switch suppliers when the one they are contracted to cannot deliver.. the way they could with e.g. domestic coal for heating.

Those facts stop a free market process from operating effectively.

In the UK, during WWII, we nationalised everything as a matter of wartime expediency. Roads, railways, coal mining, power generation and distribution, telephone services, the post office. That meant that central planning and control could deliver what were considered to be essential services for the nation, reliably.

The inevitable downside to that was that investment became politicised, and so too did the work forces. To the point where the coal miners union – essentially run by hard left agitators – became more powerful than government. It was into that context that Margaret Thatcher was elected, to essentially restore the reliability of power generation and the authority of government from the political instability with which it had become burdened.

Her solution – hated then and now, by the Left – was to privatise what were, in effect, in many cases natural monopolies.

Privatisation removed the politics from investment and allowed modernisation to occur without argument over funding it. But it also raised a serious problem. These were in many cases natural monopolies – not coal mining, but railways, the national power grid, the telephone system, the post office and so on. These were still regarded as critical national infrastructure and couldn’t be allowed to exploit their natural monopolies to gouge consumers.

What happened in effect was the the boards of these nationalised industries morphed into politically controlled regulatory authorities. OFCOM for telecoms, OFWAT for water, OFGEN for electrical power and so on. These were given serious teeth. And their job was to act as a sort of proxy shareholder and customer in the monopolistic areas. So that they could set standards of delivery and fine the agencies responsible if they failed to deliver.

Having thus set a level playing field for any or all participants – there are for example many water companies, regionally split – in effect the government both set a standard for delivery and additionally set a cap on profits. That is an ongoing process – at regular intervals commercial companies sit down with official regulators and argue the case for price rises while the regulators negotiate expected standards for public utility delivery.

Now that is, for better or for worse, how it’s done here. It looks like ERCOT is an attempt to do the same thing in Texas, that has singularly failed.

So a partial resumé: Resilience costs money, and it is a political decision ultimately whether or not people are prepared to pay for it. In the case of natural monopolies or arm’s length commercial contracts between suppliers and customers, the free market mechanism is inefficient in delivering the desired result, and nationalisation places far too much power with both unions and central government. The awkward compromise that has worked reasonably well – I will say no more than that – in the UK is to bring these natural monopolies under state oversight, but not state ownership. To make this work, the regulatory authorities need teeth, and they need competence. They acquire both by statute. Staff can be fired politically, and laws can be passed giving them powers of retribution against commercial companies.

Now it has to be said that in the case of electrical power, in the UK, the mechanism is close to failing because the political goalposts have been changed from the supply of the lowest cost most reliable electricity, to meeting spurious ‘renewable obligations’ designed to favour renewables over conventional generation, even though no carbon dioxide emissions are reduced as a result.

This ultimately cannot be blamed on the regulatory authorities – they are only doing what their political masters have instructed them to. In fact my long road to being an ardent Brexit supporter started with trying to establish who in fact was responsible for what was clearly a policy leading to disaster … well I suppose here we would call it the green blob. A cadre of profit making crony capitalists who have marketed a myth so powerful that governments and in particular the EU, cower in its face. But I am preaching to the converted. Accept my apologies.

To return to Texas, as the case in point. Clearly ERCOT has failed to deliver what people have suddenly discovered they need. Reliable electricity in a winter freeze.

What ‘planning engineer’ is saying, and I can’t offer an opinion on the veracity of that, is that they were not tasked with that, ultimately. Well if not, then it is a political decision as to whether they should be.

What he is also saying is that by implementing an energy market and not a capacity market, there is no financial incentive to invest in plant that would cover extreme situations, or more gas storage, or the ‘winterisation’ of conventional power stations. The UK has increasingly had to run a capacity market for precisely these reasons. Because OFGEN is tasked with maintaining sufficient capacity as well as planting windmills. In fact what has happened is that strictly adhering to ‘renewable obligations’ and resilience constraints has led to huge numbers of fossil powered inefficient backup plants being deployed to the extent that – as in Germany – emissions have not really reduced at all!

And this brings me to the causes. Not cause, but causes. Looking at the graphs it is clear that although the frozen wind power was a joke, it was not the biggest problem. And indeed ERCOT was merely being a tad economical with the truth when they pointed out that gas, coal and nuclear had taken hits as well.

The dominant failure was gas. And let’s not twat on about fracked gas having high moisture content and freezing. That’s just spin. The serious issue is that gas is what people use to heat their homes with as well as generate electricity with, and there wasn’t enough put by.

