The Temporary Collapse Of Texas Is Foreshadowing The Total Collapse Of The United States

By Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse Friday, February 19, 2021

We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to the United States as a whole.

America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling. Our power grids were never intended to support so many people, our water systems are a complete joke, and it has become utterly apparent that we would be completely lost if a major long-term national emergency ever struck.

Texas has immense wealth and vast energy resources, but now it is being called a “failed state”.

If it can’t even handle a few days of cold weather, what is the rest of America going to look like when things really start to get chaotic in this country?

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At this point, it has become clear that the power grid in Texas is in far worse shape than anyone ever imagined. When extremely cold weather hit the state, demand for energy surged dramatically. At the same time, about half of the wind turbines that Texas relies upon froze, and the rest of the system simply could not handle the massive increase in demand.

Millions of Texans were without power for days, and hundreds of thousands are still without power as I write this article.

And now we are learning that Texas was literally just moments away from “a catastrophic failure” that could have resulted in blackouts “for months”…

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

I can’t even imagine how nightmarish things would have eventually gotten in Texas if there had actually been blackouts for months.

According to one expert, the state really was right on the verge of a “worst case scenario”…

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

For years, I have been telling my readers that they have got to have a back up plan for power, because during a major emergency the grid can fail.

And when it fails, it can literally cost some people their lives. I was deeply saddened when I learned that one man in Texas actually froze to death sitting in his own recliner…

As Texas suffered through days of power outages, a man reportedly froze to death in his recliner with his wife clinging to life beside him.

The man was found dead in his Abilene home on Wednesday after being without power for several days in the record cold.

Most Americans don’t realize that much of the rest of the world actually has much better power infrastructure than we do. Just check out these numbers…

In Japan, the average home sees only 4 minutes of power outages per year. In the American Midwest, the figure is 92 minutes per year. In the Northeast, it’s 214 minutes; all those figures cover only regular outages and not those caused by extreme weather or fires.

As our population has grown and our infrastructure has aged, performance has just gotten worse and worse. In fact, things ran much more smoothly all the way back in the mid-1980s…

According to an analysis by Climate Central, major outages (affecting more than 50,000 homes or businesses) grew ten times more common from the mid-1980s to 2012. From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled. In a 2017 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported that there were 3,571 total outages in 2015, lasting 49 minutes on average. The U.S. Energy Administration reports that in 2016, the average utility customer had 1.3 power interruptions, and their total blackout time averaged four hours.

America is literally crumbling all around us, and it getting worse with each passing year.

Our water systems are another example.

In Texas, the cold weather literally caused thousands of pipes to burst. The damage caused by all of these ruined pipes is going to be in the billions of dollars.

Right now, we are being told that a total of 797 water systems in the state are currently reporting problems with “frozen or broken pipes”…

Some 13.5 million people are facing water disruptions with 797 water systems throughout the state reporting issues such as frozen or broken pipes, according to Toby Baker, executive director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. About 725 systems are under a boil water advisory, Baker said during a press conference Thursday.

Overall, approximately 7 million residents of the state live in areas that have been ordered to boil water, and it could take months for service to fully return to normal.

Without water, none of us can survive for long, and it is absolutely imperative that you have a back up plan in case your local system goes down.

In Houston, people that are without water in their homes have been forced to line up to fill buckets at a public spigot…

Meanwhile, in scenes reminiscent of a third world country, Houston residents resorted to filling up buckets of water from a spigot in a local neighborhood.

One Houston resident, whose power has just gone back on Thursday after three days but still has no water, told DailyMail.com: ‘It is crazy that we just watched NASA land on Mars but here in Houston most of us still don’t have drinking water.’

You can watch video of this happening right here. Of course if your local water system completely fails, there won’t even be a public spigot available for you to get water.

Shortages of food and other essential supplies are also being reported in Texas.

For Philip Shelley and his young wife, the situation became quite desperate fairly rapidly…

Philip Shelley, a resident of Fort Worth, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter, Ava, were struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and due April 4.

“(Ava) is down to half a can of formula,” Shelley said. “Stores are out if not extremely low on food. Most of our food in the refrigerator is spoiled. Freezer food is close to thawed but we have no way to heat it up.”

So what would they have done if the blackouts had lasted for months?

All over the state, extremely long lines have been forming at local supermarkets. In some cases, people have started waiting way before the stores actually open…

Joe Giovannoli, 29, arrived at a Central Market supermarket in Austin at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, an hour-and-a-half before it opened. Minutes later, more than 200 people had lined up behind him in the biting 26-degree weather.

Giovannoli’s wife is three months pregnant and the power in their one-bedroom Austin apartment blinked out Tuesday night. After a water pipe broke, firefighters also turned off the building’s water, he said. Giovannoli said he realized he still had it better than many others across Texas, but worried how long things will take to get back to normal.

This is happening in communities across Texas, and you can see video of one of these “bread lines” right here.

Of course those that had gotten prepared in advance did not have to wait in such long lines because they already had food.

Sadly, even though Joe Giovannoli had gotten to the supermarket so early, he later received really bad news…

A few minutes before the store opened its doors, a manager stepped outside and warned those waiting in line that supplies inside were low: No produce, no baked goods, not much canned food.

