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posted by mrpg on Wednesday June 16 2021, @10:20AM   Printer-friendly

'Unplanned' outages hit Texas power plants in soaring temperatures

Officials with Texas' power grid operator pleaded with residents Monday to limit their electrical usage amid soaring temperatures and a series of mechanical problems at power plants.

The appeal, from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, comes four months after deadly blackouts during a winter storm left millions of people without power — and weeks after state legislators passed a package of measures aimed at fixing some of the problems exposed by the storm.

Officials with the nonprofit group, which oversees 90 percent of Texas' energy production, asked residents to set their thermostats higher, turn off lights and avoid using larger appliances until Friday.

A spokeswoman for the group told reporters that the outages accounted for more than 12,000 megawatts, enough to power 2.4 million homes. Some areas of the state, including Dallas and Tarrant counties, were warned about poor air quality and potentially dangerous heat, with the heat index approaching 110 degrees.

A senior official with ERCOT, Warren Lasher, said it wasn't clear why there were so many unplanned outages. But he said that the group is "deeply concerned" about the plants that are offline and that a thorough investigation is being conducted to better understand the problems.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 16 2021, @03:31PM (8 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 16 2021, @03:31PM (#1145945) Journal

    Interesting but fishy

    From the second link

    Our analysis revealed that GMATs of rocky planets with tangible atmospheres and a negligible geothermal surface heating can accurately be predicted over a broad range of conditions using only two forcing variables: top-of-the-atmosphere solar irradiance and total surface atmospheric pressure.

    I don't think that the solar irradiance or total surface atmospheric pressure changed much over the last 200ky. And yet we had a glaciation until about 12000-11000 years ago.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 1) by js290 on Wednesday June 16 2021, @03:59PM (7 children)

    by js290 (14148) on Wednesday June 16 2021, @03:59PM (#1145962)

    I don't think that the solar irradiance or total surface atmospheric pressure changed much over the last 200ky...

    relative to CO2? which is still less than 0.05% of atmospheric gases by volume.

    And yet we had a glaciation until about 12000-11000 years ago.

    See Younger Dryas impact hypothesis...

    Was this the reason for North American ice melt that some have proposed? @graham_hancock [twitter.com] #Randallcarlson [twitter.com]
    Greenland ice sheet hides huge 'impact crater' https://t.co/n8mevkrdLx [t.co]

    — Perception Machine (@Percepmachine) November 18, 2018 [twitter.com]

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 16 2021, @04:26PM (6 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 16 2021, @04:26PM (#1145981) Journal

      which is still less than 0.05% of atmospheric gases by volume.

      Which still jumped 60% since and over the level at the beginning of the industrial revolution [i.redd.it].
      Still a better hypothesis for the warming of the climate than an yet to be discovered impact crater, which supposedly melt the ice... what... in North America only?
      And better than just "two forcing variables: top-of-the-atmosphere solar irradiance and total surface atmospheric pressure" which remained pretty constant over the recent period.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0, Redundant) by js290 on Wednesday June 16 2021, @11:04PM (5 children)

        by js290 (14148) on Wednesday June 16 2021, @11:04PM (#1146173)

        In other words, ATE is a form of adiabatic compression heating that is independent of atmospheric composition and governed by Laws of Thermodynamics, which are not gas-specific. The IR back radiation is a BYPRODUCT of atmos. temp. & ATE. Hence, there are NO "greenhouse gases"! pic.twitter.com/1cVYm5fhKb [t.co]

        — Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) June 16, 2021 [twitter.com]

        "Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

        — Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom (@TalebWisdom) May 27, 2021 [twitter.com]

        Most of the time, people’s observations about something else reveal more about the observer than what’s being observed.

        — Kieran McCarthy (@joyousandswift) May 6, 2020 [twitter.com]