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Phil1111

Republicans in Texas

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18 minutes ago, nomasoyo said:

just wondering, what's the pay like for the hours you put in?  i figure i could come up with shit a lot better than you and get folks to actually believe it.  you're a joke, not even trying now.

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14 minutes ago, sfzombie13 said:

just wondering, what's the pay like for the hours you put in?  i figure i could come up with shit a lot better than you and get folks to actually believe it.  you're a joke, not even trying now.

Lol!! You libs are so easy...another notch!

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2 minutes ago, okalb said:

A Trump supporter that doesn't seem to understand the concept of rules and consequences. What a surprise!

A trump supporter who is reduced to coming here and posting garbage as he licks his wounds from losing bigly. 

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6 hours ago, sfzombie13 said:

but it sounds so much like some folks i know...

Yup. Very familiar.

6 hours ago, Phil1111 said:

Fancy Bear programmers, smarter every year or its the Gulag.

I don't think so.

I think it's an old 'friend' who's decided to come back and try to stir up some shit.

I have a few suspects, and the more he posts, the more I narrow it down.

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1 minute ago, sfzombie13 said:

i was wondering how they do it, looks like a script.  pretty good one too.  some sort of machine learning algorithm.  i'd like to see where they scrape their content from. 

The last we had one it was easy to tell that the poster was several people working in shifts. The level of English skill would shift from day to day along with the general intelligence of the posts.  That was of course during the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 election. At least one of them had a some knowledge of skydiving though. This poster has not yet shown any that I noticed before I blocked him from my feed. I'm not sure what is going on here now. It is more likely to be a real disgruntled American idiot this time. 

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4 minutes ago, wmw999 said:

Given the Houston location, yeah, it's very possibly a real person. Maybe even someone I know or knew, but I don't know who it is. Either way, they're clearly here just to spew, and not interchange.

Wendy P.

Ya mean they're just here to make noise and a mess?

Something like 'serial vandalism' of the site?

Hmmmm...

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Doubt that additional federal regulation is the answer. The last cold event was 1940.

The folks that built the generation made purchase decisions each time they bought a generator. Wind turbines are available with heated gear boxes, motors and blades. Coal plants can be built for cold weather. Nuclear safety devices aren't supposed to get wet and freeze. Natural gas pipelines can be installed and made operational in cold climates.

About the generators: the utility is held to a "reasonable and prudent" standard when their rate increase requests are made. The regulators look at the costs in the rate filing and decide if they are reasonable and prudent. Certain costs will be disallowed - such as alcohol, first class travel, employee recreational clubs, lobbying expense, certain advertising, glamorous offices, excess construction, and others. The utilities deal with the regulators on a regular basis and are familiar with how they make decisions. I suspect that the utilities knew that if they had bought the "cold weather" package the additional cost would have been disallowed. The regulators, in SC, are appointed and then elected by the politicians. Politicians are pestered by their electors. The public hates rate increases and they raise cane about everything. 

The utility would argue that the additional expense is justified because once in every 80 years it gets cold enough that it is needed. The intervenors in the rate case, Wal Mart, large energy users, the military, the consumer advocate, and anyone else that wants to testify, would argue that the cold weather package was not needed. So, they are having a once in 80 year event and, no surprise, stuff froze.

The TX situation and every other grid is massively complicated. No one thing caused this problem and federal regulation won't fix it. Well, it could. They could easily require more redundancy, additional transmission capacity, more dispersed generation and just about anything else. That's fine except it costs tons of money. The expense would be paid by consumers. And consumers hate rate increases. Reliability is always a balancing act between the two.

We have the same problem in SC after a hurricane. After Hugo in 1989, 31 years ago, everyone screamed, "if power lines were underground we wouldn't have this problem!" That's partially true except there are other problems with UG power lines that don't exist with overhead lines. And, it costs tons of money that no one wants pay for in a rate increase.

As electricity is restored the next layer of problems is being revealed. Lack of water. The construction standards in some areas didn't contemplate this extreme. Many homes have detached garages connected to the house by a short breezeway. The copper line comes up the wall of the unheated garage into the attic area and over to the house. The pipe freezes and splits. As it warms up the leaks are evident. There is a shortage of plumbers and plumbing supplies. My buddy shipped 100' of Pex and a box of fittings to his son. There is enough stuff to fix a few dozen houses. The neighbors will luv him.

