Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Has Trump derangement syndrome cost Texan lives? Back in 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal fuel onsite, for disaster resilience.
At the time the resilience proposal was widely criticised as being a thinly disguised Trump scheme to pump government money into the coal and nuclear industries. But in hindsight, a bit more resilience might have saved Texas from days of painful electricity blackouts.
From 2017;
Rick Perry: DOE’s Coal, Nuclear Proposal Is ‘Rebalancing the Market’
Perry doubles down on arguments that the NOPR will protect Americans.
LACEY JOHNSON NOVEMBER 02, 2017
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said a proposed rule to subsidize coal and nuclear plants is “rebalancing the market” to correct for the Obama administration’s support of renewable energy.
They “clearly had their thumb on the scale toward the renewable side,” said Perry, who spoke about his energy policy priorities with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and Axios CEO Jim VandeHei at an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The DOE’s request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would upend decades of energy market policy by guaranteeing cost recovery for power plants with 90 days of fuel supply on-site — something that only nuclear power, a few hydropower sites, and some larger coal power plants can provide.
“If you can guarantee me that the wind is going to blow tomorrow, if you can guarantee me that the sun’s going to get to the solar panels…then I’ll buy into that. But you can’t,” said Perry.
The notice of public rulemaking, or NOPR, implies that there is a looming threat to grid reliability due to coal and nuclear power plant retirements. Its conclusions are largely based on an incomplete analysis of the 2014 polar vortex, which could have led to blackouts had several coal-fired plants now slated for closure not been available to serve the load.
The move has been widely criticized by clean energy advocates as politically motivated and factually unproven, and has drawn a backlash from major sectors of the energy industry.
…
Read more: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/rick-perry-doe-coal-nuclear-proposal-is-rebalancing-the-market#gs.Fp8TJMg
Federal regulators rejected the plan, on the grounds that Rick Perry failed to provide enough evidence that retiring coal and nuclear plants was undermining grid stability. The plan was eventually dropped, after vigorous lobbying from gas and renewable energy groups.
Now that the scenario Rick Perry predicted has actually happened in Texas, it seems pretty obvious the Rick Perry was right about the risks. Nuclear power plants and fossil fuel plants which had access to adequate fuel supplies mostly stayed fully operational.
Why is government intervention required to ensure grid resilience?
Keeping several months worth of fuel onsite is a cost which does not contribute to company profits. The cost of all that reserve fuel represents money which could instead have been used to pay down capital debts, or pay out dividends to shareholders. Power companies which choose to wear this kind of expense are at a competitive disadvantage compared to power companies which run leaner operations, by running their reserves down to the bare minimum. The expense of keeping fuel in reserve impacts market share and company growth; consumers frequently flock to the lowest price energy service, without considering the long term consequences.
Rick Perry’s plan would have eliminated the financial penalty for keeping a fuel reserve onsite, by compensating power companies for the cost of maintaining substantial fuel reserves.
Given resilience payments seem to be a workable solution, will President Biden or Texas Governor Greg Abbott implement the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan, to ensure nothing like the Texas power outage disaster ever happens again?
Update (EW): Mark Baher reminds me I was critical of Rick Perry’s plan in 2017. At the time I was focusing on Perry’s explanation that he was seeking to “rebalance the market” against renewable subsidies – I had a vision of Perry’s plan kicking of a subsidy race, between proponents of renewables and proponents of fossil fuel and nuclear. What I didn’t realise was how limited reserves would be in a severe weather event. Perry was right, I was wrong.
The Climate Crusaders only want to plan for warming and their carbon tax revenue windfall. Climate cooling and weather cold snaps are noise to them.
And what does the nuke site do with all that coal ? Wait until it’s cold and lend it to the coal powered plant?
Perhaps they could burn it around their cooling systems to prevent them from freezing; like a Florida citrus smudge pot!
I meant fuel 🙂
Biden is busy ripping down anything good that Trump put in place – I doubt he will resurrect one of Trump’s ideas that didn’t even come to fruition
Yeah, it’s just as stupid as Trump trying to rip down everything that Obama did.
Not stupid at all. The things Obama did harmed the United States and should have been ripped down.
Did Obama do any good or just lefty idealist stuff?
Just dangerous leftist stuff.
“Biden is busy ripping down anything good that Trump put in place “
Shouldn’t take too long.
I can’t wait till black unemployment skyrockets due to open borders. I can’t wait till Hispanic unemployment skyrockets for the same reason. I can’t wait till Iran gets its first nuke under Biden. I can’t wait till America starts losing manufacturing jobs to China again.
Biden has already been a disaster and he’s only been in office for a month. It will take generations to undo his idiocy.