“We haven’t had a delivery in four days,” he said.

Remember, this is just a temporary crisis in Texas that is only going to last for a few days.

So what would happen if a severe long-term national emergency disrupted food, water and power systems for months on end?

All it took to cause a short-term “collapse scenario” in the state of Texas was some cold weather.

Eventually, much worse things will happen to our nation, and it has become clear that we are not ready.

So get prepared while you still can, because time is running out.

Biden’s Dept. of Energy Blocked Texas from Increasing Power Ahead of Storm




Outages Morph Into Outrage As Texans Slapped With “Mind-Blowing” Power Bills

By Zero Hedge Friday, February 19, 2021

The rolling blackouts that plunged up to 15 million Texans into darkness amid a historic cold snap are diminishing by the end of the week. About 188k customers were without power in the state on Friday morning. Days after power prices jumped from $50 per Megawatt to more than $9,000, the horror stories pour in for those who had power this week during grid chaos as they are mind-boggled how their energy bills skyrocketed.

None of these horrifying power bill stories below should be a shock as we described to readers in the piece titled “Power Bills To The Moon: Chaos, Shock As Electricity Prices Across US Explode,” that this would happen.

Texans who were on a variable or indexed plans with power companies are only now reporting their bills have jumped hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars for the month.

Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that’s a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.

“It’s mind-blowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said.

“It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”

Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.
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“There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” Pierce said, adding that if the virus pandemic hadn’t affected his work, “we could have taken care of this.”

Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated.

WFAA Dallas spoke with one person who said:

“Mine is over $1,000…not sure how…700 square foot apt I have been keeping at 60 degrees.”

One couple said:

“When your electric company tells you to switch but there has been a hold on switching for over a week now. Using as little as possible 1300 sq ft house and this is my bill. . How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020 year. “

A tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of their bill that now stands at $3,800 for the month.

Ty Williams told WFAA that his average electric bill is around $660 per month. He said it now stands at $17,000.

Williams wondered: “How in the world can anyone pay that? I mean you go from a couple of hundred dollars a month… there’s absolutely no way…it makes no sense.”

… and in case you were wondering, OilPrice.com ran the numbers of how much it would cost to charge a Tesla in Texas earlier this week. While a regular charge costs around $18 using a Level 1 or Level 2 charger at home, estimates showed that the surge in power prices would have cost $900.

So the Texas power outage has morphed into outrage for customers who had variable power rates. We don’t want to speculate, but if small and medium-sized enterprises were on these plans (unhedged) – their bills could be absolutely devastating. Hopefully, larger companies hedged against the spike in power rates; if not, their energy for this month could be astronomical.

A synopsis of what happened - and why...
Now, as the snow across Texas melts and the lights come back on, answers remain hard to come by.

What’s clear is that no one — neither the power plants that failed to cold-proof their equipment nor the grid operator
charged with safeguarding the electric system — was prepared for such an extreme weather event.

What happened in those two hours highlights just how vulnerable even the most sophisticated energy systems are
to the vagaries of climate change, and how close it all came to crashing down.

The warning signs started well before the cold set in. Nearly a week before the blackouts began, the operator of a wind farm in Texas
alerted the grid manager, known as Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that ice from the impending storm could force it offline,
an early signal that capacity on the system would likely be compromised.

On Thursday, a natural gas trader trying to secure supplies for his company’s power plants for the holiday weekend was surprised to see prices surging.

The reason? There were concerns that gas production in West Texas was at risk of freezing off, which would crimp supplies for power generation.

And Sinn, the owner of Aspire Commodities, noticed from his computer in San Juan that day-ahead power prices on Texas’s grid were climbing,
a sign that the market was anticipating scarcity.

By Saturday, a considerable amount of capacity was already offline, some of it for routine maintenance and some of it due to weather.
This is because in Texas peak demand is associated with summer heat so many plants do routine maintenance in winter.

Wind was the first to go, as dense fog settled over turbine fleets, freezing on contact.

The slow build-up of moisture over several days caused some of the blades to ice over, while connection lines began to droop under the weight
of the ice until power production from some wind farms completely ceased.

But because the resource makes up a minor share of Texas’s wintertime power mix, grid operators didn’t view it as a big problem.

Then gas generation began declining. That was inconvenient, but not unmanageable.
There was still plenty of supply on the system.

On Sunday, the mood in the control room grew tense.

As the cold deepened, demand climbed sharply, hitting and then exceeding the state’s all-time winter peak.
But the lights stayed on.

Magness and his director of system operations, Dan Woodfin, watched the monitors from an adjoining room, satisfied that they had
made it through the worst of the crisis.
“We thought maybe we are OK for the rest of the night,” Magness said.
They weren’t.

At 11 p.m., the green dots on the monitor overlooking the control room turned red.
Across the state, power plant owners started seeing instruments on their lines freezing and causing their plants to go down.
In some cases, well shut-ins in West Texas caused gas supplies to dip, reducing pressure at gas plants and forcing them offline.
At that point, virtually all of the generation falling off the grid came from coal or gas plants.