Just about every problem can be prevented or minimized if one throws enough money at it. Most don't want to pay for prevention. 

What a mess, but no different than natural disasters in other areas of the country.

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15 minutes ago, billeisele said:

Doubt that additional federal regulation is the answer. The last cold event was 1940.

The folks that built the generation made purchase decisions each time they bought a generator. Wind turbines are available with heated gear boxes, motors and blades. Coal plants can be built for cold weather. Nuclear safety devices aren't supposed to get wet and freeze. Natural gas pipelines can be installed and made operational in cold climates.

About the generators: the utility is held to a "reasonable and prudent" standard when their rate increase requests are made. The regulators look at the costs in the rate filing and decide if they are reasonable and prudent. Certain costs will be disallowed - such as alcohol, first class travel, employee recreational clubs, lobbying expense, certain advertising, glamorous offices, excess construction, and others. The utilities deal with the regulators on a regular basis and are familiar with how they make decisions. I suspect that the utilities knew that if they had bought the "cold weather" package the additional cost would have been disallowed. The regulators, in SC, are appointed and then elected by the politicians. Politicians are pestered by their electors. The public hates rate increases and they raise cane about everything. 

The utility would argue that the additional expense is justified because once in every 80 years it gets cold enough that it is needed. The intervenors in the rate case, Wal Mart, large energy users, the military, the consumer advocate, and anyone else that wants to testify, would argue that the cold weather package was not needed. So, they are having a once in 80 year event and, no surprise, stuff froze.

The TX situation and every other grid is massively complicated. No one thing caused this problem and federal regulation won't fix it. Well, it could. They could easily require more redundancy, additional transmission capacity, more dispersed generation and just about anything else. That's fine except it costs tons of money. The expense would be paid by consumers. And consumers hate rate increases. Reliability is always a balancing act between the two.

We have the same problem in SC after a hurricane. After Hugo in 1989, 31 years ago, everyone screamed, "if power lines were underground we wouldn't have this problem!" That's partially true except there are other problems with UG power lines that don't exist with overhead lines. And, it costs tons of money that no one wants pay for in a rate increase.

As electricity is restored the next layer of problems is being revealed. Lack of water. The construction standards in some areas didn't contemplate this extreme. Many homes have detached garages connected to the house by a short breezeway. The copper line comes up the wall of the unheated garage into the attic area and over to the house. The pipe freezes and splits. As it warms up the leaks are evident. There is a shortage of plumbers and plumbing supplies. My buddy shipped 100' of Pex and a box of fittings to his son. There is enough stuff to fix a few dozen houses. The neighbors will luv him.

Just about every problem can be prevented or minimized if one throws enough money at it. Most don't want to pay for prevention. 

What a mess, but no different than natural disasters in other areas of the country.

they had one in '83, another in '89, another in 2011 and they even had a report with advice to prepare for more after that one which says that they need to be prepared for these events that will increase in the future.  guess what?  the report was right.  so, while i am not normally one to question sources of information, how in the hell did you come up with the 1940 bullshit?

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Billeisle is dead on -- here, like so many situations, are more complicated than they appear. The fortitude comes in accepting that's true in situations that we don't understand (and therefore simplify) just as it's true in ones that we do.

What we don't have, and need to include in our plans, is some sort of redundancy/resiliency, for the times when things go belly up. I lived in Houston for over 40 years; I have some knowledge of the area. Texas, in addition to the potential for record cold (I can remember frozen pipes; 1989 was a bad year in the Houston area), has had plenty of hurricanes/tropical storms, as well as drought and fire. Each one highlights failings in the system.

What they all highlight is our increased dependency on the technology that we've come to rely on. Houses used to be built to deal with cold by building a fire; Texas was one of the later states to be fully electrified, so there is housing stock that understands that. But the smaller/poorer houses were built in minority neighborhoods -- builders didn't make good homes for renters, they made cheap homes.

The freezing of pipes is a periodic/regular thing, it and flooding are probably what hits individual homeowners/renters on a large scale the worst. Water damage. If a hurricane is coming, they used to tell you to fill the bathtub with water to have water for essentials, like flushing the toilet, for a few days -- after a few days, you can find other resources.

