Texas Guv: Updating Texas Grid “an Emergency”
February 16, 2021
Above, Texas Governor Greg Abbott explains that the main reason for blackouts in Houston area was the failure of a South Texas Nuclear plant. He also calls for emergency evaluation of the Texas Grid operator, ERCOT.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said reforming the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is an emergency item for state legislators in the current session, as power outages continue across the state for another day due to record cold temperatures as part of a massive winter storm.
The governor on Feb. 16 said he wants lawmakers to investigate ERCOT, which operates much of the state’s electric grid and manages its deregulated power market, even as he said it would have been impossible to prepare “for this type of event, because the last time we had this type of weather was more than 100 years ago.”ERCOT said it lost about 34 GW of power supply as the cold temperatures forced both coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants offline.
The cold also reduced the supply of natural gas to power plants, and caused wind turbines to freeze. Wind supplies the second-most amount of power to Texas customers, behind natural gas, and the turbines in Texas are not equipped with cold weather packages that would enable them to operate in extreme cold.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
February 17, 2021 at 9:40 am
Abbott is blaming the turbines to win points on Hsnnity:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/17/texas-abbott-wind-turbines-outages/?outputType=amp
Abbott every once in a while shows that he’s not a completely insane Repub, then he pulls stuff like this.
My experiences are that we lost power about 24 straight hours, and the house went down to 39 degrees. We’ve had rolling blackouts most of the rest of the time since early Monday morning. We’ll probably be on them today, too – that’s what Oncor is saying. But, we’ve had power since about 2 am until now, so we’re okay and close to normal currently.