I don’t know, DJT will be able to fix most of it in the first 60 days of 2025. Harris/Biden are giving him the blueprints to follow.
“I don’t know, DJT will be able to fix most of it in the first 60 days of 2025”
That’s for sure. The year 2022 might be a banner year for Repubicans, too. It would be nice to gain control of the House of Representatives and that would allow us to fend off two more years of Biden destruction. It would be nice to shut Nancy Pelosi up, too.
Trump is going to give a speech at CPAC next Sunday, his first public speech since being censored by the Left, so we’ll get to see what the future holds for conservatism/freedom.
Guess what folks? No modern life without FOSSIL FUELS full time. Why can they not figure that out? Rose colored glasses, and blurred thinking.
Headline on fake news.
“<b>Texas Crisis Exposes a Vulnerability to Climate Change</b>”
It was snow and low temperatures you idiots!
First the straw man-
Texas power disaster may be strongest case yet for renewable energy (msn.com)
but we will have to think about unreliables
‘“The loss of power has been a warning of the issues that will be raised as the proportion of renewable generation on the grid rises,” said Crooks of Wood Mackenzie.
Generation, transmission and distribution equipment, and the design of the electricity market, will become even more important to cope with the challenges created by a renewables-heavy grid.
“Distributed resources including storage and demand response will also have to play a greater role. Texas renewable capacity would need to increase more than 10-fold to provide the same amount of energy produced by the fossil fuel fleet on Monday, even at reduced levels,” Wood Mackenzie analysts said.
Because this would prove excessive at some times of the year, storage will matter immensely, including batteries, hydrogen or another technology.’
Another technology! Now what could that be? Horse driven….oxen…pedal generators…?
Mind you the climate changing Facebook fatties could do with some Green exercise and back to the future for an energy lesson-
Alfred Hermann Traeger, OBE | SA History Hub
“the design of the electricity market, will become even more important to cope with the challenges created by a renewables-heavy grid.”
To hell with that! Keep it Simple, Stupid, as they say, and leave unreliable generation out of the mix.
News update: no bail for climate activist in India
Common sense is right wing.
Engineering and technical competence are right wing.
Or in current parlance, “problematic”.
So both are now being systematically cancelled.
Replacing engineers with CPAs nevers pays off in the long run.
Anyway, Hunter is rushing to Texas because he heard there are lots of crack pipes everywhere.
If I understand things correctly, they did not run out of coal, rather the coal pile, kept wet so it won’t catch fire, froze into a solid pile.
I assume there are augur feed systems, they may have emptied out a cavern of unfrozen coal under the coal pile. I’d think twice about running a bulldozer on the pile to break it up. Heck, I’d think twice about taking a shovel to it.
I’m looking forward to the post mortem on the situation. If this was an issue, and there is no easy solution, maybe nuclear is the answer.
I guess its a good thing you aren’t in charge of the coal piles I guess. Have you actually ever seen one?
Nuclear plants don’t just “empty the tank” like a car or lawn mower does. They can easily defer a refueling cycle to get past a cold spell or hurricane. A refueling lasts 12-18 months.
In fact, operators schedule refueling during mild weather periods, e.g. spring or fall.
I read somewhere that the nuke that was forced offline had a freeze up in the return water flow from the cooling tower.
Having a 90 day supply of uranium on hand would have done no good whatsoever.
The disaster was due to ignoring the risks of another freeze like they had in 2011, not the coal or uranium supply.
See https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37252 for more on nuclear plant outages, including refueling scheduling.
Seems to me, that there was absolute incompetence that caused the return water feed to freeze.
When a simple by pass system would have solved the return water temperature being to low.
Like only using a smaller percentage of the cooling tower?
Yes I know that could lead to problem in the cooling tower.
But there are things called modulating valves and temperature sensors.
That would automatically keep the tower from freezing.
That is, if there was enough hot water in the first place?
I was wondering how northern nuke operators deal with that. I suppose one possibility is to close off some of the vents at the base of the tower to reduce the amount of cold air being admitted.
Insulating the return line might also a good thing to do.
Or perhaps something I don’t know enough about froze one way or another.
niceguy posted a link above about the Reactor shutdown. Excerpt: “South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured.”
There was a choice between more safety and more “renewables” (intermittents).
Texas chose poorly.
https://youtu.be/0H3rdfI28s0
In other news, Mark Zuckerberg is deported to Germany for crimes against humanity
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56140903
Politicians don’t understand business people, and by the way business people don’t trust politicians.
Nobody trust politicians
Several of Texas’s LNG export terminals were originally built as import terminals with re-gasification equipment connecting to major gas distribution networks. Reactivating this capacity would enable stored LNG to be returned to the pipeline system in the event of a production shortfall.
