The power outage disaster in Texas in February of 2021 proved to be a calamity with multiple variables to blame and countless fingers to point. But with many conservatives claiming wind power a failure…is this really so? What could have prevented it? Is there technology to winterize wind turbines?
In other news, South Korea and Spain both announced big wind farms in the works, and Dan and Allen also discuss natural composite nacelles made by Greenboats, de-icing technology, wooden wind turbine towers backed by Vestas, and broken down conductors.
Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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EP49 – Did Wind Power Actually Fail Texas? Can Turbines Work in Cold Weather? Plus, Big Off-Shore News
welcome back i’m Allen hall i’m Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running
all right welcome back to the uptime podcast i’m your co-host Dan Blewett our fearless host Allen hall is back with us today so excited to have him here and in today’s episode we got a pretty wide range of guitars obviously one of the big ones that we’ll cover at the end is what happened in texas right really big news wind turbines uh very much in the spotlight uh but before we get there we’re going to talk about Iberdrola building a pretty or potentially building a pretty big uh wind floating wind farm off of the coast of spain south korea on track to build the world’s biggest offshore wind farm um vestas investing in some wood tower technology we’ll also talk about down conductors there’s been some issues with some breakages we’ve kind of been peeking at on linkedin and we’ll also talk about a couple of composite upgrades to both blades and the cells and lastly we’ll circle back to the texas uh power nightmare that really uh took over the country by well took over the press cycle in the us recently so Allen welcome back glad to have you back on the show first and foremost yeah good to be back so let’s start with uh with Iberdrola so obviously floating wind we talked about that a bunch it’s starting to pick up um speed right there’s more and more of these popping up and that’s a good thing long term because now they’re going to be able to hey we’ve got more data more of these out there bobbing in the ocean like cauliflower right and so some you know see how well they work because they’re obviously seems like pretty well proven but not nearly as proven as other means of uh offshore wind right the off the offshore part is interesting in the sense that uh we’re not really limited on the size of turbines right so the growth of wind turbines in terms of output size going to the 20 megawatt plus is going to happen offshore and the capability to have literally gigawatts of power generated offshore is is really right on the precipice of that so there’s so much technology and energy being pumped into offshore wind right now and that’s where the growth is going to occur in that offshore wind sector we’re going to see a lot of great engineering changes and engineering improvements and just attacking a problem which is really difficult which is as these turbines get bigger and bigger and bigger how are you going to handle the loads how you’re going to be able to distribute the amount of energy coming off them what are the failure modes look like how you’re going to be able to service them there’s a lot of engineering problems that come along with it so it it will be the next two to three years is going to be really exciting in terms of the growth of the wind turbine industry yeah so this is these 300 megawatts of power which is going to come with an investment over over a billion euros as spearheading what the company says will be up to 2 000 megawatts in new developments off the spanish coast so this is just the tip of their their well should you say tip of the iceberg when we’re talking about water i don’t know it’s the tip of the crest of the wave here but but yeah and of course in in bigger wind farm news south korea is planning the world’s largest offshore wind farm gigantic 43 billion dollar plan to put 8.2 gigawatts so i mean just gigantic um off the coast of sainan a small archipelago west of mokpo so if you’re familiar with mokpo yep this will be but anyway they’re gonna they estimate it’ll create 120 000 jobs and they want to be one of the offshore powerhouses by 2030. so anything stick out to this uh or stick out about this as unusual or what are your thoughts well is it it seems like is it more of a industrial growth situation that’s what it seems like they’re investing in local companies to develop wind in the hopes that they have an export market i would assume because if the growth market is going to happen in offshore wind which it will then being a large manufacturer having all the production in place to handle it and because korea is a big shipping export place they make a lot of ships there first off so they know a lot about uh transporting of large objects around because they make the ships to do it in south korea so is it makes sense for for them to make the offshore wind turbines and to also bring them to where they need to go because they’re also making the ships that do it so the infrastructure a lot of the infrastructure for offshore wind is already in south korea yeah it wouldn’t surprise me a hundred thousand hundred thousand jobs seems like it’s probably on the on the small end of what that industry could create for south korea yeah yeah yeah it is so i mean you mentioned the local companies so it sounds like they’re planning on putting doosans offshore turbines which doosan’s obviously a south korean company but they their their biggest one right now is 5.5 megawatts which is getting on the small side for offshore wind turbines right obviously you know who knows what their design is and why that’s the right choice but when you start to hear of all these you know 14 15 megawatt ones by you know um ge and siemens gameza and now uh vestas with their new 15 megawatt version you wonder