Drew Dowdell

You're in the north, your gas line is probably below the frost line underground. I did a quick Google to see if I could see what you are referencing regarding the generation in Texas and couldn't find anything that stood out.... but I'll give it my educated guess. If you go up a few of my posts, look for the link to Black Start. The TL:DR of it is that you can't just add generation to the grid without letting everyone else know. It has to be coordinated with everyone else at the ISO/ERCOT. ERCOT manages this and if they're good at their jobs (day to day operation, they're pretty good, they just don't have the resources to handle emergencies like this) that generation will become available to users in a few minutes to a few hours. Getting all of the high voltage transmission equipment up and running is a lot like priming an empty plumbing system in a 6 bathroom house. In some cases it still requires sending a lineman out to a site to manually close contacts at a substation and letting all of that equipment energize and warm up. That's a lot of coordination. That's why you can't just pull start a generator and hook it up to the grid.

I am disappoint. Dr. House should be up in the upper right along with Doc McCoy.

So, you're not wrong, but just wanted to zoom in a bit for more detail.... Storms do happen, no grid is ever 100%. I lose power shockingly often for being only ~10 miles from a downtown metro area, but never for more than a few hours. The worst power outage we had was for a few days when a car took out a key power pole with multiple transformers on it down at the bottom of my street and they couldn't get replacement transformers (Thanks Covid!). No regulation could have prevented that. I appear to be on the edge of a local grid, so it seems like I don't have redundancy. There have been times where only my side of the street is out. The trees thing is a constant fight between power companies, local governments, and property owners. As you know, I work for a local government now so I hear what goes on. Our code enforcement officer will warn a property owner for the trees either if they see something or if we get notice from the utility. If the property owner doesn't address it, we fine them. If they still don't address it, our public works goes out and does the tree and we bill them for it. The whole process can take 6 months to a year depending on how cranky the property owner is. The township I live in (not the same as where I work) has an additional snag in that we have an arborist who we have to check with and get approval from for any tree trimming or cutting. If it's for powerline stuff, it's not that big a deal to get approval but it is still an extra step. Pretty much all new construction uses underground power lines, but in a city like mine that has very old housing stock, the costs of converting from pole to underground is astronomical and you have to do whole streets at the same time and a significant financial burden ($2,000 - $4,000 residential) will fall on the property owners because from the pole/street into the house is their responsibility.... so the cost/benefit analysis discussion ends pretty quick. Further, I want to make sure you understand that there are different levels of "grid". The Grid is really nested grids like those Russian nesting dolls. There is a neighborhood grid that is part of a larger city grid that is part of a county grid, that is part of a local regional grid, that is part of the regional ISO. Only the regional ISO is subject to the federal regulations. Here in Pennsylvania the ISO is called PJM. PJM is roughly the same level as ERCOT but spans multiple states. All of the smaller grids under PJM are subject to state regulations rather than federal, and as such, the regulations for the smaller local grids will vary state by state, so I can tell you how PA operates and Texas at the Regional level, but I don't know how your state or local utility would operate. Also, adding more complexity is that the generation companies and the transmission companies are two different things (most times, but not all, depends on the state). So even though you only pay one bill, if you read it closely you're actually paying two different companies. Those two companies can even have very similar names, but they are separate entities due to regulations. For example, my local utility is Duquesne Light. They are responsible for the wires on the poles delivering energy to my house. There is a separate company of Duquesne Light called Duquesne Light Generation that actually generates the power. (I switch my generation to another company to get Wind power, so mine is different). All of the generation companies dump their power into the grid at the ISO level and it filters down through there. The ISO level is so large that the energy powering your house could be a few miles away or a few states away. The wind power for my home comes from about 60 miles east of me, and I only know that because I buy the power from that specific generation company. The transmission companies here in PA are not allowed to operate at a profit, but the generation companies can. The generation companies as a group are required by state and federal regulation to provide a certain amount of reserve capacity at all times and to incentivize that, there is a bidding process for reserve power. This is partially what failed in Texas, ERCOT does not require sufficient spare generation capacity. They have enough to prevent price spikes if one or two power plants get knocked off-line unexpectedly, but they can't handle 20% and they can't import power from other states because they refuse to meet the Federal requirement for redundancy and spare capacity. They'd rather shoot themselves in the foot and not be able to accept help because that means they might have to also help Oklahoma or Arkansas sometime in the future. Sorry for the wall of text... but with 13+ years in the energy industry, I hope to bring some understanding to grid issues to everyone here and how it tangentially relates to EVs.