Maybe part of our social contract needs to be to help people find the 3 days' worth of support that's needed before they can figure out how to keep going. Those 3 (or so) days are information on what people can and should do for themselves, and how the people who can't should prepare or be supported.  People in trailers really shouldn't try to ride out tornadoes/windstorms; disabled, etc need to consider evacuating earlier, because if you can't live without support, you need to be somewhere you can keep it.

Wendy P.

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every situation is complicated.  the fixes are time tested though.  this cold snap did not sneak up on us, i heard about it on tv a few days before it happened.  enough time to get prepared at least.  the power on our farm has been out for over a week now, and isn't likely to come on til at least tomorrow, if then.  we haven't had to use the water we gathered, yet, but aren't dumping any of it just in case.  i would have thought that with the prevalence of hurricanes in tx, that most would be prepared to live with no electricity for a week.  i guess some things that seem like they would be common sense aren't that common. 

the worst thing about the whole mess is the amount of mental gymnastics being used to deflect the responsibility from the power companies which failed to properly prepare for cold weather.  they were warned, several times, and in 2011 had a long report with some good recommendations, i read it.  one thing that jumped out at me was when they put in the part about how things like this would become more common.  go figure, they were warned, they chose to ignore the warning, then got bit in the arse.  well, at least they'll probably get a rate hike so they won't lose any profit when they attempt to fix things.  too bad they won't prepare for the next time.  good luck.

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5 hours ago, kallend said:

NASA just landed a nuclear powered aircraft carrier on Mars.

True. But if SpaceX had been given the project it likely would have been done on half the budget with a profit left for more R&D.

Edited by gowlerk

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3 hours ago, billeisele said:

Doubt that additional federal regulation is the answer. The last cold event was 1940.

From my Wednesday posting of the report on the 2011 event. A quote from the summary of that report:

"The storm, however, was not without precedent. There were prior severe cold weather events in the Southwest in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008, and 2010. The worst of these was in 1989, the prior event most comparable to 2011. That year marked the first time ERCOT resorted to system-wide rolling blackouts to prevent more widespread customer outages. In all of those prior years, the natural gas delivery system experienced production declines; however, curtailments to natural gas customers in the region were essentially limited to the years 1989 and 2003."

And here is the link again

https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf

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3 hours ago, billeisele said:

Doubt that additional federal regulation is the answer. The last cold event was 1940.

 

10 minutes ago, ryoder said:

From my Wednesday posting of the report on the 2011 event. A quote from the summary of that report:

He didn't make it clear so it confused me too. I'm pretty sure that part of his post was referring to his home state of SC.

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12 minutes ago, ryoder said:

There were prior severe cold weather events in the Southwest in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008, and 2010. The worst of these was in 1989, the prior event most comparable to 2011.

The 1989 event was when work sent us home early, and I got there just in time to see that the water was down to a very slow trickle; had we stayed at work all day, at least our outside inlet pipe would have frozen solid. As it was, I put the heating pad on it, and we were back in water.

The rent house didn't fare as well; the tenants had gone skiing, and a neighbor turned the water off at the street when he saw it running out the front door.

A lot of people in those infrequent-cold-weather places also discover that four-wheel-drive doesn't mean four-wheel-stop ;)

Wendy P.

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10 minutes ago, wmw999 said:

The 1989 event was when work sent us home early, and I got there just in time to see that the water was down to a very slow trickle; had we stayed at work all day, at least our outside inlet pipe would have frozen solid. As it was, I put the heating pad on it, and we were back in water.

The rent house didn't fare as well; the tenants had gone skiing, and a neighbor turned the water off at the street when he saw it running out the front door.

Ugh!

I'm halfway between Denver and Boulder. I woke up Tuesday to -8F and no running water.  Some tracing of water lines led me to believe the supply line is inside a drywall-covered soffit in the garage. (The garage is attached, but unheated.) It was cold as hell in there, so I opened the door between the den and the garage, and cranked up the heat. Then I turned on the kitchen faucet, and left an empty pitcher under it. At 1pm I suddenly heard the kitchen sink running, and I had water again. Thankfully, I had no broken pipes.

Edited by ryoder

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