For one thing, this storm isn’t anything like last year’s storm in terms of intensity of wind, temperature, precipitation or length. Austin was in a deep freeze for 144 hours straight then, got 6 inches of snow, and down into the single digits. By contrast, we’re only getting a dusting of snow in this storm, and weather will be back up above freezing tomorrow.
Last year’s ice storm and power outage crisis once again emphasized how important it is to prepare for such events. So here’s a brief revised guide to cheaply prepping for a range of disasters. I’ve included Amazon links, but for some items (like batteries), Sam’s or Lowe’s tends to offer better prices. (Batteries are among goods that can be purchased tax free during the Texas emergency preparation sales tax holiday, which is April 23-25 this year, along with smoke and CO detectors, fire extinguishers and first aid kits.
The Basics
These are just all-purpose tools everyone should already have, listed here for completeness sake.
First aid kit: There are a lot of different makes and models of these, and this is one where Sam’s offers a kit that’s a bit cheaper than this one. Has a little bit of everything. A good thing to keep in your car for emergencies.
Smoke alarm: Everyone should already have these, but if you don’t, or want more, these are cheap, and it has a silence button so you can put it in your kitchen. The batch I got was made in Mexico, but First Alert also makes stuff in China, so caveat emptor.
Carbon Monoxide detector. Doesn’t say but I suspect it’s another made-in-China item. There are some combination carbon monoxide/smoke detectors, but I think you want to avoid the possibility of a single point of failure there.
Fire Extinguisher: Every home should have at least one, and make sure it’s not expired. This is what I have (I think it’s made in Mexico), but fortunately I’ve never had to use it.
Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage. I had one of mine go off a week before the ice storm hit because a shutoff valve I had closed to plunge an overflowing toilet had started leaking. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). That link goes to a 5-pack, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). (There’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with.)
Speaking of plunging toilets, I imagine everyone already has a plunger, but if you don’t, I bought this one recently on the recommendation of a YouTube video, and it works well. You might consider one for each bathroom, or at least each floor.
Speaking of things everyone should already have more of, everyone needs flashlights. I have an old bulb-type Maglite, but here’s a pretty close equivalent with LEDs. As a bonus, it’s also heavy enough to conk someone out. I have flashlights in my bedroom, my kitchen and in my car’s glovebox. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is about four times as expensive as the Maglite. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And if you have a flashlight, chances are you’ll also need. I saw a Disel Creek video where he and friends explored an abandoned coal mine using OLIGHTs like this one and it looks pretty bright.
Batteries. The Maglite takes D-Cells, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with.
Car jump starter: Much better than jumper cables, and can save you money when you have a dead battery, or because it’s just not cranking in the cold.
Water shut off tool. The toilet valve problem made me keenly aware that I did not have the specific house water shutoff valve tool, so I went ahead and got this one, which also has a gas shutoff tool, and it works pretty well. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.
Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: After the freeze, Austin went under a boil notice, and the Sawyer system (which I bought the previous time Austin was under a boil notice) was Good Enough, even if it’s a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool). I also recommend fill empty bottles (3 liter bottles, etc.) with drinkable water in advance, which you can do at essentially no cost.
Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover. I recently picked up some Gorilla tape, which gets super-high marks, but haven’t actually used any of it yet.
Cold Weather
Here are some specific prep items for cold weather:
Faucet Covers. If you’re a homeowner, you probably already have those, but if not, here they are, and they seem to work better than a rag or dripping the faucet, and neither of my faucets busted in the ice storm. That link goes to the cheap Styrofoam version, but these plastic ones look a bit bigger and stronger.
O’Keeffe’s Working Hands hand cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
I think I’ve covered the basics, and I’m not tackling things like food, clothing or generators, etc. Feel free to add anything I missed in the comments.
Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Jason Isaac has a Prager U video analysis of the reasons behind the great Texas ice storm blackouts.
The analysis will be familiar to regular readers: Over-investment in unreliable, subsidized renewable energy meant under-investment in reliable fossil fuel and nuclear necessary for base load reliability.
Gov. Greg Abbott has gained another challenge from the right, with the addition of former State Sen. Don Huffines into the gubernatorial race on Monday.
