Money News: Energy Lessons from the Texas Freeze

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Category: Business/Financial News
Published on Tuesday, 02 March 2021 18:25
Written by Dr. Jane M. Orient, M.D.,

The Texas freeze again brought renewable energy into the national conversation. It is quite likely that your state or locality is making firm plans to hop on the "renewables" train, following the lead of Texas and California.

Tucson, Arizona, recently distributed an opinion survey about how, not whether, to phase out "fossil fuel."

But wherever we live, we need to learn from Texas. Texas has prided itself on leadership in the wind industry. But as the graph below shows, if you had power in Texas in early February, it was coming from natural gas, coal, or nuclear—mostly gas.

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If you were able to leave your frozen home, to drive a few hundred miles to a place where you could heat formula for your baby, you drove in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. If you slept in your car to keep warn—not in a closed garage!—you were burning fuel. If you did not have gas in your tank, too bad. Service stations can't pump gas without electricity.

Many Texans were without water, and half the state was advised to boil water because treatment plants were shut down. How? Some Texans were burning their furniture to keep from freezing.

All "renewable" (intermittent, fluctuating, unreliable) generating plants need to have 100 percent backup available. The backups often must run very uneconomically if not at full capacity. They are likely unable to compete with heavily subsidized wind and solar, so there is no incentive to invest in them.

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For various political reasons, natural gas is favored. It too had problems in Texas, especially from inadequate weatherization. Plants require just-in-time fuel delivery. Pipelines can freeze—or may not exist. The Keystone Pipeline was stopped with the stroke of Joe Biden's pen. Deliveries then must be by rail or diesel-powered tanker trucks—assuming roads are open.

Coal-fired plants, in contrast, can store a few months' worth of fuel on site, and nuclear plants need to be refueled only once in 12 to 18 months.

Freezing is not unprecedented in Texas. Unpredictable bad weather will continue to happen. Without electricity, our economy and lives come to a stop, and people die. Blackouts are probably coming to your area also.

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Questions to ask your politicians as they contemplate radical changes in your energy supply:

Who is responsible for assuring adequate capacity (deliverable, not nameplate), under normal and emergency circumstances? In Texas, no one was. What will happen to electricity prices as "green" plans are implemented?

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        For more information, see

·         The Week That Was, Feb 20 and Feb 27, 2021

·         Climate Change IQ Question #6 (Why can't all states emulate California's 'clean energy' standards?)

·         More Green Blackouts Ahead, WSJ, Feb 24, 2021

·         When the ice storm cometh, Financial Post, Feb 19, 2021.

 

 

Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.

She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for school children, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. 

More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and non-hazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

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