“Contrary to some early hot takes, gas and coal were actually the biggest culprits in the crisis,” said Eric Fell, director of North America gas at Wood MacKenzie.
Back in Taylor, the town northeast of Austin, where Ercot is based, orange and red emergency displays began flashing on the giant flat-screens that lined the operators’ workstations.
“It happened very fast — there were several that went off in a row,” Magness said.

In the span of 30 minutes, 2.6 gigawatts of capacity had disappeared from Texas’s power grid, enough to power half a million homes.

“The key operators realized, this has got to stop. This isn’t allowed to happen,” said Magness.
By that point, the temperature outside had fallen to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 Celsius).
Across the state, streets were icing over and snowbanks piling up. Demand kept climbing. And plants kept falling offline.
No one in the room had anticipated this. And it was about to get worse.

The generation outages were causing frequency to fall — as much as 0.5 hertz in a half-hour.
“Then we started to see lots of generation come off,” Magness said.
To stem the plunge, operators would have to start “shedding load.”
All at once, control room staff began calling transmission operators across the state, ordering them to start cutting power to their customers.
“As we shed load and the frequency continued to decline, we ordered another block of load shed and the frequency declined further,
and we ordered another block of load shed,” said Woodfin, who slept in his office through the crisis.

Operators removed 10 gigawatts of demand from 1:30 a.m. until 2:30 a.m., essentially cutting power to 2 million homes in one fell swoop.
The utility that services San Antonio, CPS Energy, was one of those that got an order to cut power.

“We excluded anything critical, any circuit that had a hospital or police,” CPS chief executive Paula Gold-Williams said Friday. “We kept the airport up.”

Alton McCarver’s apartment in Austin was one of the homes that lost power.
The IT worker woke shivering at 2:30 a.m., an hour after the blackouts began, and tried turning up the thermostat.
“Even my dog, he was shaking in the house because he was so cold,” he said.

McCarver wanted to take his wife and 9-year-old daughter to shelter with a friend who still had power,
but the steep hills around their home were coated in ice and he didn’t think they could make the drive safely.
“You’re hungry, you’re frustrated, you’re definitely cold,” he said. “I was mostly worried about my family.”

The power cuts worked — at least in so far as Ercot managed to keep demand below rapidly falling supply.
But the grid operator shed load so rapidly that some generators and market watchers have wondered whether they exacerbated the problem.

What’s more, frequency continued to fluctuate through the early hours of the morning, potentially causing even more power plants to trip,
according to Ercot market participants.

The Sandy Creek coal plant near Waco was one them, falling offline at 1:56 a.m. in tandem with the frequency dip, according to data from the plant operator.

Ercot, however, maintains that the frequency stayed above the level at which plants would trip.

And as blackouts spread across the state, power was cut not only to homes and businesses but to the compressor stations
that power natural gas pipelines — further cutting off the flow of supplies to power plants.

Power supplies became so scarce that what were supposed to be “rolling” blackouts ended up lasting for days at a time, leaving millions of Texans without lights,
heat and, eventually without water. Even the Ercot control center lost water, and had to bring in portable toilets for its staff.

“It’s just catastrophic,” said Tony Clark, a former commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser at law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP.

By Friday, when Ercot declared that the emergency had ended, 14.4 million people still lacked reliable access to public water supplies,
and the crisis had already cost the state $50 billion in damages, according to Accuweather.

Meanwhile, some generators made a windfall as energy prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt-hour during the crisis.

In all, generators have earned more than $44.6 billion in electricity sales alone this year — more than 2018-2020 combined, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Those earnings don’t take into account any hedges that may have been in place.

In the wake of the blackouts, the Public Utility Commission of Texas announced an investigation into the factors that led to the disaster.

But at least the lights were coming back on. In the afternoon, shell-shocked people trickled out of their homes to soak up the sun.
“It feels crazy standing outside in the 40 degree sunlight,” said Cassie Moore, a 35-year-old writer and educator, who offered up her
shower and washing machine to her boss and friends who were still without power or water.

“In this same spot a few days ago I was worried that my dogs might freeze to death.”

—With Javier Blas

WeatherBELL service was putting out info and warnings weeks before,

Joe Bastardi claimed part of problem was breaking through all the impeachment noise in the media to get the warning out.
He said this storm was same as a Cat 5 hurricane as far as damage potential was concerned and should have received the
same public warnings.

Many commodities and future traders use his services.

duplicate

A lot of people heat their whole home with central electric heat. Always get natural gas or propane heat central with at least a 250 gallon propane tank instead of central electric heat. If you only have electric heat then just heat one room with a propane space heater. Get at least one spare propane tank for a space heater like this one
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Or get a kerosene heater and stock up on kerosene

[img]https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.0gUt8kFWbrWHTKjkOsUySAHaHa%26pid%3DApi&f=1[/img]

And get a wood heater.
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Several states are going to be just as vulnerable soon, There are cities that are banning the inclusion of natural gas in new construction, both residential and commercial. https://www.axios.com/cities-ban-natural-gas-hookups-98c292b7-a48f-465a-af87-d8b107882549.html

That's the problem with cities. They're infested with the liberal bureaucrat disease.