“I’m a proud fifth-generation Texan,” said Huffines. “For too long, Texas has been let down by politicians who offer nothing but excuses and lies. Our border is still wide open. Property taxes keep going up. And our election laws continue to be ignored. Plain and simple, our politicians aren’t getting things done, and Texans have rightfully run out of patience.”
“I will fight and win on behalf of Texans. We will protect our great state and secure our freedoms. I am ready to take on the federal government and the entrenched elites of the Austin swamp. We will finally finish the wall and secure our border, and we’re not going to ask for permission to do it. We will put Texas on a path to eliminating property taxes. And we will enforce our sacred voting laws so that the voices of lawful voters are preserved and not diluted through corrupt election procedures,” he added.
Don Huffines was first elected to the Texas Senate in 2014, after defeating liberal Republican incumbent John Carona in the GOP primary.
Immediately, Huffines made his mark as one of the most conservative members of the chamber, on more than one occasion grinding the normally scripted Senate to a halt by offering amendments that attempted to improve Texas’ open carry law and completely phase-out the state’s margins tax.
Huffines also led the charge to take down “Dallas County Schools,” a corruption scheme that stole millions of dollars from Texas taxpayers and led to the imprisonment of six individuals.
Huffines was defeated in the Senate by Democrat Nathan Johnson in the 2018 Democrat sweep of Dallas County.
Since then, Huffines has continued to be a figure in the conservative movement, traveling the state to pull back the curtain on the true nature of the Texas Legislature, as well as being a sharp critic of the governor.
Is Huffines a serious threat to Abbott? Let’s just say he’s a more serious 2022 Texas Gubernatorial candidate than Chad Prather or Kurt Schwab. Or, for that matter, Barbara Krueger or Larry SECEDE Kilgore, the two nobodies Abbott wiped the floor with in the 2018 Republican primary. State senator is a pretty decent launching pad for statewide office, as Dan Patrick can attest. But no one has jumped straight from the state legislature to the Governor’s mansion since Dolph Briscoe did it in 1972, and that was after a previous gubernatorial run, plus the Sharpstown scandal. Mostly the the path to the governor’s mansion runs through a lower state-wide office (Attorney General and the Texas Supreme Court for Abbott, Lieutenant Governor and Agricultural Commissioner for Rick Perry, Treasurer for Ann Richards).
Up until last year, Abbott was considered a popular governor and a shoe-in for reelection. Then the 2020 lockdowns happened, then the disaster of the ice-storm. No one blames Mao Tse Lung on Abbott, and he clearly weathered the coronavirus crisis better than Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom or Grethen Whitmer (to damn him with very faint praise indeed), but he waited far too long to lift the lockdown and mask mandate orders when it was obvious they had no effect on viral spread, especially compared to Ron DeSantis. Likewise, the ice storm was obviously not of Abbott’s making, but the years of lax oversight of ERCOT and a failure to push reliable fossil fuel over acquiescence to subsidies for trendy (and unreliable) renewables made the crisis far more severe than it had to be.
So Abbott probably is vulnerable, but I’m not sure Huffines is the candidate to take advantage of it. Abbott has at least $47 million in the bank, an extremely formidable warchest going into the primary season. (If Matthew McConaughey does jump into the race, he may need all of it.) Huffines has conservative bonafides, but losing your last race is seldom an indicator that you’re ready to step up a weight class (Richard Nixon not withstanding). Huffines, like Abbott, seems more like an artifact of the bygone pre-Trump political era, and thus very unlikely to defeat Abbott in the Republican primary.
I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.
Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.
The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.
This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.
In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.
We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.
Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.
Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.
“Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.
What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.
Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.
Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”
As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?
But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.
The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.
Snip.
On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.
Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.
We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.
“By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.
“Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”
Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.
But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.
“We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”
For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.
When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.
Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.
So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.
Here’s the long story.
Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.
However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.
Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)
Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:
The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast. It can’t call on other grids for support (but that is a bit overrated as typically when you need power so does your adjacent region, but that’s later).
ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on). In my experience some of the smartest people I’ve ever met work there. Wish I could name some of them because they’re absolutely brilliant.
