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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Woo, county-wide power outage right before Christmas, with no bad weather associated with it like usual (just a single digit freeze). If it's someone's resistance op I wish him the best of luck: this is a great target.

Seems like a good time to break out the laptop, curl up by the wood stove, and finish the culture war side of "why forcing everyone to only have electric heat with no form of backup allowed by law may be a bad policy choice."

Not that anyone with any power cares what the consequences are.

Edit: Christmas Eve, and power's out again for at least half the day. Only a day between outages.

Hoping things go a little smoother in Texas this year. Not terribly optimistic given the government's response last time around.

Got any tips for stocking up accordingly? I don't think my apartment will tolerate an actual wood-burner.

Texas appears to be going much better than it did two years ago.

I'm not personally surprised: the 2021 storm was a particularly unlikely event that was worse than this one in multiple ways. That storm came with heavy early freezing rain, causing power lines and wind turbines (especially ones in South Texas not adapted for anti-icing) to fail even from the start: this one has been pretty dry. Two years ago Texas saw multiple inches of snow, making transport difficult in areas that largely see snow accumulation once-or-so a generation, and covering solar panels: it's sunny today. A NPSH sense line installed improperly in 1988 caused one of the state's 4 nuclear reactors to go offline: this worked for more than three decades of weather conditions, but was fixed after 2021.

Although I occasionally saw it mocked on social media, temporary insulation and tarps at power plants apparently do work, probably in the same way that wrapping exterior pipes on houses can be quite effective: often it's only a handful of degrees that keep pipes from freezing.

For anyone interested, the ERCOT dashboard tracks energy supply and demand in realtime.

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