Warren Buffett, February, 30 discussed on Ernie Brown
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Able to on days when we have scarcity Bring power in. But perhaps even more important any we would be able to export a whole lot of wind and solar on days where we have more of it. I mean, what If there's anything Texas has been exceptional at throughout our history, right, it's well, maybe not throughout our history. But for the last Whatever 120 years of our history, it's exporting energy resources abroad and we have sort of artificially decided. We're not going to do that. We're going to keep all the wind and solar here within our state borders, And it's a major loss of revenue for rural areas of the state. Particularly so, Doug. You mentioned when wind and solar and we were told in February that you know those energies froze up very quickly. Can they be made dependable? So so well, solar and wind. Definitely so wind. You have to separate them. First of all wind had some problems we we had about, um I think it was like 30 to 40% of wind had some kind of problem. Most of it was was ice they the ice creates all kinds of problems for all kinds of different generation. Solar actually performed pretty well performed well above expectations and and wind. Um, because the big problem with solar is you just got to push the you got to push the snow off of it. And once the snow's off of it, it'll work. Obviously, if cloud cover you don't get as much production but we got more out of solar than ERCOT expected. We had more out of wind for about 80% of the time of the outages than what they expected. There were times where wind dropped very low. Um the bigger problems were with mostly gas and coal. But of course, one of the nuclear units was offline, too. So literally, Every generation source had problems. We were down about 30 gigawatts about 25 of that. Was thermal was was gas, coal or nuclear, So some of the sort of accusations towards wind and solar were overdone. But to answer your question, or Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely things that can be done. Or winter winterization packages that can be applied to, um, wind turbines just as they you know, they're different. But you know, you could do the same on gas plants, and there will be a rulemaking at the Public Utility Commission. Over the next six months on exactly that, looking at all different kinds of generation and okay and how we went around. Well, did you hear about the Warren Buffett plan his company apparently offered to build. I think it was nine gas powered plants that would sit idle until they're needed until we didn't have enough generation to avoid this kind of thing happening in the future, and it didn't seem to get much play in the legislative session this time around. Well, it got some play..