Given that the rest of Canada is green with envy of our coastal environs, leftist Utopian paradise where we can garden year round. But you are right, the bureaucratic nightmare can be, well, an insane nightmare. I assume this is the Islands Trust gang destroying Salt Spring? What you describe is nothing short of insane. I am sure AirBnB did not help either…
Prices in NC - I wish… that is a literal pipe dream, looking on from this side of the continent.
Hi AP,
what you are describing (beurocrats) gives me shivers… I’ve been self employed as a Tilesetter for 20 years now so I’ve come up against my fair share of gestapo grief when living in my former town of Sechelt. It’s night and day here and I hope it stays that way… There are always rumours that the city will extend its building and by- law enforcement out this way (tax revenue) but we are fairly small population wise that I’m hopeful it’s not worth their effort$. I’m just south of Lund about 4k.
Does Salt Spring still make its own currency? I was shown some of the bills years ago and though it was really great.
Seb.
The true left supports workers. This island discourages everybody who wants to work or find anything to live in that’s not insanely expensive. A few years back some fool was charging 1000.00 per month to let someone sleep on his property, in a tent. Bizarre, shameless.
If I was younger I sure wouldn’t stick around.
- Literally a town named Utopia, Texas. How is it Utopia? Virtually no government. We are not an incorporated town, just a hole in the county. The local people are ranchers and have earned their dignity through hard years. Charity abounds. The community is heavily faith based. There is no Gestapo to be found here. Mostly libertarian philosophy. Is my family self sufficient? Maybe a way to measure is how long can we survive (thrive) with no more external inputs. We can thrive for a good while. With Rain water, solar power, wood heat, wild game, chickens, open pollinated gardens, Acoustic music, ... we are closer..... but still not self sufficient. Don’t think we’ll get there, but the joy is in the effort and the process. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Great article, Samantha; very inspiring. And congratulations on your good news!
Love the photo of your dog and lamb cuddled up together; animals are the best.
I live in Fort Worth. Unusually cold and wintery weather has caused the following in the past 5 days
- 130 car pile up on an interestate during morning rush hour leaving 6 dead (with a thin glaze of ice)
- Six or so inches of snow and record cold, as low as -4 or -5 (before wind chill).
- Power outages- was supposed to be rolling power outages of 15-45 minutes at a time. But windmills froze, solar panels were covered in snow (and days of cloudy weather) as well as frozen generators and natural gas frozen in pipelines. Many areas have been turned off in an effort to keep the entire grid from going down.
- Power went out at a water treatment facility in Fort Worth, leaving some 200,000 people under a boil water alert. But it’s hard for people to boil water without power. 5. City of Fort Worth’s plans to distribute bottled water thwarted because their normal supplier, Nestle, is closed.
- Stress on the power grid is causing cell phone towers to go down.
You don’t need a full homestead to be prepared to deal with something like this. I’m not in as good as shape as I want, but I do have containers to store water, water filters, and an alternative cooking method and flashlights. I’m in a lot better shape to deal with this than most people are.
7. Gas stations are running out of gas.
You don't need a full homestead to be prepared to deal with something like this. I'm not in as good as shape as I want, but I do have containers to store water, water filters, and an alternative cooking method and flashlights. I'm in a lot better shape to deal with this than most people are.This is sad! I mean, yes you're right: a homestead is not needed to deal with something like what suburban and urban Texans are going through. But it sure would make a big difference in how well one survives it. And thank God this deep freeze is going to be of short duration, however long it lasts. Winter isn't forever.
But if your meager preps are “a lot better” than what most people have as resources when an infrastructure hiccough emerges, well that just ain’t anything good. In an era when FEMA puts out (pathetic) guidelines on how to become more resilient, if as a people we can’t even measure up to those 3-day standards, we’re just a significant disaster waiting to happen.
I’m pessimistic. I don’t think Texans will learn anything from this. Some few might be thinking this morning after a freezing, dark night about what they are gonna do as soon as they can to be better equipped and more resilient, but I’ll wager by July 4th most of them will have forgotten all about their nightmare. It’ll be a patio party anecdote. Because, hey, it’s not likely to happen again in their lifetimes, right? And by extension, nothing else bad is going to happen, so what’s to worry about? It’s bright and sunny out today and the beer’s flowing.
The rest of the country, watching this drama unfold, will learn even less. Even those hit by some disaster last year or the year before, will respond with nothing more thoughtful than a vague emotional empathy for what some distant fellow Americans are experiencing. Everyone will be watching to see what the government does to fix it and get life back to normal. Few will think about what they should do, and far fewer will actually commit time and resources to implementing a plan. 'Cause that’s what government’s for. Even one that’s obviously going broke.