Why not?

Because there is no money to be made in supplying over capacity in an energy, as opposed to a capacity, market. Power comaines lose less by failing to supply than they would have lost by building excess capacity for a once in a decade event.

Why is there an energy, as opposed to a capacity, market?

Because windmills and solar panels have no capacity to sell. That is a point being made here. capacity means you get paid for reliable ability to supply.

And that seems to me to be the salient point. In order to incentivise renewables, ERCOT and whoever else is involved, have disincentivised maintaining adequate capacity. Even of gas.

In short it wasn’t the windmills per se that were the problem, it was the whole political and commercial framework designed to put the windmills there, that disrupted the market enough to cause the problem.

That’s how it seems to me. The UK has had to patch a capacity market on the side of the renewable energy market to guarantee continuity of supply, and its not working that great, but so far it is working. And the regulator has the teeth to do it. It isn’t the solution, but it is a solution.

Ultimately, irrespective of carbon dioxide affecting the climate, (even if it were true), we have somehow been suckered into ‘renewable energy‘ when we ought to be focussing (if the warmunistas are right) on emission reductions. The bland assumption that renewable energy reduces emissions overall must be challenged, and we must start to recognise that there is cash value in reliability as well as megawatt hours.

But please, dont get sidetracked into making simplistic claims that are clearly false. Windmills per se were not really the problem, it was the whole policy framework and the mind set that put them there that was the problem.

And there I will stop. I am not competent to pronounce on the intricacies of US or Texas regularity law. Or its politics.

xxx

Leo, that was an interesting analysis that, using different words and examples, pretty much repeats what the lead article said. Wind power was in part a proximal cause and a minor player in the recovery in Texas since it could not provide reliable, dispatchable base load, but policies favoring intermittent renewables were a major indirect cause. The question for Texas in coming months and years is how to repair the damage to grid reliability in the face of massive misinformation and lobbying by activists and special interests.

xxx

Thinking about this disaster for awhile, it becomes obvious the root cause was global warming.

After the 2011 incident, where 3.2 million people faced rolling blackouts from unusually cold weather, the August 2011 official report said the Texas energy infrastructure needed to be ‘winterized’.

Assuming some people read the report, they probably decided that with global warming, another “2011 event” was unlikely, so they spent their money on more windmills instead (global warming virtue signalling).

The number of windmills quadrupled by 2021. The new windmills could have been equipped for unusually cold weather, at a higher expense. But why ‘waste money’? The post-2011 decision looked smart for about ten years.

For one hour, about a week before the blackout, wind power accounted for 58% of all ERCOT electricity generation. During the blackout, down to about 5% (of course half the windmills were frozen, but the wind happened to be weak for those windmills not frozen). Windmills are highly variable sources of electricity. One day, when batteries cost about 10% of the current price, windmills may be very useful.

xxx

“ERCOT” set the Texas power grid up to fail and it has done so, spectacularly. They will now screech for more money to be pissed away on wind mills and solar panels, all while blaming everyone else for what they created, a disaster.

xxx

The critical data in understanding the weatherization problem with wind/gas turbine co-location in Texas is hidden by not splitting out large scale natural gas plants with the gas turbine backup co-located with the wind powered turbines.

Whenever conditions or equipment failures prevent the wind turbines from operating (an occurrence less common in west Texas than most anywhere else, but still common) these natural gas powered turbine engines kick in. Follow the data and you can see natural gas production skyrocketing as wind power collapses.

With eleven thousand windmills scatted through the backroads of west Texas, thousands of these backup generators needed to be resupplied… by road… to keep the natural gas figure at its peak. Something made impossible by the extreme weather. What portion of the natural gas falloff starting on the 16th was due to these backup generators running out of gas, and what portion was caused by disruptions to traditional natural gas powerplants?

Preventing future failure would require knowing the difference between the two natural gas methods of power generation.

xxx

2021-02-22 a
TEXAS FREEZE I
"After Texas Gov Abbott declared a state of emergency back on Feb 12 Biden administration ordered ERCOT to throttle energy output by forcing it to comply with environmental green energy standards, knowing full well Texans could freeze to death in their homes with zero electricity as temperatures plunged into the single digits."

Texans Froze To Death Because Biden Admin Ordered ERCOT To Throttle Energy Output By Forcing It To Comply With Environmental Green Energy Standards

The White House said on Thursday a severe winter storm engulfing Texas and nearby states was the type of extreme weather event that climate change is triggering, rejecting assertions by Texas officials that “green energy” caused widespread power outages.

