DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Ted Cruise flys to Mexico while he leaves many of his constituents freezing and starving to death.

So basically he abandoned Texas in a time of great need and takes his family to a tropical getaway... Then he gets called out on it (I'm sure twitter is hammering him), and decides to abandon his family there to come back and look like a Senator... Scumbag.

exactly. there's conservative texans ticked the hell off at Cruz and the texas GOP for fighting like hell to deregulate the energy grid, and yet DC and others got the audacity to somehow blame it on other people who aren't even from the state.

its just simply mind blowing. i read his post again and still came away more baffled at his level of ignorance and deflection than the last time.

You're right... Trump would have thrown paper towels at them. Or handled it like the pandemic. Honestly, they're better off with Biden even if is just sleeping in the oval and drooling down his shirt. That would still be 1000x better than a Trump response.

Bro, it's much easier to just stop taking anything they say seriously. Until I see Trumpians start to show some redeeming qualities and start acting like normal people again, I'll treat them like the 800 pound gorilla in the room that everyone pretends is not there. I'd much rather talk to the gorilla tbh.

Normal like Sprial, Clem, Portland, Rocket. OK gotcha, I start working on being normal.

No, not at all. I remember when you weren't led around by the nose by FOX and Friends, back when we might have had differences but we could still talk to each other. Trump really pulled a number on all of you but I'm sure you don't see that and I'm wasting my time responding.

It's already been reported that the root of the issue is lack of preparing the infrastructure. Ercot went for profit over security.

https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/editorials/article249285685.html

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-grid-outage-ercot/

Just one more LIE and trying to blame LIBERALS for something they did to themselves. Pretty much everything that poster writes these days is imaginary or just simple lies.

jc

Ted Cruz is stupid and doesn't want to be re-elected.

That explanation makes the most sense.
Doltlike moves such as this have been career-killers in the past.

Nowadays, I just don't know. Seems that the bar has been reset so low, he might get re-elected anyway.

Good, because this lady sure does! What a good Christian she is!

When was the last time you saw a Republican do something good like this? I'll wait.

Figured I had better share this before Fish claims another victory...

Heroic Ted Cruz Travels To Cancun To Lasso The Sun And Bring It Back To Texas



CANCUN—Ted Cruz is being heralded as a hero after he traveled to Cancun in the middle of the worst energy crisis in recent memory in order to lasso the sun and bring it back to Texas.

The media quickly condemned Cruz for his trip but apologized when they realized he was actually saving the state by bringing the sun back for them.

"Don't worry, y'all -- Ted is comin' back, and the sun's comin' with him!" Cruz cried as he rode along a beautiful Cancun beach, spooling up his lasso to catch the sun. "Yeeeeehaw!" After a few unsuccessful attempts, Cruz remained undeterred, riding back and forth across the beach, trying to catch the sunlight.

"He's a tricky lil' rascal, boy howdy!" Cruz said. "But we'll get 'em, just you watch! Darn' tootin'!"

He was also attempting to bottle the water and bring it back to the Texans who have had no water for days, but advisers warned him that drinking the Mexican water would probably just make matters worse.

https://babylonbee.com/news/heroic-ted-c...t-back-to-texas

Beautiful OCD ... how to lasso a topic from one thread and bring it to the other!

J/C

Dude sure packed a hell of a big bag for an overnight trip...

Texas was "seconds and minutes" away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say

Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said that grid operators implemented blackouts to avoid a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark 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.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline due to the extreme cold brought by the winter storm, the amount of power supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state fell rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses turned up the heat and stayed inside to avoid the weather.

“It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. “It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.”

Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, “then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you’re sunk.”

Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that “could have occurred for months,” and left Texas in an “indeterminately long” crisis.

While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.

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.

“As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could’ve been in blackout,” she said. “ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn’t worse is because of those grid operators.”