Isn’t it wonderful how Ted Cruz can suddenly think Mexicans are OK. What a guy he is. Leaves his constituents to freeze while he suns it across the border.
Funny, from all I have read he flew down to see daughter/friends to their destination and flew back. What, precisely, could he have done at home to change anything about the statewide situation? Really like to know. He damned well could have taken actions during the preceding several years that would have helped, what exactly could he have done DURING the outage. That is the actual question everyone is ignoring.
The MSM doesn’t care about being rational, only about condemning GOP.
What could he have done? Stayed and consoled those who were struggling. People are looking for answers at this time not for a wealthy representative to wave bye-bye on their way to a warmer place. It’s about the optics as much as anything. Basically he is saying stuff you lot I’m outta here. Cruz is a hated by many we all know that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnGNSDlZJU) but this doesn’t help his image one little bit.
So, again, feelings not actual help. And I can’t stand the man, he is a duplicitous backstabbing scumbag. Does not change the fact that he could do nothing in this greentard Democrat created disaster. But hey! Your feelings are hurt and that is all that matters.
That Cruz is hated by all progressives is self evident. Then again, progressives hate anyone who threatens their supply of free stuff.
Apparently his original plan was to fly back Friday, but when the snowball hit the frozen fans, he hightailed back a couple days early. The last I saw of him was when he was passing out cases of drinking water to constituents at a relief pick up area.
Once again, the progressive reveals that in it’s pitiful excuse for a mind, all conservatives are racist, and they won’t let anything as trivial as mere facts move their opinions.
Sky News reports:
So instead of blaming the situation on unreliables, they imply reliable fuel was unreliable.
More coal plants wouldn’t have avoided this, would they? and since it is natural gas which has edged out coal in Texas anyway…
Yes, yes they would. More nuclear and gas generation will help, too. A new industry, though short lived, will crop up with the tearing down and recycling of wind turbines. Solar in Texas has a future, a niche, hobby sort of future, a future all the same.
having worked in manufacturing where they got the JIT stock supply bug and then having our entire production line utterly stuffed around when just one critical component didnt arrive and we had ZERO spare stock on hand,,,Ive been highly critical of the idiocy of save a dollar today and them lose far more later that this stupidity pretty much g/tees with the slightest glitch
if you think long term , you have to consider renewable energy any how , as fossils are not permanent ! that’s the truth , who is pretending the opposite is a liar !
Coal is minimum hundreds of years supply
Nuclear is many thousands.
That isn’t permanent but it’s long enough that no one alive needs to worry about it
You can have all the wind turbines you want, properly winterized, and if the wind isn’t blowing you get frozen dead people
Until you also have workable affordable grid scale batteries wind and solar are just a second mostly useless generating system
We’ve got enough oil and gas to last for hundreds of years.
We’ve got enough coal to last for at least 1000 years.
We’ve got enough uranium to last for many 1000’s of years. When you add the other isotopes, that number gets increased greatly.
There is no reason to install wind and solar now.
Sure, do some basic research, maybe in a few thousand years, wind and solar might be ready for prime time.
Then again, by then we might have fusion working.
PS: Nobody has ever made the claim that oil and gas are permanent.
The fact that you have to lie about the other sides argument in order to make your case just proves that even you know that your argument is too weak to stand on it’s own.
So, a plan was put forward, roundly criticized by the environistas and competing gas interests, poopooed by the Trump Haters and the citizens of Texas got thoroughly screwed? Bet the media will refuse to cover this, farcebook and twatter will block all mention of it and griffie et al will repeat endless lies about it. Same old same.
“I had a vision of Perry’s plan kicking of[f] a subsidy race, between proponents of renewables and proponents of fossil fuel and nuclear. What I didn’t realise was how limited reserves would be in a severe weather event. Perry was right, I was wrong.”
You were both right. Government intervention always requires government intervention in expanding amounts on expanding levels.
This event is a homage to T. Boone Pickens, “the father of wind energy”.
The father of wind energy subsidy mining.
Nobody has mentioned Ohio. I believe that many advocates for renewables were quite angry when Ohio decided to subsidize non-renewable energy.
Now there is movement in the related bribery case:
https://www.wkbn.com/news/ohio/dark-money-group-admits-racketeering-in-ohio-bribery-case/
Do we need bribery to keep the lights on these days?
Apparently; I think that’s called ‘globalism’.
Biden administration blocked Texas from increasing power as Texas begged for help a week before catastrophic polar vortex.
Texas asked to temporarily lift regulations on energy output to avoid disaster. Biden’s DOE refused to help due to “green energy standards”.
https://www.energy.gov/oe/downloads/federal-power-act-section-202c-ercot-february-2021
You’ll never hear about this on the MSM. I wonder how this can be publicized more widely?