The crisis in the largest U.S. oil- and gas-producing state has put Democratic President Joe Biden’s White House squarely at odds with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who initially did not acknowledge Biden’s 2020 election win.

Abbott had ordered state officials in January to fight Biden’s push here to combat climate change by pausing new oil and gas leases, and cutting fossil fuel subsidies.

Biden spoke with Abbott late on Thursday, promising the federal government would continue to work with state and local authorities to meet the critical needs of those affected, the White House said in a statement. Biden also said he would instruct additional federal agencies to look into immediate steps that could be taken to help Texans.

But Biden’s “America last” agenda was again on full display.

After Texas Gov Abbott declared a state of emergency back on Feb 12 Biden administration ordered ERCOT to throttle energy output by forcing it to comply with environmental green energy standards, knowing full well Texans could freeze to death in their homes with zero electricity as temperatures plunged into the single digits.

Going into effect Sunday, Feb. 14, Emergency Order 202-21-1 shows the Energy Dept. was aware of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide disaster declaration and that ERCOT was readying gas utilities in preparation for a demand surge.

Here’s Abbott's order:

(image)

Biden admin ordered ERCOT to throttle energy output by forcing it to comply with environmental green energy standards.

Below is the actual order from the federal Department of Energy which specifies ERCOT’s reasons for asking permission including that “…ERCOT has been alerted that numerous generation units will be unable to operate at full capacity without violating federal air quality or other permit limitations.”

(image)

Let’s explain this further. This fiasco in Texas happened due to Biden Admin environmental limits on energy production. The emergency order increases it, but:

“To minimize adverse environmental impact this order limits operation”

While Texas lost much of our renewable supply (wind and solar) their natural gas and coal are required to operate at 60% capacity to reduce emissions. They CAN operate at 100% if they get a waiver from the federal government (as Abbott requested) but Biden refused.

The order shows Acting Energy Secretary David Huizenga did not waive environmental restrictions to allow for maximum energy output, instead of ordering ERCOT to utilize all resources in order to stay within acceptable emissions standards – including purchasing energy from outside the state.

More fuel was added to this when an internet sleuth alleged on Feb 17 that Ercot’s website says they have more than enough supply power after reports of ERCOT stating that there is not enough power. Image below:

(image)

Rick Perry, the state’s former governor who served as Trump’s energy secretary, said Wednesday in a blog post sent out by U.S. House Republicans: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Perry and allies say it is really Democrats who are using the crisis to promote their favored changes in energy policy.

The continental United States is divided into three grids: an eastern grid, a western grid, and the Texas grid. The Texas grid manages more than 90% of the state’s electric load.

Is it true that fear of federal regulation drove Texas to isolate its grid from the rest of the country?

But not much has been said about the role federal pollution standards have played on Texas failing to get ahead of the problem by ramping up supply.

Yes, Federal pollution standards.

Texas is getting a lot of grief about being a standalone system, and not running on National Standards. The usual green-deal embracing suspects are leading that charge. But national regulations are part of the reason our base-load electrical energy sources, ones that do NOT rely on the ebb and flow of sunlight and wind power, did not ramp up adequate supply.

Then why are so millions of Texans without power right now?

The answer is all-too-familiar: Texas’ relationship with the federal government.

In anticipation of this unprecedented power demand, Texas could have maxed out power generation. However, they couldn’t. Like a lowly beggar, Texas had to first ask for permission from the federal government to generate enough power to keep our people warm. Why? Because cranking up the power plants to full production might violate federal pollution limits.

While Biden and his administration were more interested in environmental restrictions a Texas man reportedly “froze to death” in his recliner amid the freezing temperatures sweeping through the region.

The 60-year-old victim, who was not identified, was found dead in his recliner on Wednesday after his home in Abilene lost power for three days, one of three people to die in that city, KTXS 12 reported. The man’s wife, 72, was taken to the hospital.

More cases were reported An 11-year-old boy who had just seen snow for the first time died in an unheated Texas mobile home. Authorities suspect hypothermia.

An ailing 75-year-old Vietnam veteran who left his house to fetch an oxygen tank from his truck and froze to death there.

These are just a handful of the Texans who, authorities say, apparently froze to death during the devastating winter storm that has paralyzed the state, cut off heat and power to millions, and plunged a proud people into the cold of a pre-Industrial Revolution-like existence where basic necessities like food and drinkable water are now in short supply. (read more)

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