Michael Ramirez for February 25, 2021

Texas as run by YOUR guys, Mike.

Own it.

Maybe it’s high time to send the Republic of Texas a message!! Relocate all of the USG facilities to other states!! Then the Republic will have plenty of power … to spare!!

Dear Michael, if the Texas power grid is operated on a free market, isn’t this what the market wants? Long live the free enterprise free of rules and regulations – or?

That is because NASA is run by scientists and the Texas power grid is run by business execs.

They wanted this, they got it. This is what greed, and lack of leadership looks like. The people must like it, because like here in Kentucky, they keep voting the idiots back into office.

What is the point for a Nation to be so wealthy, yet it fails when it comes to protect its own people. It is both tragic and shameful!

That’s because NASA is run by scientists and Texas is run by “we stand independent” and “we don’t want no government regulation” shitheads.

Sure can……..that’ll be $16,742.99. Don’t need no guvment interfering with the free market.

Hey Texas how does leaving the Union look now ?

Don’t need no electricity to tip some cows! YEEEEEEEEE HAWWWWWWWW!

Yup

Look on the bright side The government wasn’t "on their backs’ So much better to freeze in your home and to have children in schools shot and killed than to have to deal with regulations. We can be free to suffer and die.

When politicians cut corners to make the rich richer, it eventually catches up with you.

This cliche (normally in reference to the moon) has repeatedly been shown as fallacious.

$50,000,000,000 in damage and lost revenue, but $1,000,000,000 gained in bloated electric bills. The “free” market????

Every administration, every state has evaded the obvious! The grids in America are OLD and vunerable to hacking…YET, THEY DO NOTHING! Where the hell is our tax dollars going then? UNDER THE BUS? Pathetic, GREEDY, incompetent politicians!

That old saying.. you get what you pay for.. comes to mind. And in this case, also who you hire but fear not, chances are you won’t get another weather event for a few years so nothing to worry about, or change.

That’s what an unregulated power grid gets you. Can’t WAIT for you mouth breathers to secede.

That’s because you keep voting for stupid greedy sexist racist republican thieves who stole the money instead of making upgrades to the electrical system.

Back to the USSR! You don’t know how lucky you are! ;-)

I gave a like to Mr. Ramirez and I don’t feel dirty.

The investment, or over-investment, in renewable energy in TX has diverted funds from ensuring the other sources of electrical generation (natural gas, coal and nuclear) and the connecting infrastructure are as reliable as possible. Even with that, those sources proved more reliable than wind during the recent freakish weather. Electrical generation from wind turbines fell 91%. The others were somewhere in the 25% area. Wind is only about 40% reliable under normal circumstances, anyway. No wind or too little wind as well as too much wind means no spinning blades. Good news for the birds but not so good for those relying on the electricity.

My heating bill is $80, hydro $150, wife does a lot of baking and we had some weeks of -30c. Government owned utilities.

Yep. One is regulated by government and taxpayer funded; the other is de-regulated and controlled by private for-profit corporate interests that extort their customers. You nailed it.

The people who create these messes aren’t affected and are not held accountable.Four of the five directors of ERCOT, Texas power provider, don’t live in Texas.Rick Perry, former governor, said Texans had rather have blackouts than be connected to the national power grid.That’s too much like socialism, ya know.

Oh lookie, a righty weighs in against wind power! Well, gosh, wind only provides 7% of power in Texas. Properly maintained wind turbines work even in very cold weather. Properly maintained gas lines work in cold weather. (See Russian gas lines send gas a long distance to western Europe.)

But let’s look at those numbers shall we. So, the claim is that wind is 40% reliable. Assuming that is true, then there would be between 3% and 7% (no wind anywhere in Tx) variations in Texas Electrical generation on essentially a daily basis, even without freezing temps. So the TX grid would be used to such variations. Which means blaming wind in this case is just plain stupid!

25% of all other power sources lost? And that isn’t the problem? Wind power is not the problem, foolish cons. Foolish government is. Even more foolish is lack of government.

Taxpayer-funded credits made wind power cheaper than coal and fracked natural gas and oil. It didn’t matter that wind power is intermittent, requires backup power sources, and ice buildup would force wind turbines to be shut down, to prevent their destruction; “It never ice storms in Texas.”

