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ndawg

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by ndawg

  1. 2 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    That shit always drives me crazy. "Hey, I think you're a fucking worthless politician and generally a piece of human garbage and I want you gone yesterday, but thank you for saving my entire family from inside that burning building."

    With a tinge of, "the contrast between how much I hate you and me offering you a couple words of gratitude lets me also bask in my own magnanimity."

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  2. 17 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

    That quote sums up the current republican mentality perfectly. If you are in dire straits it’s your own fault and you should be left to your own devices to figure it out 

     

    A safety net is necessary. Argue about how extensive or limited to make it to take care of folks without disincentivizing their productivity, but to argue there shouldn’t be one is straight up evil

    Austerity psychology 101. Make life worse for lower and middle class rubes, while encouraging them to brag about who can fasten their belt the tightest.

    AOC is doing a wonderful thing, while also following a very sound strategy for loosening the grip of Republican gaslighting. Outworking the Republicans in the biggest red state in the union is a really, really good look.

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  3. 30 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

    From the Dan Patrick thread.  The people in charge have to go.

    Wow.. "we didn't have a problem in 2012, 2013, 2014..."

    Ah yes, the old "my son was a wonderful, kind person for twenty years, and was a rapist for only fifteen minutes" defense. Chernobyl was an expertly run power plant until it just happened to have one really, really unlucky day.

     

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  4. 48 minutes ago, freyguy said:

    buddy, you're all over the place with this one.  I don't even know where to begin...

    If it weren't super off-topic, I'd be happy if you explained the error in my understanding. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the subject matter, but I do have a personal interest in the study of management theory and would appreciate any correction (or, really, which books to read to get a richer perspective).

  5. 7 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    With as many midwesterners that have moved to Texas over the last 20 years, you’d think enough would be in the energy sector that some knowledge was available. Linemen up to plant managers and engineers. 

    The puzzling thing to me is that if you take away management methodologies like six sigma, you don't go back to some magical time when American managers were dynamic, creative leaders who started in the mailroom and never lost touch with the work as they climbed the corporate ladder. You're actually just back at Sloan style modern management, which essentially prioritizes... you guessed it... trimming excess capacity and cost cutting above all else.

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  6. 25 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

    I'm more saying the whole management culture is at fault. Everybody is quick to throw blame around and say we should fix this, but we are stuck in the same rut that got us here. We can throw as much mo et as we want at it, but we will always have these issues because the have a management class that doesn't actually know that much about how to make things run. Instead of sending people to get their six sigma certifications, we need to send them down to the trenches. Once they see how things actually work and the reasons they don't they can actually make management decisions that will be effective.

    What is your basis for concluding that the issues were caused by a lack of front line experience among the management ranks?

  7. 7 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Actually, renewables probably played a very indirect role in that generation companies invested in and received subsidies for and patted themselves on the back for renewables while stripping their budgets for plant maintenance and winterizing.  Again, it's the generators' fault, but it was a shiny expensive object that distracted them.

    Even when we look at this level of detail, renewables themselves aren't to blame, it's a lack of project oversight that is to blame.

    Internet debates about who is to blame are a welcome reprieve and a chance to off-gas. I certainly feel the desire to get pissed off, too. It's not helpful, but it is understandable. On the other hand, it disgusts me seeing our elected officials exploiting a crisis for political points before they could even know whether their decisions as leaders have contributed to it. And I think that's because they know if they don't establish a scapegoat now, they might actually get held to account over their role, which will probably land somewhere between "inept negligence" and "outright corruption" before it's all said and done.

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  8. 3 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

    You don’t have the energy to lay out the rationale for your bullshit statement? So stop posting then. You have said as much more than once then you keep posting bullshit which is the definition of a troll.

    "I have a great argument but you idiots are all too block-headed to really consider it" was a tired troll schtick in the 90s.

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  9. 8 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    The home is on the demand side. 

    Capacity is based on generation capacity.  It starts with nameplate of a facility, then you back out planned down time and historical reliability.  That capacity is what a plant could deliver into the grid on an hourly basis.