Retail guys, municipalities, and cooperatives are the guys who buy power wholesale and sell it to the end user (residentials, commercials, industrials).
Retail outside of municipal or cooperative areas can shop for a retail provider. 8/
This year, ~20,000MW of (gas and coal) Power plants requested an outage. ERCOT runs an outage study looking at demand and other available resources, and then says yes. (They make sure all the plants in Houston aren’t out for example because that would jack up Houston rates). 12/
If those plants could be back up they would’ve because they want to make big money. So, Feb 11th, we go to bed, wake up to a coating of ice. This ice is thick and persistent. Next day, sun is out, roads are good. Maybe we’re through the worst?
On the night of the 15th, between midnight and 3 am, 8000MW of gas, 1200MW of Nukes, and 2000MW of coal trip off the grid. Culprits are frozen gas pipelines and water for steam. (Note the Big gas drops)
I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.
So no water through the pipe, no steam. No gas no gas to heat that water.
That trip caused a lot of the outages and most of the outrage.
So ERCOT’s only options in these situations is: 1) cut off a big chunk of the customers. 2) let the whole system trip and take months to get back to normal.
Last thing. In 2011. We had a bad winter but it was followed by a drought and the worst summer ever. Power plants didn’t have water in their lakes to run the plant. 100 days over 100°. The grid focused on that issue instead of the cold.
Nationally, retail electric sales generated $117 billion in 3Q2022, $10.9 billion in Texas (of which $6.3 billion was residential) and $14.5 billion in California. 2/12
If Texans paid what Californians did for electricity, Texans would have paid $13.2 billion more, or about $508 more per person in the state for those three months in 2020. 4/12
One aspect of Texas’ failure has been the rapid grown of unreliables (wind and solar) subsidized by federal and state policy concurrent with the shedding of reliable power (coal and natural gas). 6/12
We suggest making all electricity producers guarantee dispatchable power for Texas’ grid—this means that the unreliables would have to secure agreements… 8/12
Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”
The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.
That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.
But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.
This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.
One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.
Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.
Snip.
As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.
The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.
To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…
Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.
Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.
Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.
In chart form:
This sums up what you want to know about power shortages in #Texas! Timeline matters. Researchers must start from Feb 9. Have solar & wind failed? YES, starting Feb 9.
Have backup #natgas plants failed? Yes, starting Feb 14. Yet, Natgas generation still way higher than before pic.twitter.com/AKa6M0neZw
Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.
California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.
Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.
Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.
It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.
We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.
Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business analyzed the plan and found that the massive spending splurge—which costs roughly $13,260 per federal taxpayer—would only cause a “slight uptick” in economic growth in 2021. The analysts warned that this minor boost would just be “instant gratification,” and that the skyrocketing government debt caused by the blowout legislation would undermine any gains in the medium-to-long term.
“The existence of the debt saps the rest of the economy,” Wharton analyst Efraim Berkovich said. “When the government is running budget deficits, the money that could have gone to productive investment is redirected.”
“Effectively, what we’re doing is taking money from [some] people and giving it to other people for consumption purposes,” he continued. “That has value for social safety nets and redistributive benefits, but longer-term, you’re taking away from the capital that we need to grow our economy in the future.”
Biden’s costly plan would explode the national debt. This, per Wharton, would lead to a “crowding out” effect over the coming years as more loan money is taken away from productive business/private sector investments and instead consumed by government debt.
So the Biden Administration hit an Iranian-backed militia stronghold in Syria in retaliation for attacks on Americans. I know we’re supposed to compare Warmonger Biden to Peacemaker Trump for the cognitive dissonance luls, but this is similar to President Trump’s missile strike on a Syrian chemical weapon faculty in April of his first year in office. I’m sure there’s plenty of Biden foreign policy stupidity ahead to rail against, but in this case it’s not significantly different from Trump policy.
A surprising body of research links increases in the minimum wage to increases in criminal offending by those most likely to lose jobs as a result of the wage hike. One analysis concluded that raising the federal minimum to $15 could create crime costs of up to $2.5 billion—a bill that would be borne disproportionately by the very people whom the wage hike is meant to help.