ERCOT has three emergency procedures to balance the equation between supply and demand. Grid operators can call on other grids for help — Texas’ grid has limited connections to the eastern U.S. and Mexico. But in this week’s storm, so much power went offline that other grids couldn’t close the gap, in part because those grids were being stressed by the same storm.

Next, ERCOT can try to reduce demand by interrupting power to large industrial customers that have previously agreed to have power cut during an emergency.

If that doesn’t work — and it didn’t in this case — ERCOT has a last resort option: ordering transmission companies to reduce demand on the system with rotating outages for customers.

That’s what happened in the early hours of Monday morning.

Usually, those outages are limited to less than 45 minutes. But this week, the outages lasted days. That’s likely because after ERCOT ordered companies to stop providing power to customers, even more power generation tripped offline, and it was not able to “roll” the outages effectively, Johnson explained.

The amount of power ERCOT needed utilities to cut back in order to prevent complete blackout was so great that the companies didn’t have flexibility to roll power from one area to another to spread out the pain.

The emergency procedures are designed to avoid overwhelming the entire Texas grid. If that had occurred, even as power generators recovered from the cold, ERCOT would have been unable to quickly reconnect them back to the grid, Johnson said.

Grid operators would have needed to slowly and carefully bring generators and customers back online, all the while taking care to not to cause more damage to the grid. It’s a delicate process, Johnson explained, because each part of the puzzle — the generators producing power, the transmission lines that move the power and the customers that use it — must be carefully managed.

“It has to balance constantly,” she said. “Once a grid goes down, it’s hard to bring it back online. If you bring on too many customers, then you have another outage.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/

So somebody tell me again how this was the libs? Or how natural gas is way better than solar and wind? smh

This is a Republican deregulation problem and crap for infrastructure because we don't invest in America's future. Just add in some global warming wild weather and BOOM! Texas craps the bed.

EDIT: My buddy GM or some other fossil proponent will be along shortly to talk about the virtues of "Clean Coal"...

You just can't make this crap up. Dying.

I'm not so quick to pin this on deregulation. Not saying it isn't... but it was a pretty crazy thing that happened (temperature drop/snow) that they were not at all prepared for. The south just isn't built for that kind of cold plain and simple, and you can see that born out in many ways.

I had a long post written up about how trying to nail Ted Cruz on this was silly, but it turned into a disorganized mess. Mad respect to Beto and AOC for rolling up their sleeves (so to speak). I think holding up their actions in front of Cruz does much more to hurt him than trying to slam him for attempting to look like he cares about his family.

Yep, I couldn't care less about Cruz but I agree it was snake like for him to slither away. But knowing Cruz, who would expect anything more from him? But some of the things this flaming of Cruz has the right posting are just hilarious. Trump Jr.'s post above was the second best thing I saw today.

Ted cruz has now given 3 different explanations on what happened.

and now somebody leaked his wife's text inviting others.

and people STILL trying to give him cover. this is sad...

you can't be serious.

deregulating the grid for the last 10 years allowed the Texas government not to winterized and maintain their infrastructure. why is it that states further north still have their energy grids working? and by the way, the vast majority of energy in texas still comes from oil and gas. it was a complete failure, and can be DIRECTLY pointed to a lack of leadership and management maintaining the energy sector.


____
About 56 percent of Texas' energy comes from natural gas, just under 24 percent comes from wind, 19 percent from coal, and almost 9 percent from nuclear energy.

"About a third of our thermal fleet is offline," said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas in Austin who specializes in the power grid. "We typically count on about 90 percent of it being available during a peak event."

"From freezing gas wells and gas lines, to depressurization of our natural gas infrastructure because so many homes and businesses are calling for gas at the same time, we just don't have enough fuel," he said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fac...crisis-n1258185

the texas GOP specifically went for cheap, and got cheap results when it mattered the most. the federal government a few years ago tried to get the country to modernize their grid, and texas fought like hell to do the exact opposite.


