By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Saturday, January 04, 2020 - 06:32 pm: Edit

Now for fighting other scavengers etc
yes, something a little heavier than 22.....

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Saturday, January 11, 2020 - 07:29 am: Edit

Well, with harsher weather possibly approaching, I have started to sort out an emergency car kit.

Not as ideal as true Survival torch, but it has glass breaker, seat belt cutter, compass and can charge USB devices - and has a built in Solar panel to charge it (and was fairly cheap!).

Probably not the most sturdy torch ...but not fortunately, not too many Undead or Gun wielding Mobs round here.

Ordered 2 - 1 for my car and 1 for the wifes car.

Now to sort out everything else.

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Friday, October 30, 2020 - 11:12 am: Edit

Well, the title for this topic is pretty appt for 2020.

At least the Four Horsemen will ride past this time saying "looks like they have had enough this year".

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 03:40 pm: Edit

Just received a phone call form the power company, and confirmed via Facebook and news sites that it was real: due to high demand and the fact many wind turbines have frozen up, they may be forced to do rolling back-outs to balance the power grid. Yikes!


Garth L. Getgen

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 04:01 pm: Edit

Boy. Bet you are loving that green technology right about now.

The thing about coal fired power plants was they delivered the coal supply during the summer because barges don’t deliver when the rivers freeze. Sure, the coal piles could get snow covered, and some times ice up... but usually front end loaders did not have trouble getting to the coal.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 04:31 pm: Edit

It is just a glitch (seriously). The Green Energy people will figure out how to keep the wind turbines from freezing. I do not know why they did not foresee this problem. Probably because they were planning the things to exist in a period of global warming, but then Global warming is supposed to produce more powerful wing gusts and storm, and they do not seem to stand up well, or remain operational in such weather, but we still subsidize hem with our tax money which creates the illusion that the power they produce is cheaper.

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 05:40 pm: Edit

The argument going around twitter...
Is even Fossil Fuel Electricity can be interrupted during bad weather....
The distinction they leave out,
is FF loss is the network (lines falling etc),
where Green Energy is a production stoppage at the source...

By A David Merritt (Adm) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 06:57 pm: Edit

Interesting, our local power utility said it was issues with the natural gas supply.

"In an earlier news release, (Springfield MO)CU officials said the majority of utility companies in the Midwest are experiencing natural gas delivery issues. That’s not due to lack of supply or ability to purchase natural gas, but rather because of “a critical problem created by severe cold creating delivery problems from the natural gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma,” City Utilities said."

By Richard Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, February 15, 2021 - 07:43 pm: Edit

I remember a winter in Chicago in the 70s when I was a child during the Energy Crisis where they cut off whatever was fueling the heater in our house. It dropped to 30 degrees indoors over a couple days.

Brrr.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 12:29 am: Edit

From my time in the oilfields, I can tell you that gas flowing out of a well into a pipeline isn't automated. A human being pretty much goes to every well every week and in some cases more often. There is maintenance to be done, some wells are turned on and off manually on a schedule or switched from one pipeline to another on a schedule, etc. Then there are gasoline drip tanks. Gasoline drips out of the natural gas and is collected in a "drip tank" which is part of the pipeline. The drip tanks have to be emptied manually. If you cannot get there, the tanks overflow and gasoline runs down the pipeline, reducing the gas flow and interfering with all kinds of stuff down the line.

It should be noted that some people steal raw gasoline from drip tanks since it's free if you know where to find it. That is not a good idea as "drip gas" is really dirty and will damage your engine.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 12:20 pm: Edit

Natural gas or hydro is used to replace green power when it doesn't work, because the gas and hydro (unlike nukes and coal) can be quickly turned on or off without much trouble or waste.

I believe that most utility scale green energy is built with nearly 100% capacity in gas backup. Because it needs it and you can't build new hydro most places.

Those huge batteries a few places have or are building aren't to replace the green power when it doesn't work, they're to load level the sudden fluxuations and last a couple of minutes while the gas turbines spin up (basically a giant UPS for the grid).

So, if green energy causes a blackout, it is quite likely that a gas shortage was involved as that's what kills the backup that's supposed to mean that any windless night isn't a blackout. Blaming the blackout on a gas shortage is true, but blaming it on trying to use green power rather than coal is also true.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 01:25 pm: Edit

Remember that green energy costs the equivalent of $9 a gallon gasoline. It doesn't work at all without taxpayer subsides.

By Mike Dowd (Mike_Dowd) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 01:33 pm: Edit

I know that I'm fortunate by geography: 91% of electricity generation in BC is hydroelectric, 5% biomass (waste from our forestry industry), and 4% wind.

By Steven Zamboni (Szamboni) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 02:09 pm: Edit

There are deicing systems for wind turbines in cold regions. ERCOT didn't install them.