why you’d go five and a half megawatts when you could easily go you know 810 you know and and more but again i don’t know the economics and you know i’m sure there’s a lot of uh you know it’s a growth thing i think it’s a growth issue where you start out smaller or moderately sized and you and you work your way up to the bigger turbines the only way to do that is to to do it is to build that infrastructure one piece at a time so they’re probably starting off on things they can do today knowing five years from now they’re going to be a player but they’ve got to pump billions of dollars into that to that industrial system to get there yeah so moving on vestas is investing in modvion which is a company that’s creating technology for wooden towers we talked about this in the summer um in april they installed a 30 meter tower on an island in uh sweden and their goal is to complete their first commercial tower in 2022 so this is obviously like a big carbon footprint kind of thing is that right
yeah right resources sure sure and recyclability uh i i assume but it also may be a way like we talked uh we’re gonna have coming up on 3d printed uh concrete towers maybe just another way to do it depending on where the location is and how you want to build them right could be yeah well and we’ve uh in our upcoming episode we’re going to talk with uh henrik um lon nielsen from cobot where they’re talking about 3d printing wind turbine bases and potentially towers as well so the idea of using non-steel materials for wind turbine towers in the near future is you know it’s a couple different options coming coming up pretty quick so pretty interesting it’s going to happen don’t you think that’s going to happen i’m going to make the transition away from steel eventually or at least in some applications you’re going to move away from steel and concrete would be one of those answers like that is for certain and the wood may play out too right there’s having more options is always a better situation for everybody because um you know transportation of of the towers and all the all the infrastructure that has to happen around those towers those steel towers you’re kind of getting to the limit of being able to move things right and you’re going to have to do it in sections pretty soon that’s why the concrete makes sense and why wood in sections starts to make sense yeah absolutely so more on the composites kind of side the natural fibers kind of sides let’s talk about green boats so they’re really interesting company they make some i mean beautiful boats uh they’re a german company and they’ve been uh touting a offshore nacelle project recently which is pretty cool obviously nacelles typically have a fiberglass you know top to them um you know like a steel frame but a large chunk of it is composite and they’re trying their goal green boats uses like natural fibers and their composite mixes and all that stuff so their goal is to make green composites in this uh in the cell so i mean what what problem do you see that solving alan i think it’s a recycling problem right from the fiberglass epoxy in the cells that are typically used today what do you do with them when you decommission the turbine do you grind it up and make it into some other object or you bury it what do you do with it uh having a material that is quasi biodegradable right so if they’re using flax fiber as the fiber instead of fiberglass that that’s a natural product it’s grown right so it’s just a harvested product and we’ve been using that we’ve been using flax for all kinds of industrial products for hundreds of years so i think it makes sense and the nacelle is probably the right place for it because it’s not a critically loaded structure there’s not a lot of this like a blade where it has a lot of load onto it it’s basically just a shell kind of similar somewhat to a boat honestly uh so it’s the right application that’s the hardest part is finding the right application for the right technology and it seems like they’re pushing in the right place so it’d be interesting to see how it plays out because at some point it’s going to be a cost cost driven effort if if the costs are the same for green boat to make in the cell versus a standard fiberglass epoxy company to make it you they may get chosen more just because the recyclability is going to be a plus in their in their direction so we’ll see how it plays out because there hasn’t been a lot of recyclable materials in wind turbines have you noticed everybody’s really making a push to make them more recyclable because so many are starting to come out for service and yet they’re not recyclable yeah for the most part yep the world is quickly filling up with trash i mean it’s certainly not funny but that’s definitely what’s happening i mean i think everyone’s getting more more aware of their own plastic use and all this stuff and yeah like you said the the bill is coming due a little bit with a lot of these wind turbines coming out of service so yeah ending up in yeah those big blades ending up in landfills is is crazy and obviously the cells are part of it too so um last thing in this segment let’s talk about this interesting uh evo flap which is a a root um aerodynamic flap uh eva flop evo blade is is the company out of um out of germany and um evo flap it looks like it’s gonna increase some of the aerodynamic flow and but it’s also potentially a pretty large um you know a large performance upgrade to be added to a blade as a retrofit so i mean we’ve talked to others on the show about you know aerodynamics i mean where are the limits of tampering with not i wouldn’t i shouldn’t say tampering but with but with upgrading or adding to blades that may not have been tested for that use or for that upgrade in the factory well it’s a really good question because any alteration to a large structure such as a winter blade is always fraught with the danger of do you put some damage or put some load on the blade in which it was not designed for and then