Yep, shows the difference between National efforts and Texan efforts…

The problem is that Texas voters chose an “independent” power generation model that paid big salaries to the C-Suite and failed when stressed. Of course voters were misled — that’s what Republicans do — lie and mislead voters. Wake up, people!

Thank the republicans for deregulating.That and a weeks worth of electricity costing $10,000 or more.Free market at work so quit your b!tching.

since the US government is aiding these people with FEMA. . .maybe a way should be found to get some of that aid out of the power companies responsible for some of this

The Mars project was run by scientists. The Texas energy commission was controlled by politicians.

Deregulation of monopolies does that.

Sometimes, too little government regulation is a bad thing.Sometimes.

But Rick Perry told us … it’s OK to go without power for days on end in the worst winter storm in memory as long as Texas maintains its independence from the feds!

Free market BS, as opposed to sciency stuff that really worked!

And California has had rolling brown outs for years with a plethora of state and federal regulation and oversight. Look, I see a lot useless rhetoric here that has no solution to the energy problem. I have a lot of objections to wind and solar not the least of which is they are not as environmentally friendly as their proponents would have us to believe. That said, can we all find a reasonable middle ground? How about the following:1. Solar and wind power is not a consistent source of power but can be a valuable asset to existing power grids.2. The three mainstays of consistent 24 hour power generation are coal, hydro and nuclear.3. It’s highly unlikely that anymore hydroelectric will be built and coal is being phased out.4. Of all the continuous power sources only one has a relatively high safety record with a zero annual death rate, nuclear.5. Our power consumption is growing and will continue to do so.

Can we have a serious discussion on funding and construction of new, modern, safe nuclear power plants with an emphasis on Thorium as fuel? Even many on the environmental left are coming to the opinion that nuclear is the only alternative to coal. Frankly, I don’t see any long term solution to our energy demands other than nuclear. Fission would be nice, but that’s been an ongoing dream for over sixty years and I don’t see a break through in the near future. I know someone is going to toss geothermal into the mix but that is expensive and only viable in a relatively few areas.

Only at $17,000 a day though…

Independent, no-nonsense, realist, independent Republican* governor of Texas has determined the first thing that should be done in order to fix the Texas electricity problems.

And his magic solution is ….

.

Wait for it …..

.

Better REGULATIONS!

.

Now, THAT is one ingenious solution, certainly one none of them socialist communist fascists in the federal government couldda come up with, eh? I tell ya, those Republicans* are bloody geniuses, wot?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Scientists sent the rover to Mars….and it’s RepupliCONs who can’t plan ahead, even when given a step bY step instruction book, to keep the lights on in a snowstorm. Texas is a Mess.Ditto for how the Cons handled COVID.

Texas didn’t send the Rover to Mars; NASA with JPL did. Houston wasn’t involved this time. California, NASA Langley (Virginia), Launched from Florida. Sorry, Texas, you weren’t needed.

Well, Texas, you wanted your own grid and complete deregulation, you got what you paid for!

Well yeah. The Mars thing is run by scientists. The Texas power grid is run by Republicans.

Texas is what happens when you elect people who don’t believe in government to run the government.

Unregulated Free Enterprise at work.

welcome to unregulated Texas

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . the two cities of Dallas-Fort Worth . . .you little Republican dickens. . . . /S

No, AMERICA can send a rover 300 million miles to Mars, TEXAS can’t send electricity down the street.

“A poor man stealing electricity”

The only thing to “own” here is a dependency on a “green new deal” source of electricity that is not reliable like solar and wind. Further we had finally made the country energy independent under DJT so what does Biden do in his first week? Kill 11,000 jobs and stop the XL pipeline. Since then the gas prices have been sneaking up every week. YOU democrats OWN that!

Do you mean “How can a government agency send a rover to Mars but a privatized grid cannot provide electricity down the street…”.

because enivro wackos pressured for “green energy” while simultaneously decommissioning aging natural gas plants and out weak politicians here bought into it….then all the “green energy” failed and the remaining natural gas, nuclear, and coal plants couldnt replace the loss to the power grid….sorry but this is a GREEN ENERGY problem not a texas problem