Mushrooms* 🍄

Despite the growing development of wind energy production in Texas, the state’s transmission network would need significant infrastructure upgrades to ship out the energy produced in High Plains to other parts of the state. https://t.co/zEp77eZjvl

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) August 2, 2022

Texas has more wind turbines than any other state in the union. Which is great, except Texas doesn’t have the transmission lines to deliver that electricity outside of the region where it’s generated. Because, of course.

What can we do about it? According to the state Public Utility Council, the same people who couldn’t do anything when we froze in February (and haven’t done anything since): they can’t do anything.

It does take a lot of time to figure it out — you’re talking about a transmission line that’s going to be in service for 40 or 50 years, and it’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” Jewell said. “You want to be sure that the savings outweigh the costs, so it is a longer process. But we need more transmission in order to be able to move more energy. This state is growing by leaps and bounds.”

Growing, but nothing we can do about it. We certainly can’t tell people about it  And besides, what if the readily available electricity doesn’t outweigh the costs?

This is where I note some of the turbines get turned off by ERCOT because they create excess capacity because we can’t deliver that electricity to people facing brownouts because the rest of the system is overtaxed. Really gotta be sure those new transmission lines are worth it, right?

Many years ago my electricity provider told me I had signed up for a program to use renewable energy. Those transmission lines weren’t there then, either. Now I know why they quietly dropped that program.

The American Society Of Civil Engineers reviewed what happened in February 2021.

"the failures that caused overwhelming human and economic suffering during February will increase in frequency and duration due to legacy market design shortcomings, growing infrastructure interdependence, economic and population growth drivers, and aging equipment even if the frequency and severity of weather events remains unchanged.”

And what is the state doing about it, a year later and after this summer from hell?

Not a damned thing.

*keeping us in the dark and feeding us shit