*quality shaming. Bravo Alaska

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by newtboy.

They might work in the cold but they don't work when it isn't windy. Then they have good old fossil fuels to pick up the slack, yay.

The bullshit lie Texan politicians sold was that wind turbines don't work in the cold. They do.

In Texas, the good old fossil fuel plants failed before the wind turbines and for longer....so couldn't pick up the slack. Had all the turbines been retrofitted to operate in cold, a simple fix strongly suggested the last time their grid failed from cold, they could have taken up the slack from the failed fossil fuel plants and kept Texas out of the dark.

Indeed, amazingly the wind power in Texas actually met expectations of the power it would provide in the cold snap.

The trouble is wind is so undependable they only counted on there being about 10% of capacity available. Wind gets absolved of blame by having almost no expectation that it will be available in the first place.

I say screw wind, build nuclear reactors instead and get the job done properly.

I'm all for nuclear, but what's the reality of that happening in the states anytime soon or at all? Are there plants being built right now or planned to be built?

Not in this climate of fear over all things Nuclear post-Chernobyl. Besides, with so much de-regulation and lack on competency & accountability, would you trust the 21st-century private Nuclear energy sector MORE than the 20th century's? We really need to leverage as much renewable energy sources like Wind/Solar/Hydro first and use nuclear as backup. Fossil based must be the dead-last option for those places that got no other viable means...

There are two under construction, both in Georgia, and both fairly small, maximum 1100MW.
The last to go online was 2016, also barely above 1100MW.

My understanding was that the areas that rely on wind for up to 25% of their power were not the areas that had power shortages but on the contrary were some of the only generation still happening in the state....of course, if Texas wasn't so obstinate they would agree to meet federal standards, would have upgraded both their wind and fossil fuel generation to withstand hard freezes, and would have had access to power from their neighbors if they still failed, and would have had billions of federal dollars to make it happen, but noooooo.....

Truth be told, Texas expected only 7% of total winter generation to be renewable/wind and got much more than that. They lost nearly half of their wind generation capabilities temporarily at the peak of the freeze, 16GW, but that loss was only half what was lost from natural gas and nuclear coolant freezing, 30+GW, and it was down longer.

(btw, I was born and raised in Texas)

The whole industry in the US is being hamstrung but obstructionist greens, lack of access to cheap financing and dithering politicians.

Asia are building reactors on time and on budget, the US and EU need to play catch up especially as China and Russia are developing soft power from exports.

Moving this video to eric3579's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.