Natural disasters certainly don’t spark national conversations about infrastructure policy. Anybody going to revisit the decision to cancel the XL Pipeline again? Any plans going to be put in place to assure backup power sources - I mean, plans for resilience for America in general, not just for the next Texas freeze up, which plans (if any are implemented) will be relaxed in 3 years when Texas’s freeze has faded into the distance? Anybody in Oklahoma or California or, heck, my state of Vermont, going to mine Texas’s modern history of decision-making that has brought it to this ridiculous situation? (I could wish, but I know my state government better than that; we’re busy trying to out-Texas Texas with our reliance on solar energy, and the managers’ desire to outlaw widely-used wood and oil heat, despite the 4 feet of snow in my yard and the icy rainfall of yesterday that coats and sticks to everything.)
A few gallons of water, a filter, and some kind of camping stove just won’t cut it when times get really tough and don’t get better, and FEMA has run out of resources with which to alleviate the desperation. My goodness: I went to a local chain pharmacy yesterday, and walked down an aisle of empty shelves that are usually filled with “seasonal merchandise.” We all saw temporary shortages of key supplies last spring and summer. I still see rolling outages of canned goods and certain kinds of vegetables (no thin-skinned potatoes for a month, now). The international supply chain is strained. There’s talk of meat shortages coming, and limited soybean supplies. And who knows what commercially grown vegetables produced domestically or imported from across the globe will actually be available? But all anyone wants to think about is how the vaccine has come and by mid-summer we’ll all be back to normal.
Really, America? That’s a great Plan A. I sincerely hope it works out. But what if it doesn’t? Or, what if it does and something else happens? Something no one’s thinking about right now? America, and Americans, what’s your Plan B?
Power back on after 72 hours with about 45 minutes of off and on power during that time. I guess that was the “rolling” part. 
Isolated the kitchen/bedroom area (contiguous) with plastic sheeting and heated with a small propane heater. Used about 1/8 of propane on hand. Ran gensets (2 is 1…) for duration. Dealt with a carburetor issue on one, but remedied that.
Made a list of improvements to be done. We did fine, but it can always be better. A LOT of people were VERY uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we are now hearing of deaths due to not-so-smart ways of staying warm. I don’t really know what apartment dwellers could do other than a small bottle of propane with a small heater and plenty of warm clothes.
Over the past year, and particularly the past 3 days, it has become clear that the 99+% of the masses are prepared for absolutely nothing other than this weekend’s entertainment event.
I was out a few times and saw these things.
Multiple gas stations without gas. People milling in the grocery store like zombies under emergency generator lighting, all cold case items had been removed. Non perishables only. Man at a gas station in shorts @10 degrees. Lines wrapped around fast food places that had power. So many people rely on so many fragile systems.
Many signposts to make note of when it comes to human behavior. VTG, you are right that we continue to have the lessons put before us and so few take heed.
Would rather have been at the farm, but for now it’s one foot on the dock and the other in the boat.
Thanks to Dr. M and the PP tribe (among others) for the motivation and knowledge to be “prepped”.
Spot On,
For years, my family snickered behind my back as being that prepper from Idaho who is afraid of running out of food and water. In the last year, they have gradually had to admit that maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all: Being able to generate my own heat and solar electricity, obtain water from my own well, grow and hunt much of my own food, all of which results in me being in better physical shape. It gives one great peace of mind and equanimity, plus it contributes to a sense of community if done in concert with others.
We are at an inflection point where Governmental policy has failed and has very little hope of becoming viable again. Plan B is your individual plan. Get your shit together now using what resources are still available. Texas is the current example of failed policy... dominating the news cycle until the interest reverts back to failed Coronavirus policy. We are here in Texas watching the “suffering” all around us. Some are individually prepared and doing fine but most are living on the edge. Texas generates @ 20 to 25 % of its energy by wind. Windmills don’t make economic sense, even when they aren’t frozen. The city of Georgetown Texas contracted to have all their power supplied by alternative energy sources for a period of 25 years. It is an epic fail. They are buying natural gas on an emergency basis at huge premiums and their customer rates have gone far above those of their neighboring towns. The mayor of Georgetown lied to the people about why their rates were going up and proudly strutted about after having a photo shoot with Al Gore about 5 years ago. He is gone, but His bad policy will outlive him by 20 years.Germany has seriously overestimated how much its neighboring countries are able to help out in the event wind and solar energy fail to deliver, thus putting it’s power supply at risk.