over at service life you had this fatigue factor does it end up damaging the blade large or structurally over time that’s a really good question increasing power production is a real need it obviously is there’s a lot of companies that are adding power curve upgrades to wind turbines so the question is do you know enough about the blade itself to make that alteration in most cases you don’t because the blade manufacturer is not the company that’s putting on the upgrade so there’s some assumptions being made about what that blade can handle and how much load you’re putting on that blade to get the power curve improvement so the the use of basically flaps or spoilers is a viable means to increase power production no doubt i think it just comes with the added engineering assessment that has to be made which is if i add on this aerodynamic change does it increase loading on my blade do i have to worry about it going forward do i have any service history with my particular blade in my particular design that i’m not going to do some unknown amount of damage going forward those are that’s the cost benefit analysis that has to happen power curve improvement risk of blade damage what does that look like and a lot of times you don’t really see those numbers that’s the hard part Dan is that those numbers are not provided on the websites that’s for sure so whether they’re providing to the operators i don’t know that’s a good question yeah well like you said it i think it it just warrants more cost benefit analysis where someone needs to determine is this going to be right for our model of turbine and how do we know and how can we know like what else can we do to figure it out and you know we can see that the benefits there but is it going to be right for our application so yeah yeah right all right so let’s talk a little bit about uh down conductor so we both follow blade partners on linkedin they often post a lot of really interesting photos of their repairs stun up tower and they seem to do really really great work uh so some interesting photos about snapped down conductors which is obviously a major lightning issue and then there’s just lots of other just blade damage uh in addition to the down conductor um so you know we really encourage you to go follow blade partners on their linkedin page but Allen what’s how did down conductors snap those are pretty thick pretty robust cables how does that happen i mean isn’t the lightning supposed to just hit the receptor flow through it and go about its business yeah well there’s there’s a couple of different ways you have a broken down conductor some down conductors are actually built in segments that are fastened together down the length of the blade so you can have because of the flexing of the blade you get your flex in these joints and the joints fail so you have actually a physical break in the down conductor which is a problem uh the the other way they break is they’re they’re really too tight in the in the structure so they’re getting fatigued pulled and compressed and eventually they snap the other way we’ve seen them break is the lightning protection system on the blade isn’t too functional usually the lightning protection system tends to degrade over time so you get into years 5 through 10 5 through 15 the lightning protection system at the tip isn’t all about all that great and the lightning starts to reach out to other places like the down conductor and it will hit the down conductor and weaken it or separate it just physically break it because the down conductor is meant to carry lightning energy not to take a direct attachment of lightning to it because the direct attachment has a lot of heat if you can well imagine it’s like an arc welder hitting a a cable if you hit a down conductor cable with an arc welder you’re going to cut into it you’re going to actually physically make it weaker right so you’ve now changed the the stress stresses in the cable the flexing of the cable eventually breaking that’s that will tend to happen so there are a number of ways to to break that cable the the critical thing is and this is where our owns over in uh latvia is is trying to do measurements on all these wind turbines to measure if the dow conductor is really there or not and what the resistance of those down conductors are that’s that’s really important because a lot of if you do have a breakage of a down conductor in the blade itself you can’t see it there’s no really no way to know that without taking resistance measurements and if you if you do get an open circuit basically a very high resistance measurement uh from the blade tip to the to the turbine the cell something is wrong inside that blade and you better fix it now because if there is a broken down conductor inside and you do have a lightning strike event it’s going to be all kinds of arcane and sparking inside that blade that you just don’t want because it’s going to do struck real structural damage to the blade so it’s a pretty serious issue and blade partners does put a number of magnificent photos on their website and they do talk to some of the issues that they see around the world and it’s i think it’s a really does a service to the wind turbine industry to know these are the sort of failure points that we’re having out in the field because that’s only the way engineers can correct those situations is to have data have some real data and blade partners does a good job of highlighting those those issue areas yeah that’s interesting and thought about that because i used to weld a good amount in high school and into early college i worked on cars and really enjoyed metal work but yeah when you’re when you’re welding obviously the ark is melting it’s creating the weld but then that all that same electricity is going to flow back through the piece and then into your clamp back into the machine and those parts of it are completely unaffected so yeah that that analogy immediately like clicked with me where yeah that makes perfect sense or