Tesla asks Texans to avoid charging their EVs during peak times because of the heatwave
Tesla is asking its customers in Texas to avoid charging their electric vehicles during peak times in order to prevent overtaxing the state’s power grid. The alerts come as Texas’ grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, is calling on residents to conserve electricity during the recent heatwave, as the system is being pushed to near-emergency conditions.
The heat dome fueling the heatwave is also depriving Texas of its wind power, which typically generates about a quarter of its electricity.
Thanks to Green Power, Texans are freezing in the winter and dying of heat exhaustion in the summer.
The solar electric I installed on the house nine years ago is down. It’s supposed to feed that monster called the grid. Since April, I noticed that the electric bill is creeping up way beyond the usual seventeen bucks that the electric company charges home solar producers for the privilege of feeding their system — which, let’s face it, has a downside for them because the intermittency of so-called alt-energy disorders their operations.
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I got a whopping folio of tax breaks and subsidies from the state and federal government when I decided to put solar electric on my house in 2013, though it finally still cost a lot: $35-K. I had intimations of living through a chaotic period of history, and the decision was consistent with my general theory of history, which is that things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. Getting a home solar electric rig seemed like a good idea.
So, last week, after considerable hassle with my solar company setting up an appointment for a techie to visit and evaluate the problem here, the guy came up (at $150-an-hour) and informed me that my charge controller ($2,000) was shot. The charge controller processes all those chaotic watts coming from the solar panels on the roof into an orderly parade of electrons. He also told me that my back-up batteries — for running critical loads like the well-pump during grid outages — were at the end of their design life. Subtext: you have to get new batteries.
There are four big ones in a cabinet under the blown charge controller and the inverter (for turning direct current into alternating current that is the standard for running things). The techie had some bad news, though. New building codes forbid his company from replacing the kind of batteries I have, which are standard “sealed cell” lead-acid batteries. Some bullshit about off-gassing flammable fumes. Now the government requires lithium batteries, which would cost me sixteen-thousand dollars ($16-K) more to replace than new lead-acid batteries.
So in nine years major components are shot to a total of $18,000, not including labor and shipping. If he spends the money to repair it then he’s half way through the lifespan of the solar panels anyway.
In a low-grade epiphany while going through this ordeal last week, I realized that back in 2013, instead of getting the solar electric system, I could have bought the Rolls Royce of home generators and buried a 500-gallon fuel tank outside the garage, and had a manual water pump piggy-backed onto the well, and maybe even purchased a fine, wood-fired cookstove — and had enough money left over for a two-week vacation in the South-of-France. Silly me.
Of course, these travails with my home solar electric system are a metaphor for the complexity and fragility that is, all of a sudden this year, causing the operations of Western Civ to fly to pieces. My investment in solar was as dumb as what the entire nation of Germany did in attempting to run itself on “green energy.” (Not to mention their more recent dumb-ass decision to forego imports of Russian Natural Gas in order to please the geniuses at Tony Blinken’s State Department, the dumb bunnies.)
Of course, even when I get the solar electric back up-and-running again, something else is sure to go wrong. And in another ten years, the solar panels will be at least half-dead. So, if you’re reading this personal lamentation, consider bending toward simplicity. Wish I had.
My costs for Natural Gas and Electric are (per year) $2,500 to $3,000 in the NorthEast. If I wanted to spend serious coin towards hedging my bet on utility power and gas I’d add a wood or coal burning stove. The house is relatively new and fully insulated, with good (not great) double insulated windows, with exterior storm doors. The electric panel has a power transfer switch installed, just need an external generator. And stockpiled fuel.
The truth is that a lot of the solar panels you see on your neighbors roofs are in the same shape as this poor guy; failed or failing. The whole solar and wind thing is a huge con job.
Written maybe a decade ago – the original post seems to be lost in time, but it’s always a good time to recall the concise words from Marco Kloos (pronounced “close”) on why the 2nd amendment is so fundamental to the preservation of our civilized society.
Why the Gun is Civilization:
– By Marko Kloos
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat – it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation … and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
A look back for a moment, the coronavirus pandemic, that would be the virus itself, and our government’s response to it turns out to have been the single most destructive event to take place in the United States in our lifetime — so destructive that it’s going to be many years before we know for certain what the last two and a half years have caused to all of us.
But even now, the outlines of it are clear. COVID crashed our economy first and foremost. GDP fell by the biggest percentage since the Great Depression; 22 million Americans lost their jobs in the first two months of the lockdowns. Remember that?
What you may not know is that at least five million of them never went back to work. They dropped out of the workforce, apparently for good. At the same time, as fewer people were working, thanks to the profligate lunacy of our leaders, our national debt rose by nearly $10 trillion, unprecedented. And along with the debt, our debt to China also rose.