ERCOT lost 30 GW of production yesterday, 26 GW of that was down coal and gas sites. They were screwed even if they had spent money for turbine heaters.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 02:13 pm: Edit

Use gas or coal power to keep the turbines ice-free.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 05:09 pm: Edit

Mike, Hydro is nearly the ideal backup for wind. So if your area DID want to go heavily into wind, they could probably get away with it.

Similarly, New Zeeland, with geothermal, hydro, and fairly strong reasonably steady winds, might actually be able to go net zero without excessive costs.

Cane sugar cultivation areas can also go green without excessive costs. Sugar processors can run a massive power surplus from burning off the processed cane which is an excellent fuel. (I have no idea if US cane processing does this, US sugar production has weird government regulations if I understand things correctly.)

Texas has nice winds and sun for green power, but has to use gas for the backup, which is usually acceptable, but seems to not be working well this week.

My area is hydro heavy, but the weather is too often cloudy for solar (which doesn't stop everyone), and the winds aren't steady enough for anyone sane to want to put up windmills (which doesn't stop everyone, there's a bunch of tiny wind generators on the top of the light poles outside Whole Foods, which are almost never spinning).

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 05:48 pm: Edit

1) The wind turbines in TX didn't have cold protection. As opposed to the ones in Iowa.
2) Coal, Nuclear and Gas powered plants all require WATER. Which must be in liquid form. Guess what else the power plant people in TX didn't invest in.
3) Heck, they can keep the windmills working in Norway, so there is no excuse except bad planning...

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 06:46 pm: Edit

3) Heck, they can keep the windmills working in Norway, so there is no excuse except bad planning...


That pretty much describes the rush to Green Energy....

Recall a Documentary, where they put in a Tidal Generator.... took a number a tries...just to get the right size generator....along with the correct blade size/degree....

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 09:25 pm: Edit

There are some other problems that are proving to be a challenge to getting Green technology to work right.

One is in the area of wind technology, such as sudden changes in wind velocity or direction.

Too much wind or sudden change in direction is blamed for material failure of components. Like the farmer who experienced a 100 feet of wind turbine blade entering his house at high speed because the material fractured under the strain resulted in said blade being thrown clear of its mount in a wind storm.

The other is the number of bird deaths as birds fly into the path of the rotating wind turbine blades. Estimates vary, but the ones published tend to be very high indeed.

Then there is the problem for wind turbine farms when there is no wind at all.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 10:51 pm: Edit

It was not bad planning.

Speaking as a Registered Professional Engineer who spent a few years building this energy stuff, it was NOT poor planning.

It was cost control. Preparing to stay running in negative 5F costs money. A calculation was made that this would not happen very often and that they could just make do with other energy sources for the rare times they needed them. (After all, nobody complains that there was no plan to deal with a volcano, asteroid, or zombie apocalypse. Was THAT poor planning?)

I dug into this wind thing years ago when somebody wanted me to invest in it. It basically boiled down to "Steve invests $x. Federal taxpayers invest $y. The wind farms produce $z." They could barely make the thing pay out with the "reasonable assumptions" that they would not design for below 10F because that happened only X days out of 1000 days and the power companies and federal inspectors all said that this was an acceptable situation.

If they had designed the things for 0F the windmills would not have been built because the economics did not work out to pay the investors a return.

I walked away not because of that, but because the overall plan was marginal and you only had to have one thing go wrong to drop your return below passbook savings and two things (or one long thing) to drop the return to zero.

There were also serious questions about how many hawks and eagles would be slaughtered (hundreds per year on a farm of 100 windmills).

There was also the serious question that the windmill was only going to last so long (I think it was 35 years) at which point it would be abandoned by the windmill company leaving the farmer's grandson with this monstrous thing on his land that was likely to come crashing down in pieces. Once farmers saw that they refused to sign up unless the windmill company posted a cash bond to take the things down at the end of the run. There wasn't money for that (until Congress increased the federal subsidies, thanks to you taxpaying idiots!).

In the same vein, saying "It happened ten years ago and they did nothing to prepare for it to happen again!" isn't really right. There very well might not have been any money in the kitty to pay for the "preparations" and the same "it doesn't happen very often and it is reasonable to assume that we will be available for 98% of the next 1000 days" reasoning applies. Remember that nothing is available 100% of the time. Your car(s) spent how many days in the shop over the last 20 years? Do you mean you did not take the very reasonable precaution of buying a second car and parking it in long term storage for the day your primary car needed service? The only way to prepare for out of service is a 100% duplication of the plant and nobody can make that investment pay.

People who do not run businesses always seem to assume that any given business can always pull a tiny bit out of the obscene profits to pay for reasonable precautions. But that doesn't work that way. Profits are not obscene (or lots more people would bid higher to buy into those businesses bringing the profits down to market levels) and you cannot get people to invest in something that will lose money.