if it directly strikes the cable it’s going to act like a like a welder like you said and damage it put a lot of heat right there but then it’s going to flow and go back where it needs to go which is going to be into the earth obviously so yeah okay interesting right but yeah that’s it’s crazy to see those big cables snap i mean you think of things at a certain thickness you feel like that could never break right but they can it should yeah right it shouldn’t break and they’re designed not to break but there’s other effects happening on that blade that have caused that cable to snap or to be hit by lightning which is probably the worst case situation and then fixing that i mean they’re just going to replace the down conductor i mean is that the only fix i mean what’s the action item they’ll splice in a new section typically so you can if you think about wire like wiring a car you can put a splice into a set of wires to make the wire longer and so there are mechanical splices that do a pretty good job of carrying lightning current there’s different varieties of them but essentially they’re mostly are some sort of compression fitting that takes the the good part of the copper down conductor to the good part of the copper down conductor and adds that splice so you have to have the proper tooling to crimp to crimp those connections on rarely do they weld them i’ve heard have heard of people trying to weld those together or saw quote-unquote solder them together there are a means to do that but it really does not work in a wind turbine situation you’re going to have some sort of clamp compressed fitting that puts a new section of down conductor in for the damaged suction so it’s it’s involved i mean obviously you’re probably going to do it by cutting open the section of the blade to get down to that down conductor once you enter the down conductor then you’re going to have to expose it clamp it seal it all back up and try to rebuild the blade from the inside out which is going to take some time really will take some time all right so let’s transition here to texas man what a what a story in the last uh couple weeks obviously you know really a rough situation you know a lot of people were out of power for a long people a long long period of time a lot of people died uh just an awful situation in general i mean you know president biden declared a disaster and rightfully so um and of course the question is there’s a lot of finger pointing and also rightfully so but the question is why did this happen and which of our main power sources failed and there’s been a lot of uh fingers pointed at wind which deserves you know wind deserves one of the fingers point at it just like every other power source um and major people behind it but you know wind power was a much smaller percentage of texas’s total grid you know they’re the natural gas and coal are by far the bigger contributors to the texas uh power grid so and what’s interesting and one of the things i want to your opinion on is um you know so texas gets 46 percent of their electricity from natural gas says up to 23 in wind 18 from coal 11 nuclear two percent solar um that’s according to uh ercot and uh cool diagram by joshua d rhodes on uh shared on newsweek but you know on some news sites it’s and let me read a quote here by um sid miller who is texas’s commissioner of agriculture so i’m not sure what his real relation is his uh knowledgeable uh how knowledgeable he is about power but he said we should never build another wind turbine in texas the experiment failed big time so i mean by that logic does he mean we should never build another coal plant or another natural gas plant because they equally failed it’s interesting that wind gets the finger pointed at it one really all of it’s to blame but i mean alan what was your take of this
situation i think right now it’s what i would call the fog of war it’s too early to tell what the real pinch points were and to have any real discussion of what to do about it first off you’re talking about what once in 50-year kind of event once every 100-year kind of event and does it make sense to modernize a system or winterize a system so they can handle that one and 50-year event maybe maybe it does maybe does but to to to point to one particular energy source as being the the main contributor i think is never the case right in in any sort of large um power system distribution failure it’s usually a combination of combination sources there’s many variables that go along with it and to pick one out sort of misses the whole point of the of the problem right the real problem is it got really cold in texas for an extended period of time a lot of equipment’s not winterized i’m sure why would you do it you know because it rarely happens right and a lot of other things happened it was a sort of a not smart calamity of errors but just sort of the way the system is designed that that was going to be the outcome regardless of what the power sources were because it pretty much every power source had an issue because it’s not designed to handle those cold temperatures for that long period of time so i think it does everybody a disservice to pick out one so soon without having the facts because what are you going to do really what are you going to do you got so many wind turbines in texas right now you’re going to turn them all off you know because it is providing us now a substantial amount of the power for texas you can’t do that do you want to winterize them all and basically put anti-icing or de-icing features on all of them no it’s going to be super expensive do you want to plan for that 50-year event that’s a better discussion do you want to plan for a 50-year event maybe you do and what what does that look like is that is it a million dollars is it 100 million dollars is it a billion dollars to do that yeah and that that’s where the the rubber meets the road in terms of engineering is there’s a cost benefits everything that you do yeah could you winterize