___

Rick Perry: 'Texans would be without electricity for longer' to 'keep the federal government out'

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro...-longer-to-keep

_________

just stop it already. if the GOP at the federal level and the GOP at the state level didn't fight so hard deregulate the energy sector, it wouldnt be anywhere near this bad right now.

those politicians seriously tried to blame AOC and wind turbines for not working, KNOWING the majority of their power source came from oil and gas.

and let me repeat: Wind turbines and solar is working perfectly fine in much colder environments. but ya know, proper maintenance and all that.

right now you're the dude who wants to blame outside factors for the reason your car broke down, despite the fact that you haven't gotten an oil change and service done on the car in years.

Power equipment in the North is working because they're designed around the appropriate temperature range (with a safety factor). The weather we got over the past couple weeks is no biggy, relatively speaking. Here in Cinci, the worst thing was that the roads were impassable for a while (again, because we don't usually get very much annual snowfall, so we don't have the snowplows that Cleveland does).

I just don't think that you can jump to conclusions because of what happened after such a unusual/unprecedented weather event. Are we going scorched earth on building codes down there because they weren't designed with this type of weather in mind (pipes bursting awfully quickly, didn't happen when I lost heat in my house when the temps were near 0).

I'm not going to defend people that are trying to blame AOC for something that happened in Texas. I think we can at least agree on that.

And with the car analogy... the way I see it the car is serviced just fine and would've run great, except I crashed because I never bought snow tires because why would I when it rarely, if ever, gets close to freezing.

I might tend to agree with you if they didn't know or hadn't been warned that they needed to winterize their grid for a very long time. When someone knew, when someone is warned, but decided to ignore those warnings, the fault lies with them.

Texas grid fails to weatherize, repeats mistake feds cited 10 years ago

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/busines...ld-15955392.php

Texas leaders failed to heed warnings that left the state's power grid vulnerable to winter extremes, experts say

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-failures/

I think the biggest problem with Cruz in this aspect is how he conducted himself BEFORE all of this happened. We all know that one person or people who are self-righteous and throw a lot of shade toward everyone else for not doing things the right way. Then, when things blow up in their face, it makes for a feeding frenzy.

We live in an era where conclusions are pre-drawn and the facts are then invented to support those conclusions, not the other way around.

I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that there is adequate security for his family, with or without him being present, from both our government and theirs.

J/C

curious what you all mean by "winterize" the grid?

I assumed the problem was the extreme cold pushed people to turn on their heaters, which use much more power than the A/C they usually run. And that the sudden increase of demand was too much for the system.

Where as up north, the "expected" usage is based on people using heaters in the winter.

I'm only speculating here, because there has never been an issue that I know of before, and I don't see why the cold itself would have much issue on the grid other than ice bringing down lines.

That's fair, thank you for posting those articles. There's definitely some info in there that I hadn't seen before. Additionally, I'll admit to you and swish (that I didn't mention before) that power generation and providing power to people and businesses is critical (interrupting power to people can result in a catastrophic effect... obviously). Based on that, you would think such a critical piece of infrastructure wouldn't fail so spectacularly.

But buried in that second article was a small paragraph about how many power companies DID implement some weather-related mitigations, but many of those mitigations did little in the face of such an unusual storm. So again, Many of the people that are so quick to point the finger at things they would normally disagree with come off as disingenuous. More govt is not the solution to everything.


The part about being so isolated from outside power grids is something that I'm a little more interested in. It sounds like that could've been something that could've helped, but it wasn't explained at all. I'm going to look into that.

While that did happen, the real issue was that the extreme cold/snow also shut down power generation while the demand that you pointed out was ramping up. At some point, when demand exceeds supply of power, you risk damaging infrastructure due to overload. The last-ditch measure to prevent transformers blowing, powerlines going down, and other hardware damage is to turn off the power and artificially lower the demand (planned blackouts). The trouble here is that they kept losing power sources, and weren't able to get their output back up, so rolling blackouts turned into blackouts while people were caught dealing with the cold.

