Posts tagged ‘energy’
Bookmarked “Griddy customers face $5,000 electric bills for 5 freezing days in Texas”
Because of Texas' deregulated electricity market, people are allowed to agree to pay wholesale prices for power, then find themselves owing thousands of dollars because wholesale prices climbed to $9,000 per kilowatt hour during the widespread power outage 🤯
Liked “Massive Texas gas failure during climate extremes gets blamed on wind power” by Ketan Joshi
It’s only been a half year since blackouts spread across California during intense summer heat. Those blackouts were immediately blamed on renewable energy; of course it turned out later on that a string of failures in the state’s gas plants were to blame. In fact, it turned out later on that a major part of those blackouts was an instance of a misheard verbal instruction issued to a gas generator. Instead of turning up as instructed, they decreased their output. And it’s five years since South Australia’s 2016 blackout, in which precisely the same sequence of events occurred. A pattern is now clear.
Major blackout events, usually instigated by grid stress related to climate extremes, become opportunities to attack renewable energy. Media articles, political pronouncements, tweets, Facebook posts, everything – the entire media ecosystem assumes that renewable energy must have done it and runs hard with it. And of course, later, it comes out that fossil fuel failures played a significant or even majority role in the cluster of causes of the event – none of which is covered with the intensity of the original stories.
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.