everything in texas absolutely but there’s only a limited amount of funds to do it with do you have the funds to do it or can you use those funds to do other things that need to get done yeah you gotta you gotta weigh those off and someone’s gotta make a decision and um i always feel like a six month downtime when something like this is probably the right answer that you need to get the engineers involved and get people really looking at it closely to see what can be done relatively shortly and what needs to be done more of a long term because if it is let’s just say you had a frozen pipe somewhere if that one frozen pipe knocked off 100 000 electricity users then fix the pipe put a heater on the pipe if you’re talking about fixing all the wind turbine blades in west texas that’s a bigger problem that it’s going to be more costly it may not make sense to do yeah don’t you think it was still there right now well and this to me is just a it’s a black swan event right um that’s uh naseem nicholas taleb i’ve mentioned him numerous times i found his books really interesting they’re on my reading list for 2020. um and he talks about these big events because he it deals with forecasting and uh you know on wall street and you know the great example here is is the quova 19 pandemic could anyone have predicted that this would have happened and like you know why why wouldn’t some of these big businesses have kept more cash so they could withstand a pandemic right well who who would have anticipated it should we have like learned a lesson from the you know pandemic back in like 1920 um you know and this is this is the same exact thing like they hadn’t had a storm like this in texas in what 50 years or more i can’t remember the exact number but a huge amount of time and uh you know so it’s not clear that you should always plan for black swan events maybe for in some cases you just need to absorb them and say look we know that if this kind of crazy storm which happens on average once every every 50 years it’s going to hurt us x amount you might plan for it financially in some way but i don’t know that you can take you’re gonna rip you know just like say there’s a flood every hundred years that’s gonna reach up somewhere where it’s just like it never floods do you get flood insurance for your home i don’t know if you live in louisia if you would live in louisiana do you get flood insurance free home most certainly you probably do right especially if you’re in new orleans um sure but like i don’t i don’t know that you get flood insurance if you live in tennessee even though maybe there’s a you know crazy one i don’t know it comes back to that where it’s not clear yet whether it would have financially made sense because the big finger pointing is well these wind turbines they’re just junk and they turn off right when you need them well they just didn’t install the winterization packages like they don’t have blade heating elements to keep ice off the blades because why would they right like it’s not clear they would need that and then they didn’t get these other packages there’s other there’s other winterization stuff that you can get in a wind turbine different types of oils and all sorts of things that are going to keep them up yeah i mean these things operate in minnesota just fine in finland and right in the arctic almost right they operate in brutal conditions but in texas they’re like yeah we don’t really probably need that except once every 50 years or 100 years or whatever so yeah so people think that wind turbines are a just unreliable which is not true it just they just didn’t really buy the right package for it so well and it comes down to the cost of electricity right that if let’s just say they decided to winterize all the thousands of turbines that sit in west texas that’s going to be a larger energy bill that’s where that cost gets distributed to and it ends up in the cost of electricity so i think if you would ask the common consumer would you want cheaper energy over a 50-year period for that one event you could live through that one three-day event what would you do and they’re going to choose cheap energy over the 50-year period every every single time and that’s what engineers and sort of the the financial people do every day is try to put risks and what the cost of those risks are and try to weigh them off versus the cost of making an improvement that’s what they’re doing and so the the the risks were relatively minor compared to the cost i’m sure that they were that’s why they don’t have the winterization systems in the in the turbines much like you know winterization in the natural gas plants same same reason doesn’t happen that often yeah and it’s easy to look back now and say oh we clearly should have done this it cost us so much and then lives and all this but if if the storm hadn’t happened there’d be a lot of wind farm operators looking at the window at the extra millions and millions of dollars they spent on winterization wondering why did we do why did we do that like it’s been 20 years now we’ve never had any use for any of this stuff that costs millions of dollars that’s easily the other on the other side of it just like with you know 911 was a huge um black swan huge like should we have been having incredible security measures to prevent something that we had no idea was going to happen something that was kind of unthinkable i mean there was no conceivable need great question yeah security prior to that happening which is a terribly unfortunate awful event um and now security’s been much higher after we knew that something like that could happen which you know it’s awful terribly for america so you know with this it’s still it’s just like well there’s probably not going to be another storm like that for another multiple decades in texas so it’s not clear that we should rush and change this you know and that with every uh you know again black swan event like this that you should quickly but like you said i think you