The minimum wage’s economic trade-offs are well known. It raises the take-home pay of some, while causing others—particularly teens, young adults, and less-skilled workers—to lose their jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a $15 minimum would boost 17 million workers’ earnings by 11.8 percent, on average, but would also cost from 1 million to 3 million jobs.
Higher wages could make working more appealing than illegal activity for some. For others, put out of work by the hike, losing a job heightens the risk that they will go on to commit both property and violent crimes. After all, the people most likely to feel the economic downsides of a minimum-wage hike, in the form of lost jobs—the young—are also among those most likely to commit such crimes. Youths aged 16 to 24 make up just 12 percent of the population but were 23 percent of those arrested as of 2019; they account for a full third of those making less than $15 an hour. The CBO estimated that 16- to 19-year-olds alone would account for half of the job lost if the minimum wage reaches $15.
In one paper from last year, researchers evaluated decades of data to consider the relationship between minimum-wage hikes and crime among 16- to 24-year-olds, finding that the wage hikes tend to correlate with increased property crimes, particularly larcenies—a sign that some unemployed people decide to earn their keep through theft rather than finding another job. Minimum-wage hikes also lead to increases in disorderly-conduct arrests, indicating an increase in loitering and other idleness among teens and young adults. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that hiking the minimum to $15 would lead to an additional 423,000 property crimes, creating the aforementioned $2.5 billion in damages.
Along with price increases, employers may reduce hours, and Belman and Wolfson note that “[i]t has long been suggested that employers may respond to minimum wage increases by reducing spending on training, fringe benefits and working conditions valued by employees.”
Another important finding is that employers often respond to higher mandated wages by replacing low wage workers with those who have more education, skills and experience which make them more productive. This adjustment may have little effect on the observable employment numbers, but the effect is devastating for those who are replaced. Employers can be forced to pay higher wages, but they can’t be forced to hire or retain employees whose contributions don’t match the higher wage.
Some studies (see Clemens 2019) suggest that the pace of job creation slows when mandated wages rise. The increases also accelerate automation, which reduces the number of entry-level jobs and further penalizes those whom the increases are meant to help. In coming years, the combined effect of substitution, slower job creation, and accelerated automation is likely to be a growing core of workers, many of whom are young and poorly educated, who are unemployed and unemployable.
Social activists and progressive editorial boards now regard the minimum wage as another welfare program that can reduce the costs of programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and can reduce inequality. But the minimum wage is very poorly targeted for these purposes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that “roughly 40 percent of workers directly affected by the $15 option in 2025 would be members of families with incomes more than three times the federal poverty level.” If the goal is to aid low-wage households, rather than teenagers and other part-time workers in middle-income and affluent families, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would be far more effective, because it is designed to aid the working poor.
History will record Covid-induced lockdowns as the product of pseudoscientific ideology, manifestations of an unprecedented mass hysteria and drummed-up fear.
When Sweden strayed from the herd of nations hellbent on lockdown, it suffered intense vilification. The modellers who agitated for lockdown as a profoundly necessary step opined that veering from the mainstream playbook would see Sweden suffer some 100,000 excess deaths, double its normal annual death toll. Daily articles, notably in The Guardian, berated the country or the murder that would surely ensue if it didn’t rejoin the herd.
A lot was riding on this. In taking up the lockdown baton from China, the world was conducting a dangerous experiment. That experiment involved tearing up the public health policy guidelines for respiratory virus epidemics of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and many others.
These guidelines were the results of a century of evidence and deliberation that was summarily ignored when the virus arrived. Detailed statements of principle governed the evidential processes required to revise them. These too were ignored.
The basis for all of this was the assurance of the WHO’s Bruce Aylward that China’s lockdown had contained its epidemic. This in turn was based on speculation that everyone was susceptible to Covid-19 and that, without lockdown, exponential growth of disease and death was inevitable.
Snip.
But Sweden did not lock down, becoming the one of the most alluring control experiments the world has ever seen. And it did not suffer 100,000 excess deaths. Not even close. Instead, this is what happened:
Whether you are a lockdown fan drawing trend lines that suggest Sweden had 8000 excess deaths or a skeptic concluding there were none because of a build-up of very susceptible people from an abnormally low death rate in 2019, this reality dealt a devastating blow to the lockdown theory and the models used to justify lockdown.