Ssuuuuuree. Let's discuss. Texas has a whole mess of problems. 1. They isolated their grid from the rest of the US because they did not want to be subject to federal regulation regarding redundancy and reserve power generation. That means they cannot import electricity easily from other states. My understanding is they are scrambling now to make some emergency interconnects with help from the current Federal administration. 2. They sold off their grid to a for-profit consortium called ERCOT. ERCOT's first order of business is profitability, not reliability even though Reliability is in the name (Electric Reliability Council Of Texas.... kinda like Democratic People's Republic of Korea in naming accuracy) Nearly every other large grid in the US is regulated as a utility which means profits come second, reliability comes first. It isn't perfect, but it isn't the mess that Texas has. 3. Remember ENRON that caused rolling blackout in California in summer in order to drive up prices? This is the same exact thing. The primary cause of the issue is that natural gas delivery lines are freezing because they didn't bury them deep enough into the ground. This cut off supply to some generation and spiked the cost of natural gas across the state. Because the natural gas spot price more than tripled, generation plants shut themselves down to maintain profitability (See: ERCOT). They are literally letting people freeze to death because it would cause a temporary hit to their profits. 4. The Windmills did freeze.... because they didn't want to pay for the built in de-icing equipment that works just like the rear-window defroster in your car. Pretty much any windmill north of Texas has this ability. But again, profits. Windmills are only 10% of the problem according to ERCOT though... the other generation should have been able to make up for it. Windmills in Iowa are operating just fine. 5. Some of the few Nuke plants they have had their coolant water freeze. This seems like a design flaw to me... if you can't find spare heat at a nuke plant to keep your coolant tanks from freezing, that's just poor planning and design. This doesn't happen in the north. 6. What is most interesting is the neighborhoods with the highest income/property values have their power on the most. There was supposed to be rolling blackouts where everyone has to take a turn without power. That isn't happening. Poorer neighborhoods are going 48+ hours without power while downtown Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio all have power. The utility can shut house power off remotely using smart meters, but whole blocks of streets with Christmas lights and empty office towers are still lit up. 7. The next 48-72 hours are going to be interesting because they've destabilized the grid and they're going to have difficulty rebooting it. You can't just fire up a generator and throw it on the grid. It has to be coordinated. The specialists that run the grid are going to be earning their money through this. Texas isn't in a purely Black Start situation, but they're close... and if you'd like to get an idea of how complex it is, you can read more here: Black Start - Wikipedia The entire problem is due to corporate greed. So what are the solutions? Well, more greed of course. The Governor is signing an emergency order that will allow generators to pass on the higher cost of generation to their customers. Because of the way electricity is bought and sold down there, this is essentially a unilateral contract change in favor of the utilities to make sure they don't lose money for even a week. Imagine signing a contract with your energy provider saying you'll pay 10c kWh for 12 months, the utility gets in a jam and shuts down and lets you freeze to death because of the sudden high cost of natural gas, they cry to the Governor who then says "Oh, you can charge them what you want now, the contract doesn't matter....just stay profitable." That's what is happening there now. What they aren't going to do? They aren't going to require increases in reserve generation capacity. They aren't going to build the needed infrastructure to meet federal minimum standards for redundancy. And they aren't going to create permanent interlinks with the other national grids to help them through future storms because then they would be subject to federal oversight. And Gas pumps still use electricity... so it doesn't matter what kind of car you drive... if you've got an empty tank or an empty battery, you're not going anywhere.

Those new camo wraps you can get on cars these days are getting damn good!

This is the beautiful car thread, why are you posting fuselage Mopars? ?

It's not the regenerative breaking (though that does help). It's that at cruise, cars use so little power that the Model-S runs along with mostly just the smaller front motor actively providing propulsion and the rear motor just getting enough of a trickle of power to not cause drag. The car will adjust torque to the rear as needed for acceleration or aggressive cornering, but most of the time that $100k Model-S is just a FWD Jellybean Taurus. The ones where I'm not exactly sure how it's working are the tri-motor Plaid and Plaid+ models. The Plaid has a reduction in range from the Long Range, but the Plaid+ gets a significant increase in range. My guess is they're just throwing a lot more battery at it.

As SMK said... it's just batteries in what used to be an ICE vehicle. They're probably looking to move it to a dedicated EV platform instead. Huge cost efficiencies in doing that. Huge.

12, each with their own sleeping berth.

Google provides the advertising here that helps pay the server and software bills. They don’t like their ads showing on pages containing certain content (guns, illegal drugs, naked people, and others). Their system can detect the content and if it finds something it doesn’t like it sends me an alert to remove their ads from that page. Since I’m unable to remove ads from specific pages, the content would have to go. This has happened here before. there was a long thread of girls on cars that really pushed the line but I allowed it until the Google monster tapped me on the shoulder then I had to take it down.

I don’t have a problem with the girls on cars, but just a warning that if I get a tap on the shoulder from the Google monster, I have to remove it. I won’t remove the whole post though

80% of gay men are born that way. The other 20% are sucked into it.

Did you try and start it at some point?

Any idea why it might be seized? Aside from the stuck lifter, it ran when parked right?

I'm a much calmer driver here in Pittsburgh. They're overly polite in this city to the point of being annoying. When I'm back in NJ or NY, I turn into Mr. Hyde. But the more severe accidents are on the high speed highways. My experience driving a SuperCruise Cadillac to NJ was that it was much less tiring than doing the driving myself. In day to day commuting I'd want to drive myself, but after about 30 minutes on the PA Turnpike that I've driven hundreds of times, I'm fine letting the car do most of the driving.

AAAAAAaaabsolutely not.... and I'm no big fan of the XT interiors (though XT6 is nice enough if a bit bland in styling) The Model S interior is very creaky, loads of cheap plastic, misaligned panels and seams, minimalism to the point of starkness, and lets not forget the window switches from a Dodge Dart. $10k on the Model Y I priced out yesterday. Have you seen the drivers in NJ?

It probably isn't the best structurally.

Heck, that's quotes from my 9am staff meeting that just finished. how come ya’ll listen to a groundhog but not the CDC

Was that an actual factory option?

Any current Cadillac interior is better than any Tesla interior. Fit, finish, materials, build quality....take your pic, the Cadillac is better. If Cadillac does to their EVs what they did with the upper Escalade, it’s no contest

You're getting the two of us confused. I run E85 in my Avalanche and get the miserable mileage. @daves87rs has the Cobalt.

Moderna. The side effect profile seems to vary greatly. I'm running a slight fever, chills, headache, and body aches. I'm not 24 hours in yet (that will be tonight at 6pm) and I'm told hour 24 is the worst.

I got it because I'm management and work with first responders in the Police Department and Fire Department.