{"id":46773,"date":"2021-02-27T02:48:55","date_gmt":"2021-02-27T02:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=46773"},"modified":"2021-02-27T02:48:55","modified_gmt":"2021-02-27T02:48:55","slug":"texas-feels-the-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=46773","title":{"rendered":"Texas feels the shame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By JOHN KANELIS<\/strong><\/em> \/ johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Texas continues to take its lumps over the near-disaster we experienced a week ago.<\/p>\n

You see, a state that has prided itself on its ruggedness, its independence and its know-how is being pounded over the failure of an electrical grid that was supposed to carry the state through the worst weather imaginable.<\/p>\n

It sure didn’t do the job.<\/p>\n

Indeed, now we hear that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas was about four minutes away from a total collapse.<\/p>\n

As Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times: Second, it could have been so much worse. Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of ERCOT, said Texas was \u201cseconds and minutes\u201d from complete energy system collapse \u2014 the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted. \u201cIf we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn\u2019t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,\u201d Mr. Magness said. \u201cWe\u2019d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

How does Texas save its face? How does it recover from this mess, which darkened electrical output for 4 million Texans?<\/p>\n

One thought might be to join the two other major electrical grids and give up this notion of Texas running its own grid. ERCOT already is suffering from resignations of seven board members, all of whom quit in the wake of the power failure.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t make me feel at all good about my adopted home state.<\/p>\n

As Klein writes: It wasn\u2019t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory: in 1989 temperatures and electricity generation (as a percentage of peak demand) dropped even further than they did in 2011. Texas hadn\u2019t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.<\/em><\/p>\n

Opinion | Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened – The New York Times (nytimes.com)<\/a><\/p>\n

Let us demand some actual leadership<\/em> from our, um, leaders<\/em> on this matter.<\/p>\n

Yes, we’re a rich state. However, we seem to suffer from a poverty-level absence of bright ideas on how to prevent a recurrence of what we all endured. No one likes freezing.<\/p>\n\n

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By JOHN KANELIS \/ johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com Texas continues to take its lumps over the near-disaster we experienced a week ago. You see, a state that has prided itself on its ruggedness, its independence and its know-how is being pounded over the failure of an electrical grid that was supposed to carry the state through the worst … Continue reading Texas feels the shame<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[1611,3360,9621],"class_list":["post-46773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-news","category-state-news","tag-ercot","tag-ny-times","tag-texas-deep-freeze"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46774,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46773\/revisions\/46774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}