Covid-19, it turned out, was not only far less deadly than modellers had predicted, but they couldn’t credit this to the lockdowns they’d promoted. Sweden clearly showed that failure to lock down did not constitute genocide.
The favorite hobby of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Joe Biden’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is targeting Little Sisters of the Poor. He “chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.” Every knee must bend.
Massive explosion rocks Cameron, Texas (about 75 miles northeast of Austin) after a train collided with 18-wheeler. Fortunately there were no injuries.
Biden’s energy plans are bad for our national security, economy, public health, and overall quality of life. But the American people’s ingenuity and creativity — and the very nature of how our planet and energy systems work — mean all is not lost.
Under Biden’s attempts to “phase out” natural gas, petroleum, and coal, the prices we pay for energy will go up.
This should be no surprise to Biden and his political allies, since costs have soared everywhere “going green” has been tried. Californians are paying 30% more for electricity than they did 10 years ago. In Denmark, where wind energy became a priority in the mid-1990s, prices have more than doubled.
Because everything we do, from the moment our alarms go off every morning to when we turn off the lights at night, depends on energy, these higher prices will be a heavy burden for American families. Expensive energy means producing, marketing, transporting, and selling goods and services will also become more expensive, creating less a ripple effect than a tidal wave.
The rising cost of living will hurt the poor the most. Low-income Americans already spend a higher percentage of their paychecks on electricity and gas, and they have less disposable income to afford higher prices for necessities.
Coupled with the tax increases that would be needed to further subsidize unreliable wind and solar energy, Biden’s plans would cripple the poor and even put their health in jeopardy.
An equally critical consequence of moving away from fossil fuels is the destabilization of our national security. Since becoming the world’s dominant energy producer and a net energy exporter, America has a stronger influence in global negotiations and advancing the cause of freedom.
Thanks in large part to America’s growing influence over OPEC and Russia, multiple Middle Eastern nations have committed to normalizing relations with Israel, an unprecedented development National Review described as “something suspiciously resembling peace.” It’s the reason President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.
America used to go to war over energy, but now we’re actively loosening the grip of unstable, totalitarian countries not just on oil markets, but on the global balance of power. This is good news for Americans, who benefit from a safe and peaceful nation, and also for the entire world.
Sounds like the entire union should be fired, then.
"Teacher's Unions: We won't let your kids go back to school, but we will make sure the guy jacking off in front of Middle Schoolers can't be fired!" pic.twitter.com/Fkbqlv7bG5
If you wanted to get your hands on Gwyenth Paltrow’s $95 vibrator, you’re too late; it’s sold out. The way that woman creates ridiculous overpriced crap that gets everyone talking about what ridiculous overpriced crap it is, which then makes said ridiculous overpriced crap sell out almost immediately, makes me think she’s actually some sort of marketing genius…
“We just wanted to give our viewers a heads-up that the show contains jokes, comedy, laughter, and free speech,” said a Disney spokesperson. “It feels very dated nowadays, since the show is packed full of problematic things like jokes, innovation, and quality. It’s like, come on, people, this is 2021, not the Dark Ages!”
If you or I can’t sleep at night, we might read a book or waste time on the Internet. When Colin Furze can’t sleep at night, he makes a hydraulic powered shark head.
Truth:
While I don’t know how to be “less white,” I do know how to drink less coke
Paul Martin, a much more serious prepper than I, has an after action report on what went right and wrong in his own disaster preparations. Following winterization checklists and having good gear on hand were among the successes. On the other side of the ledger:
I need a better cold weather management plan for the tankless water heaters. This was our weakest point in our house. The drain lines would freeze up, requiring me to go out at all hours with a heat gun to thaw them out to get them back on line and to prevent damage. I was up between 3AM and 4 AM on the coldest nights, outside in the elements (temps between 10 to 15 degrees), working on them. Not fun.