    The solution you propose would be some calculation of the average demand of a home (and would need to take into account weather and normal heating/cooling days in a month), fixed payments based on that, and then credits if you use less.  It isn't a bad idea, and is most likely how your retail energy provider would pass through a capacity charge.

    However, I think the Capacity market needs to be at the wholesale level.  The retail energy provider should be required to pay for capacity based on their demand forecasts.  These capacity auctions could happen well in advance (based on longer term forecasts), and then there are true ups shorter in.

    I need to study up on how the whole supply chain for energy works. For instance, if a retail energy provider switches their upstream provider, how long does it take to change over? What would the batch size be of a unit of capacity sold at an auction? If the batch sizes are small enough, it seems like 10 day weather forecasts could be incorporated along with historical data in order to more accurately estimate needs.

  10. 2 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    I am not talking about the solution you posted, numbnuts.  I am talking about the solutions many of us started proposing back on page 1 of this thread.  

    Ultimately, as our political institutions are irreparably broken, then we need to make sure that the market will function well.  The energy only market itself needs to be tweaked.  We need to have a capacity market like ALL THE OTHER MAJOR MARKETS IN THE US HAVE.  That incentivized keeping units fighting fit.  I know a lot of people here are calling the power gen companies bad people, but they are companies.  They are not here to run a charity.  And they make decisions not to weatherize because of a, b, c.  A capacity market partially solves some of that.  Having a capacity market, and removing the price cap from the wholesale energy market, would necessarily mean that the consumer pays more.  It is a fact.

    On the oil and gas side, if Texas wants to be the energy capital of the world, and maintain that, it needs to fucking act like it.  The RRC has the power to require oil and gas operations to weatherize.  There is ZERO excuse for this shit anymore.

    Further, Texas needs to embrace new technology.  We need to partner with folks to look into battery and storage technology.  We need to figure out how to encourage people to invest in distributed generation (i.e. Solar arrays on their roofs) as those not only become a resource for the grid when there is high demand, but also, because it is just fucking smart.  The Federal Govt offers tax incentives.  Since Texas doesn't have an income tax, maybe there could be a moratorium on value jumps for property taxes, or some sort of property tax rebate.  In any case, we need to start thinking outside the box is we want to maintain that title of Energy Capital of the World.

    As someone outside of Texas looking in, this is a very bad fucking look all around.

    I'm gonna be that guy who thinks of some naive solution, only to be told "that's been tried before and it's really stupid," but what the hell.. here it goes. It seems like the situation could be better for everyone if our electricity bill include a fixed payout to the electric company for our capacity allotment (based on square footage?) and a variable credit that comes from the city for the capacity we didn't use, or a charge if we went over capacity. The cost of energy could increase steeply the more a home exceeds their capacity, and the sum of all overcharges would fund the credit to those who stayed under their capacity. To make things more interesting, the credit reward for staying under capacity could be more lucrative the more you get your usage below capacity.

    Am I nuts here?

  11. 2 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

    The detailed study was done back in 2011. Nothing wasn’t done to fix it. It’s not hard to then figure out who is at fault for this. 

    Sure, I'm not saying we don't already have a good idea that some people really fucked up. It's just very American that the public spectacle everyone sees among politicians is a bunch of people arguing over who should get the blame. Here on a message board, what else can we do besides vent (I've got a lot of venting to do myself, too)

  12. 2 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

    You didn't start giving a damn about anything besides your own bank account yesterday and it's unlikely you're going to any time soon.

    Smug condescension added to being a chickenshit earns a pile of negs from me. You can change names and deny it, but the the shitty takes don't change.

    The common good, does that mean anything to you?

    Also, holy shit, even a completely selfish asshole with an ounce of forethought would understand that catastrophes like this one are terrible for just about everybody's long term prosperity.

    There are many, many examples of public infrastructures all over the world. Texas is looking downright third world right now. It doesn't take a genius to realize we could probably be getting much more reliable capacity at an even lower cost if we had better management, even without looking into any of the details.

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  13. 36 minutes ago, WBT said:

    So you think Republican donors, on the whole, are profiting from this disaster?  This is far more a case of stupidity and incompetence than malfeasance.  

    Even for power generators, the blow back is going to far outweigh whatever corners they had been cutting.