brought up a good point which is that there’s probably other things that are easier like a lot of the natural gas failed because things froze and so like you start to weigh the cost well we don’t need to winterize a 2000 wind turbines what if we just really winterize the natural gas supply so if this does happen again maybe the turbines go offline but we keep all of our natural gas we keep all of our coal because the state has diversified that seems to be maybe a sensible choice that i mean i can’t imagine it would cost more than winterizing all those turbines i mean that’s a huge expense um yeah and the other thing that i’m interested in your opinion on is is why so we’ve we’ve been putting some facebook posts out uh on the weather guard lightning tech um facebook page and it’s fascinating the comments people leave are completely unrelated they don’t read the article they’ll just comment and they go yeah look how well they work in texas like maybe put some you know time and engineering them to withstand the winter and uh there’s a lot of fingers pointed at at wind turbines in this situation where it’s just like they’re looking people are looking for a you know a moment just to say aha see renewable energy doesn’t work that really isn’t the case why do you think there’s so many people ready to lash out at renewable energy well it comes with a baggage of really the politics that really shouldn’t be attached to it but it wind turbines and solar are attached to a political movement and when you’re in texas um there’s not a lot of there’s a substantial part of the population that disagrees with the approach of that political movement and when given the opportunity to push back they will right because i’ll give you that example so there’s a hurricane there’s a hurricane and it hits it hits texas well the new stories are global warming is going to just it’s going to increase the number of hurricanes and we saw it from al gore the number of hurricanes is going to increase substantially and we’re going to have all those cataclysmic damage it’s going to cost us trillions of dollars a year to compensate for all the increased global temperatures and then when it doesn’t happen
you get this kind of response like well well what what the heck right you told me the world was going to end and i had to prepare my house for more hurricanes and my life for more hurricanes and it didn’t happen and you’re also the same proponent of wind and solar well what the heck’s going on right who do i believe because do i believe my lying eyes is that is that what you know it just becomes this really um politically uh charged environment where it doesn’t need to be that way there are places and times for wind turbines there’s places and times for solar there’s places and times for nuclear but if we tie it to the world is ending you’re going to get this sort of vocal response and i think that’s sort of a natural outcome into this sort of the political environment that has been created for us in a sense by a lot of the media which is
in order to get a headline you need to get clicks how do you get clicks you get clicks by declaring crazy stuff’s gonna happen and can’t really back it up so at least to a society that just becomes polarized i i think everybody needs to take a little bit of step back and say look west texas for the most part has been putting up wind turbines for a number of years they’re a benefit to texas it makes texas independent of the united states in terms of power and energy usage unlike my state which is not do we depend on canada a lot for our energy sources um and if if texas wants to remain energy independent they’re going to have to play in all the fields solar wind natural gas uh they probably sell some coal factories up they’re going to have to have nuclear sites up too all those things are going to make it possible for texas to be in an energy independence if they’re having a quote-unquote black swan event that doesn’t mean you trash the whole system it just means you need to take another hard look at it and see where you may need to make improvements but i i sure as heck don’t think that there’s any financial or rash financials approach that would say you know get rid of wind turbines i think they are just part of the of the bigger scheme of energy variability and providing energy via various sources that helps the state of texas why not why not do it that way but we’re going to see that we’re going to see that where are you going to see that conversation pop up anywhere yeah yeah it’s it’s really strange i mean dan crenshaw who at times has some really intelligent thoughts posted a really long thread on twitter saying this is the truth about what happened in texas and he just says basically oh you know wind froze and couldn’t help us when we needed it but the gas uh you know the gas plants they were still online but the pipes froze you know therefore it’s not natural gas’s fault it’s like well the wind turbines wouldn’t have frozen either if people had you know planned for a once in a century storm which he sort of gives he says texas infrastructure isn’t designed for once in a century freezes which okay if you’re gonna give that pass to like why why do you not give that pass to wind when you give that pass to to gas um it’s just like they just want to take their sides and it’s like look everything failed you know all of it failed but right and it does it doesn’t help the citizens of texas no it doesn’t do that and right and i you know i i don’t i i saw the dan crenshaw twitter feed and and read through some of those points i think part of that is just a natural reaction like like this sucks you know i think that’s what was just a frustration like we’re losing power a lot of people losing power is going to cause a lot of hurt to a lot of families that i know and that’s not cool with me uh i don’t like but it’s this it’s too early to tell as to what the correction would be anyway and to put to lay blame that early is crazy if you want if you