I should have started working the checklist items sooner than I did. My original strategy was to do a few items on the list every night until the big event on Sunday night/Monday morning, when the snow fell and the temps really dropped. The problem came when the first ice storm on Thursday night/Friday morning took out a bunch of limbs around the house, requiring me to spend several hours cleaning that up instead of preparing for the bigger storm that was coming. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have burned a day of PTO and just done everything in the milder temps and when there was still food and ample supplies at the stores.
I should have cleaned out my gutters before the storm started. That’s going on the checklist. Leaves from the winds filled the gutters in the first storm, which then got backed up with rain, which in turn froze in place. Not good. Cleaner gutters drain quicker and collect less ice.
Plus some sobering thoughts:
You’ve now seen our grid under stress. Cold snaps in 2011, 2018 and the worst cold on record in 2021, along with the boil water order of 2018, provide real world examples of what the local grid will do when it’s stressed. You are now on notice of the grid’s limitations. What if the next emergency isn’t in the cold, but in the 105 degree heat of a Texas summer? And what if the power is off for a week or more? What if the failure is caused by a cyber attack which not only shuts off the power but causes physical damage to the grid? By the way, don’t think this can’t happen:
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
******
While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.
Things could have been much worse. They could be much worse in a future outage. Is your family ready for that? If your family isn’t ready, you will then be relying upon not only the grid operators but also your local elected officials to provide you with answers and solutions. Some of you may not be very keen on doing so after all of this.
And that’s where much of our community’s struggle lies. As a community, we need to make sure that while we’re holding our government accountable that we’re also holding ourselves accountable. I get it: not everyone can afford to have a whole house generator. But a lot of people can afford less expensive options that would have made their lives a lot more comfortable and safer.
I plead with you: make preparedness a priority for your family. If it means you have to take a smaller vacation or put off buying a nicer car for a year or so, do it. Many people can implement the step by step preparedness plan I have created in the Ready Citizen Manual which is absolutely free, which will quickly get you to a base line level of readiness enabling you to handle what we just went through.
I don’t see things getting easier in the days ahead. Our economy is showing worrisome signs, our communities are still seething from the last election with no sign of abatement, our grids are vulnerable, and we’re still dealing with a pandemic for the foreseeable future. We now see how uncomfortable things can get. Take steps now to protect yourself and family from enduring that again.
The recent Texas ice storm and power outage crisis once again emphasized how important it is to prepare for such events.
There are some people who put significant time, effort and money into preparing. I am not one of them. What I am is a cheap prepper who probably spends about $20 a year on prepping supplies. But I found that just doing that made me much better prepared for surviving the ice storm/energy outage/boil notice event than other people. So here’s a brief guide to cheaply prepping for a range of disasters.
I’ve included Amazon links, but for some items (like batteries), Sam’s or Lowe’s tends to offer better prices. Batteries are among good that can be purchased tax free during the Texas emergency preparation sales tax holiday, which is April 24-26 this year, along with smoke and CO detectors, fire extinguishers and first aid kits.
The Basics
These are just all-purpose tools everyone should already have, listed here for completeness sake.
First aid kit: There are a lot of different makes and models of these, and this is another one where Sam’s offers a kit that’s a bit cheaper than this one. Has a little bit of everything. A good thing to keep in your car for emergencies.
Smoke alarm: Everyone should already have these, but if you don’t, or want more, these are cheap, and it has a silence button so you can put it in your kitchen. This batch seems to be made in Mexico, but First Alert also makes stuff in China, so caveat emptor.
Carbon Monoxide detector. Doean’t say but I suspect it’s another made-in-China item. There are some combination carbon monoxide/smoke detectors, but I think you want to avoid the possibility of a single point of failure there.
Fire Extinguisher: Every home should have at least one, and make sure it’s not expired. This is what I have (I think it’s made in Mexico), but fortunately I’ve never had to use it.
Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage. I had one of mine go off a week before the ice storm hit because a shutoff valve I had closed to plunge an overflowing toilet had started leaking. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). That link goes to a 5-pack, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). (There’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with.)
Speaking of plunging toilets, I imagine everyone already has a plunger, but if you don’t, here’s one, and you might consider one for each bathroom, or at least each floor. Also, the black bell shaped ones are a lot more effective than the small old red ones.