    It's really important that we dispel the myth that a cadre of Big Cigars rule the Republican party from a smoky humidor. Rich Republicans don't give a shit if life for us devolves back into Sherwood Forest. First, they think everything is fine, because they're not personally suffering, and don't really have it in them to imagine what things are like for people who are suffering. Second, they'll always have a Sheriff of Nottingham to protect them. Their reaction to heightened instability among the lower and middle classes will only lead them to invest in better security systems, taller fences, and more powerful backup generators.

  14. 1 hour ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

    I'm both ragey and embarrassed. All the bluster of the 'we don't need the other 49 states,' and 'fuck California and those democrats' while the state is a humanitarian crisis because 'profits over people' is the motto.

    Me too, and, hell, I'd be overjoyed if these GOP Texans actually felt humiliated over this. That might actually lead to self reflection and change.

    Instead, the cretins in charge as well as the cretins who vote them into office will react like they have for all the major crises of the last decade. The political force behind this dysfunction will only going to grow more convinced that they need more power, in order to finally put a stop to the decline that's clearly (to them) caused by the libtard socialists. They're never going to suddenly realize they're causing all this mess. The more bad things happen to the (R) voters, the more they're going to turn to the one thing that even complete idiots know how to do to improve their situation: sequester other people's shit in order to sustain what they have.

  15. 1 minute ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    That might have been from earlier today (I did not check the time stamp), but I thought it was a good explanation for the crap going on (summarizes what many of us have been saying in this thread quite nicely).  

    Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. Just wanted to square that discrepancy.

  16. 4 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    So, a friend of mine who is a former gas trader and started Real Simple Energy.   From his company:

     
    “ERCOT cannot seem to get above 50,000 MW of generation. During peak demand times (mornings and evenings) over the next few days, the total Texas demand would be around 65,000 MW if everyone had power. This means there is an increased chance you get power during low demand periods like 10pm-5am and 12pm-4pm....but then it may go off during those high demand periods again.
     
    Natural gas power plants, which power much of the Texas grid, receive natural gas deliveries to them daily via pipelines. Since this past weekend, they have struggled to get fuel (largely because of natural gas well freeze-offs) and we don't see much reason for this to change over the next few days. If they don't have fuel they cannot run.
     
    Even power plants that have fuel struggle to run at maximum capacity for days-on-end. Many plants are just not made for it and when pushed too hard, they break, and that is what we have seen here. Repair of those plants takes time.
     
    Wholesale power price futures for the next 5 days, traded by market participants with a lot more knowledge than us, are indicating this grid-wide stress continues through the weekend.”

    Is ERCOT lying on their homepage? The chart on the left says they have 54,000 MW of capacity. (Source: http://www.ercot.com/)

  17. I'll throw in my answer to that one.. if Texas went blue and things got worse, it'd be yet another reminder that to enjoy good governance, the people we elect must get off their asses do their jobs well, and we must replace them when they don't.

    Being "right" is a lot less important than being "capable." Of course, everyone who understands that has left the GOP by now.

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  18. 4 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

    Fair enough. Because I’m earnestly conversing with you, I’ll accept the challenge. I googled the phrase “texas gop openly says it needs to limit voter turnout to win” and the top result was how higher turn out helped GOP? Link me something that proves your point, for once in your life, and let me read it and if you are right then I’ll concede. If not, you admit you are gaslighting and this whole thread is a troll job and Texas is not a failed state.

    This is some low effort bullshit right here. I just googled "DonkeyCigars is not an imbecile" and didn't get any results. Link me something that proves that you're not an imbecile, otherwise you're just trolling.

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  19. 11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


    Emotional thinking would be a step up. We just get to every fork in the road and choose “stupid.” It’s our only inviolable rule.

    And very soon, the signpost at the next fork in the road will be, "how should we respond to the catastrophe that just happened? By trying to prevent it from happening again? Or by blaming the invisible boogeyman and then doing absolutely fucking nothing about it?" Oh, right, Abbot already crossed that fork in the road and happily chose stupid, in the middle of the fucking crisis to boot.

    These people will absolutely have no trouble believing that somehow liberals and socialism caused this mess, and will only come away from this more convinced that they need more power in order to stop the enemy from advancing.

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