'Winterizing' here means implementing cold mitigations such that wind farms, coal/natural gas plants, etc are able to continue to put power out even when it gets real cold and snowy.

Gas lines were actually freezing up because they hadn't been winterized.

Kind of like the mayor of NYC moaning about needing more respirators when a few years before the Trump administration offered to sell them many?

You always have the answers.

No - false equivalence. Potentially....

Was NYC told they had inadequate numbers of respirators?

If yes, you may have a point.

If no, you invented a totally bogus comparison.

If they were offered up, I assume medical experts told the city they didn't have enough for the population size. They probably first ran in to serious shortages after 911.

If not, why not offer up more balloons for city office parties?

I had no idea this thread was about Covid. I'm sorry the truth bothers you. That is what happened. Texas was warned a decade ago this could happen and what steps they could take to avoid it. They chose not to. As a result their natural gas lines froze up.

The "answer" isn't hard to find. Maybe you should try to to look at the facts rather than try to change the topic? Nah, that would mean you want to know the truth rather than try to circumvent the truth. We can't have that.

Why not start a thread about it rather than attempt to trash this thread with something unrelated?

Cuomo is being investigated by the FBI over hiding Covid deaths. Maybe you should start a thread about that?

I don't live in NY and can't vote for Cuomo, so I don't really care.

Since when are you concerned about trashing threads?

Not to sidetrack from the Cruz and Texas story, but here's the story on the ventilators that NY was not advised to purchase a stockpile of back in 2015.


"He had a chance to buy -- in 2015 -- 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down. I'm not blaming him or anything else. But he shouldn't be talking about us. He's supposed to be buying his own ventilators. We are going to help," Trump said in a Fox News town hall held at the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday.

"They could have had 15 or 16,000 two years ago and all they had to do was order them. They can't blame us for that," he said again in the interview.

Trump appeared to be dramatizing a report from a New York Department of Health task force in 2015 which predicted that, if faced with a pandemic like the 1918 Spanish flu, New York would run into a ventilator shortage to the tune of 15,000. The report was recently resurfaced by Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and supporter of Trump since 2016, who wrote an op-ed about it in the New York Post. Her op-ed was later picked up by the far-right blog Gateway Pundit.

The report, however, did not recommend that New York Health Department should have stocked up on ventilators, nor did it find a low-cost option to do so, as Trump indicated Tuesday. Instead, the 2015 report acknowledged that New York should instead prepare for a moderate scenario and rely on federal resources if faced with a severe scenario.

"In the event of an overwhelming burden on the health care system, New York will not have sufficient ventilators to meet critical care needs despite its emergency stockpile. If the most severe forecast becomes a reality, New York State and the rest of the country will need to allocate ventilators and other scarce resources," the report reads.

The recommendation was made, according to the report, to balance "the need to prepare for a potential pandemic against the need to maintain adequate funding for current and ongoing health care expenses." The report also indicated that they would lack the staffing to even operate as many ventilators as would be required, "and purchasing additional ventilators beyond a threshold will not save additional lives, because there will not be a sufficient number of trained staff to operate them."

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cuomo-knocks-trumps-claim-ny-ventilators/story?id=69790191


Now back to Ted Cruz!...

You don't live in Texas either but you're sure working your butt off to take the heat off of their Republicans.

In an effort to try and stop the thread from being manipulated by someone who obviously doesn't want to actually address the topic.....

Texas largely relies on natural gas for power. It wasn’t ready for the extreme cold.

Texas largely relies on natural gas — especially during times of high demand — to power the state. Experts say natural gas infrastructure, from pumping it out of the ground to the plants in city centers, was unprepared for the plunging temperatures brought by the winter storm.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/

Greg Abbott Says Natural Gas 'Frozen In Pipelines' As Texas Battles Power Outages

https://www.newsweek.com/natural-gas-outage-texas-governor-greg-abbott-1569898

So fake news and another LIE from Trump ? Oh what a shocker.