Speaking of things everyone should already have more of, everyone needs flashlights. I have an old bulb-type Maglite, but here’s a pretty close equivalent with LEDs. As a bonus, it’s also heavy enough to conk someone out. I have flashlights in my bedroom, my kitchen and in my car’s glovebox. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is about four times as expensive as the Maglite. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And if you have a flashlight, chances are you’ll also need…
Batteries. The Maglite takes D-Cells, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with.
Car jump starter: Much better than jumper cables, and can save you money when you have a dead battery, or beacuse it’s just not cranking in the cold.
Water shut off tool. The toilet valve problem made me keenly aware that I did not have the specific house water shutoff valve tool, so I went ahead and ordered this one, which also has a gas shutoff tool. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.
Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: Austin is still under a boil notice, and the Sawyer system (which I bought the last time Austin was under a boil notice) is Good Enough, even if it is a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool).
Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover.
Cold Weather
Here are some specific prep items for cold weather:
Faucet Covers. If you’re a homeowner, you probably already have those, but if not, here they are, and they seem to work better than a rag or dripping the faucet, and neither of my faucets busted in the ice storm. That link goes to the cheap Styrofoam version, but these plastic ones look a bit bigger and stronger.
O’Keeffe’s Working Hands hand cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
Eucerin Intensive Repair Foot Creme: For some reason, my feet were really hurting after a few days of walking around in the cold. This seems to have fixed the problem. A podiatrist had previously recommended Kerasal Intensive Foot Repair for the same problem, and I have some of that on order, but it’s considerably pricier per ounce, and I couldn’t find any locally.
De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
I think I’ve covered the basics, and I’m not tackling things like food, clothing, generators, etc. Feel free to add anything I missed in the comments.
Hard left TV host and well-known all-around dick Cenk Uyger said Texas had the ice storm coming because…Joe Rogan moved here from California:
Only upside of Texas power outages is people like @joerogan, who were so proud to leave CA and move to TX, freezing their asses off. They said they wanted less government. Congrats, mission accomplished! I hope you're not asking the government to come help you. #Freedom
Today the Texas grid is back up and running normally and it’s getting up into the 50s today as the once-a-century Texas winter storm recedes. But I bet that come summer, California has to close down parts of its grid yet again because high winds took out another power line.
All that’s a handy hook to hang this amusing “Californian moves to Texas” video on:
And yes, it mentions Joe Rogan…
(Though if Calidude had moved to Austin rather than Houston, the homeless people would have been much easier to find…)
Update: I ventured out to the HEB at McNeil & 183 and the major roads are passable. HEB closes at 5, and the meat section was picked almost clean, but there was a lot of edible food available in various departments if you’re flexible.
The Governor discussed the current power situation in Texas and what the state is doing to get more Texans back online. There still remains about 10,000 megawatts (MW) that are off the power grid in Texas. About 6,000 MW have been added to the Texas grid over the past day, which is equivalent to power for about 1.2 million households. In addition to the 6,000 MW restored to the grid, additional power generation from coal and other sources will continue to come online throughout tomorrow. Small natural gas generators should sporadically add megawatts over the next 24 hours to help bring electricity to thousands of Texans. There are still challenges with all sources of generation, resulting from mechanical difficulties, gas supply issues, and the effects of extreme winter weather conditions.
Very similar to yesterday’s list. Also, the Westgate Central Market is closed, but the North Lamar location is open from 10 AM to 6 PM.
Next up: Walmart. The situation here seems to have improved a bit. The Sam’s at 183 and Lakeline Mall Drive is open, as is the Walmart at Northcross, and the Sam’s at 290 West and Mopac, plus the Walmarts in Manor, Elgin and Buda. All other locations appear to be closed.(The Round Rock locations of both Walmart and Sam’s showed open yesterday, but closed today.)
Update: The 183/Lakeline Mall and 290 West/Mopac Sam’s appears to be closed, but the ones at 183 at 360 and on South I-35 now appear to be open. The Palm Valley Walmart in Round Rock also appears to be open.
