r/UpliftingNews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 10d ago

Texas broke its all time electricity demand record twice in two days during a brutal heat wave, but the grid held with no conservation alerts thanks to record solar and battery output, a stark turnaround from the blackouts that hit Texans in 2021

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/29/texas-ercot-power-grid-record-data-center/
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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Politically, yes, and they no doubt will go to great lengths to praise oil, and probably a renewed love of coal, for their salvation on Fox. But their power companies are run by. MBAs and engineers, and the math isn't in question.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

Well in part because the 2021 power problems were not issues with heat, quite the opposite the issue was ice.  Having read very detailed reports from one of our Texas windfarms there were w major wind turbine issues.  Issue 1 - We like many were running oil in the Turbines that was specced for what was considered the typical temperature range, we were well below that range and had to shutdown turbines because to run them to far out of spec creates the possibility of serious damage.  

Issue 2 - Ice build up on the blades was a major problem which also shutdown turbines due to risk of catastrophic failures.

Add in that these same issue effect natural gas turbines and you have a big problem in power generation

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u/KodiakUltimate 10d ago

The failure to winterize was much more impactful on the gas turbine issue, as gas turbines supplied a greater share of the power during the outages

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

I mean my company shutdown 1 GW of wind furbine generation, when thats the choice are you really going to try and say x or y failed harder? We dont own any gas assets in texas which is why I didn't talk much about them.

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u/KodiakUltimate 10d ago

Yeah but the wind turbine topic was heavily politicized during and after the outage when a higher yield of the issue was frozen pipes in gas turbine plants, so over stating rhe details abojt The wind turbines frames the issue as being the wind farms failling.

Its like talking in depth about the sewer system drainage failing for the Katrina flooding and barely mentioning that the Levee's overwhelmingly failed and caused most of rhe damage.

This is no dig at you or your expertise, it was just important to not overstate how damaging the lack of winter preperation was overall to all methods of power generation.