OT: Power outages plague Texas, other states amid deadly cold, snow

Some do

A bit more power to stop icing should be

They could. But then it would show up on their precious meters and thgey wouldnt make so much miney

You havce reminded me of an event that took place in the early 1970s when a colleague was along for a sales demonstration on a radar dish, that had a petal shaped set of heating wires to de ice it. At the command, he threw the switch. Nobody told him, on a warm spring day, to switch it off. Only when smoke and bubbling fibreglass become obvious....

...they tested the pattern and found it still within spec, and shipped it off with a 'do not use at temperatures above 5°C' label on the switch...

Wind turbines destined for cold climates can have the blades equipped with carbon fibre coatings that are electrically conducting, and can carry a current to keep the blades ice-free. A bit like trace heating.

My favourite .sig was "..democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only persist until the electorate realise they can vote themselves the largesse of the public purse."

From that point it becomes when, not if, you see heads on spikes.

Well I could have told them. I happened to visit someone in Houston in early Jan 1985, which was the last time they had snow there. My visitees were a bit surprised.

It's the town (or the Mayor, let's say) who sets the policy.

I've already recounted learning how this happens in San Francisco.

And seems to have spread here with LTAs. ;-(

It would seem the major problem was Texas opting out of the 'national grid' The only state to be 'self sufficient'? Except when things go wrong, obviously.

Thing I really can't understand is the average spending per head on medical care in the US is towards the highest in the world. And most in the UK will have a relative or friend in the US with horror stories about that medical care. So the US pays a fortune for medical care which fails a goodly percentage of the country.

If it were cheap or even good value, I could well understand the principle of only paying for you and yours.

On the basis £22 *billion* disappeared into Track and Trace (with the Channel Tunnel only costing £15 billion) then you really need to work on your imagination.

I'm of an age when the £6 billion needlessly pissed away on Nimrod was a scandal.

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are a Conservative Goverment funded initiative dreamed up by Andrew Gilligan who was formerly Boris's cycling Czar when the former was Mayor of London. The same Andew Gilligan who had previously been employed monstering Ken Livingstone in the "Standard"; and before that making the sexed up WMD dossier claim on the "Today" programme.

michael adams

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Not to forget TSR2

Before my time - although there is an impressive remnant at RAF Cosford.

Nimrod was a purely political f*ck up. AIUI the RAF wanted AWACS - which proved to be totally unsuitable for UK use because it (a) was already built (b) worked and (c) a fraction the cost of Nimrod.

Cute many years of 10,000 change requests (>30 a day) every year for Nimrod.

The final indignity being the exhibit I last saw at Cosford with the wiring loom to the wings severed to allow them to be folded and transported.

Lots of possibilities of the coal stack itself and the coal handling plant being frozen.

For the transmission systems you can get switchgear icing, overhead line icing, switchgear lubricants stiffening, water in air compressor lines stopping switchgear closure/reclosure.

For both nuclear, gas and coal, up to a point lower temperature cooling water for the condensers would improve efficiency, get too low and you get icing with reduced flow and the turbine back end pressures rise, eventually you get the set dropping off the bars to prevent serious LP rotor damage.

For somewhere like the UK, Canada and Europe just about everything is winterised, Texas clearly isn't. Some gas plants there and in the tropics are open wall construction as far as the boiler system is concerned.

The gas transmission network is apparently another issue. It's not just interruptible gas contracts, it's failure of valves and line compressors.

That Texas was the home Enron, late of this parish, brings some warm satisfaction under the current circumstances. Con artists would be too big a compliment.

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Al Gore was consulting for enron when he made 'a Convenient Lie'

Err, not quite sure what that has got to do with medical care?

Track and Trace may be - but simply a typical boris knee jerk response.

A report from the last time it happened, 350 pages to read whilst eating frozen baked beans in a 10000sqft underinsulated shed in Texas

This global cooling is very embarrassing

I am pretty sure that the £22bn is not the cost of track and trace alone, but also includes the entire cost of testing (which is going to be the expensive part). Indeed the figure is referred to as the cost of "Test, track and trace."

The scandal was compounded by having spent so much and the airframes being near completion, that the whole thing was scrapped, the planes destroyed and we were left with no airborne early warning and anti-submarine aircraft, as the existing ones were grounded. Then we had to go and buy from the US. It would have taken little more to get the latest Nimrods up and running, giving us a hugely advanced aircraft and protected a strategic industry.