want to go look at what the real consequences was and where where the failure points were awesome do it do it and come back with something that’s helpful uh to the people of texas and i i think crenshaw would be one of those people that actually would do that i think you know he’s going to be part of that mix to go to go help fix this thing if they’re going to make any changes but i do think we have created this polarization um because there’s you know one political party that is pretty much in the in the push for renewable energy green energy with the caveat if we don’t do it the world’s going to end yeah and there’s a there’s going to be a disagreement naturally yeah well in his conclusion and his long thread which uh was on february 16th you know he ends it with you know this raises the obvious question can we ever rely on renewables to power the grid during extreme weather the answer is clearly yes i mean they they operate in really brutal conditions but he says no you need gas or nuclear he so he just completely oh i just choose his own you know his own conclusion like that’s not true yeah um yeah so it’s like okay that’s cl with him being an intelligent guy clearly i’ve heard him on the rogan podcast a couple of times um he’s just choosing to overlook the fact that wind turbines can operate completely fine in any weather and condition pretty much um they just didn’t this time and so he said oh because they didn’t this time therefore they never can the fact is that can we ever rely on them is just patently untrue so it’s just uh i don’t know finger pointing is finger pointing i suppose but yeah we all we all fall into that same trap right that sort of first gut reaction and not really thinking through what’s actually happened and that’s what the problem with twitter is you can you can post that post those emotions to the world and and if you had another 15 minutes to think about it you would would have posted something different yeah that’s a lot of that’s the word a lot of confirmation bias people speaking to their base you know and um sure you know and then again i’m not i’m not a i’m i’m not a democrat i’m not a republican so i really don’t have a a horse in the race but you definitely see people like oh winter you know wind power is you know without fault that’s not true either that is intermittent right that’s the biggest con of it when the wind doesn’t blow they don’t produce like that’s that’s a that’s a thing it certainly is um but this and they are you know a nuisance to some people and you know we’ll chat about that on an upcoming episode more as well but you know there’s pros and cons to all of it but it doesn’t seem like going back to fossil fuels in 2021 is really like the the new path up the mountain to a better planet and better economy that’s just not it yeah it may not be right it may not be it may be and we’re still trying i think we’re still trying to figure a lot a lot of that out i i do i do see i listen you do too we listen to a lot of podcasts in the sort of the green energy sector and those a lot of those podcasts do not talk about anything in the technology field at all they’re talking about policy and the policy goes like this the world’s going to end in nine years therefore x well okay we we don’t have a lot of agreement about the the nine-year thing that’s an assumption one and two your ex uh has a cost associated with it and if you’re going to devote those kind of resources to that one particular outcome and that’s the only thing that matters and that’s what you’re saying when you say the world’s going to end in nine years is that you’re saying there’s only this solution or we all die then you’re not really taking a real hard look at what all the options are nor are you looking at what the consequences of making that decision are that’s troubling i think that’s really troubling and i’ve listened to a couple of podcasts just recently where that has been the assumption like well we can only do x well we can’t only do x you know because who knows how many people that’s going to leave hungary starving and dying on the streets right because those are the real consequences to making global changes to power distribution systems is that people will die right or people will starve or people won’t get educated and all the things that will happen and that weighing those weighing those costs and benefits needs to happen we need to take away the the world’s going to explode in 10-year discussion and get to reality and we’re starting to see a little bit more of that from like an elon musk uh we’re starting to see more of that from a bill gates electrification allows in a lot of cases kids to go to school right that allows them to have fresh water so they don’t die when they’re infants from diseases that you know they shouldn’t be having those those are those consequences to uh energy policies that we really really need to get out on the table and i hate this this uh i really despise this we need to have an honest conversation bullcrap that goes on look there are there are a lot of smart people out there that have looked at a lot of the cost benefits of this and we need to have to evaluate which ones come first and i think when we’ve looked at which which uh pain points in terms of humanity come first um carbon dioxide emissions don’t doesn’t typically reach top ten now it doesn’t say it’s not an important issue that’s not something we’re going to not going to address i think we are going to address it and when it is an important issue and we need to do that but we also need to balance it with uh with other things and and that’s where the engineering part in sort of the the financial aspect of it and the that need to come into it and we just haven’t we haven’t gotten to that point yet still too political all right we’re gonna wrap up today’s episode of uptime if you’re new to the show welcome if you’re a regular here thank you for your continued support please 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