And then at the level of our society, every bad thing became more common: Drug ODs, suicide, illiteracy, crime, all of them skyrocketed. So did obesity, anxiety and alcoholism and virtually every other marker of social decay.
Marriages and birth rates, meanwhile, dropped, so did church attendance.
And none of that is even counting the deaths from the coronavirus itself. That’s a topic that public health authorities have lied about so consistently that we will likely never know what the real number is, but we can be confident the toll was in the hundreds of thousands.
So, on every level, COVID crushed America. Centuries-old traditions just evaporated. It’s a different country, and not a better one. But that doesn’t mean that everybody suffered under COVID. Countless small businesses went under. That devastated our middle class.
But at the same time, thanks to the lockdowns, the tech monopolies thrived. Apple, Google, Amazon all saw their market caps explode. Jeff Bezos wound up much richer than ever before, not that he needed the money.
But no group benefited more from the COVID pandemic than the leaders of Communist China.
By April of 2021, that would be more than a year into COVID when we were suffering here, in China, the GDP had reached the highest level ever recorded. China’s economy was growing faster after the pandemic than it had been before the pandemic and as a result of that, China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy soon.
Now, if someone had predicted that you 10 years ago, you would have laughed. It would have seemed ridiculous, but that was before COVID. Now it’s real and COVID made it possible.
In other words, the coronavirus didn’t simply change the United States; the coronavirus changed the balance of power in the world forever. So, when you think of COVID that way, and that’s the way the people who run governments think about it, trust us, when you think of it that way, it becomes pretty obvious that this was more than an overhyped public health emergency. In fact, it may very well have been a crime, the greatest crime in history.
Was it? It’s hard to think of a more important question than that, and yet our leaders seem curiously uninterested in answering it.
HOUSTON (Reuters) -More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserves release to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices hit record highs.
The export of crude and fuel is blunting the impact of the moves by U.S. President Joe Biden to lower record pump prices. Biden on Saturday renewed a call for gasoline suppliers to cut their prices, drawing criticism from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
About 1 million barrels per day is being released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) through October. The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986. U.S. crude futures are above $100 per barrel and gasoline and diesel prices above $5 a gallon in one-fifth of the nation. U.S. officials have said oil prices could be higher if the SPR had not been tapped.
“The SPR remains a critical energy security tool to address global crude oil supply disruptions,” a Department of Energy spokesperson said, adding that the emergency releases helped ensure stable supply of crude oil.
The fourth-largest U.S. oil refiner, Phillips 66, shipped about 470,000 barrels of sour crude from the Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy, according to U.S. Customs data. Trieste is home to a pipeline that sends oil to refineries in central Europe.
Atlantic Trading & Marketing (ATMI), an arm of French oil major TotalEnergies, exported 2 cargoes of 560,000 barrels each, the data showed.
Phillips 66 declined to comment on trading activity. ATMI did not respond to a request for comment.
Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo headed to China, another source said.
At least one cargo of crude from the West Hackberry SPR site in Louisiana was set to be exported in July, a shipping source added.
“Crude and fuel prices would likely be higher if (the SPR releases) hadn’t happened, but at the same time, it isn’t really having the effect that was assumed,” said Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler.
The latest exports follow three vessels that carried SPR crude to Europe in April helping replace Russian crude supplies.
U.S. crude inventories are the lowest since 2004 as refineries run near peak levels. Refineries in the U.S. Gulf coast were at 97.9% utilization, the most in three and a half years.
(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sam Holmes)
Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.
And which far thinking, wise, and tenacious American President had the SPR filled during his administration? (against the determined opposition of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi)
That would be the forty-fifth President Donald Trump.
However to correct the statement by the Dept. of Energy ‘spokesman’; the SPR was NOT created to stabilize Global crude oil disruptions, it was created to protect the security and the economy of the United States of America, and the USA only. It was the US Taxpayer that forked over the money to fill the reserve in the first place. It is not for bailing out the EU over their grievously bad decision to rely on their oil and gas supplies from Russia.
It definitely is not going to take the place of US production which is being throttled by the Biden administration. Because US gas and oil production is near infinite in it’s abundance, unlike the SPR which is rapidly being drained drier than Biden’s diaper.
I guess Biden is getting his answer to his stupid tweet demanding gas station owners lower their price at the pump to make Biden look tough and compassionate. And that answer is Fuck You.
Fact, the Federal Government collects much, much more from the cost of a gallon of gasoline than do the Oil and Gas producers.
And while the Federal Government risks nothing and invests nothing, it still gets paid. The producers invest hundreds of millions and risk it all, sometimes they get nothing.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man.
Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck." -- Robert A. Heinlein
Wrath Of Gnon
“In an age where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.” ー Nicolás Gómez Dávila
I’ve seen this on self-service pumps. But I’ve never seen this on Full-Service pumps. Put there by the manager, on every pump. 
