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Notes -
Texas appears to be going much better than it did two years ago.
I'm not personally surprised: the 2021 storm was a particularly unlikely event that was worse than this one in multiple ways. That storm came with heavy early freezing rain, causing power lines and wind turbines (especially ones in South Texas not adapted for anti-icing) to fail even from the start: this one has been pretty dry. Two years ago Texas saw multiple inches of snow, making transport difficult in areas that largely see snow accumulation once-or-so a generation, and covering solar panels: it's sunny today. A NPSH sense line installed improperly in 1988 caused one of the state's 4 nuclear reactors to go offline: this worked for more than three decades of weather conditions, but was fixed after 2021.
Although I occasionally saw it mocked on social media, temporary insulation and tarps at power plants apparently do work, probably in the same way that wrapping exterior pipes on houses can be quite effective: often it's only a handful of degrees that keep pipes from freezing.
For anyone interested, the ERCOT dashboard tracks energy supply and demand in realtime.
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