One of Germany’s strategies for making its energy supply renewable is to rely on its neighbors to step up when green energies fail to deliver. As the country adds more volatile wind and solar energy to the grid, Germany hopes that neighboring countries will cooperate in helping to stabilize the power grid in the event the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine — especially after the country shuts down its remaining nuclear power plants and starts to shut down old coal plants. Nuclear and coal power make up the lion’s share of Germany’s stable baseload power supply. “A dangerous miscalculation” However, it appears German officials have made a major miscalculation: citing a recent study, journalist Daniel Wetzel at Die Welt writes: “Europe cannot bail out the German power supply. This is so because “hardly a neighboring country has any remaining extra power plant capacity.” The Die Welt economics journalist then calls the German strategy “a dangerous miscalculation.” In 2014 the German Ministry of Economics assumed the country could rely on 60 gigawatts of over-capacity in related adjacent markets in Europe, but it turns out that the figure was overstated by a factor of 3 to 4. Consequently on windless and sunless days, Germany could end up missing considerable amounts of power. Wetzel writes:As a result, soon all over Europe power stations with ‘secured power’ that can produce independently of current wind and sun conditions will be missing.”He also adds that as every European country strives to add more wind and solar capacity, more of their baseload capacity plants are being shut down as well, which only makes the situation increasingly worse when sun and wind do not show up. The point is rapidly coming where there will not be sufficient baseload capacity to keep the grid stable. One solution, Wetzel suggests, would be to install gas-fired power generators so that they could be fired up in times of low wind and solar output: “However, new gas-fired plants are being built nowhere because refinancing under the conditions of the Energiewende appears as being too risky,” Wetzel reports. In a nutshell, as Europe expands its wind and solar capacity, more baseload capacity will be needed. But instead of adding it, Europe is reducing it, and thus making the supply and grid stability worse. As for Germany, it is increasingly dawning on politicians that designing energy infrastructure is best left technical and electrical engineering experts, and not to climate -catastrophe obsessed politicians and green activists who seem to think such complex systems can be built up ad hoc as you go. The price of this slipshod politicized approach could wind up being very painful in the midterm future. Government is corrupt and inept. It is up to each invidious to prepare.... and to find like minded friends who understand the seriousness of the situation. I agree with VTGothic that this current crisis will fade into the memory hole, and rather than fixing the underlying issues we will use all governmental resources to react to the next crisis and the next until there are no resources left. Plan B is totally your plan ... it starts in your home.
I’m thinking about doing something Less Realistic.
I have a favorite pet, a little white bird that is a Belgian D’Uccle, who is trying heroically to hatch some eggs. It looks like this batch is not going to produce.
I want to order some babies for her, then put them where the eggs are when the d’Uccle takes a daily break.
The problem is … I had 12 birds, then 9 more hatched.
The minimum order for the D’Uccle’s is 15, so I would be going from 12 to 21 to maybe 34 (usually, they don’t all survive).
While I really feel for all the people in Texas and elsewhere suffering, my hope is that this epic failure with over-reliance on alternative energy sources will somehow temper the insistence of some to blindly leap into the Green New Deal. Unfortunately, if the following tweet from AOC is any indication, I seriously doubt the lessons learned from Texas will get a fair forum in the media:
The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2021So let me get this straight, we are experiencing the problems in Texas because we didn’t pursue “green” energy solutions aggressively enough?!?
So if we had relied on a greater number of windmills and solar panels and less on reliable and proven coal-fired and natural gas plants we would somehow have MORE energy in Texas when a cold snap and snow renders the alternative energy sources useless? Yah, right, tell me how that works.
The fact is that base electrical demands need to be met through all types of weather conditions and sources like natural gas plants can be turned on and off quickly when conditions demand it. Texas chose to decommission coal and natural gas plants and install more windmills and solar farms (which work great when you have wind and sun) but now you are seeing the consequences when those conditions are not met.
Lessons learned - you need BOTH
It will be interesting to see how the debate gets framed in the aftermath. If the COVID “Official Narrative” is any indication, I know where I place my bets.
The media reports I read suggest that cold weather impacts on natural gas production and distribution to power plants were more impactful than wind power being off line. I wasn’t able to find a source that clearly quantified the relative impacts of gas and wind. And, of course, increasing the proportion of wind power on the grid a would probably result in big impacts on the grid for turbine icing events. Then again, storage would buffer things, but probably only for hours to 1 day at most.
Of course, the real problem is too many people living in too many houses (i.e. too few people per house) that are too big and poorly insulated (at least some of them) and with too high an expectation for very cozy temperatures in their house 24/7/365 and with electric heat (hopefully heat pumps rather than resistance, but I have my doubts).
No, the real problem is fragile, one-size-for-all energy solutions. Even with more people in fewer houses, the grids would have still gone down in most cases, perhaps all. Our problem is nicely articulated in Oliveoilguy’s post: “…designing energy infrastructure is best left to technical and electrical engineering experts, and not to climate -catastrophe obsessed politicians and green activists…”.
It’s one thing to set a goal of increasing renewable energy, and then let the engineers figure out what’s best in each setting; it’s something far less rational for activist groups and international bodies to dictate how each country is to reach the goal. That’s patently absurd central planning and it never, ever, never works.
It makes little sense to convert so much of Vermont’s farmland to solar panels (and then worry about food production issues), and to refuse to reactivate the many deteriorating river dams that used to power our state’s once-significant manufacturing industry. Here, where the sun is fickle and the water plentiful, it makes far more sense to use hydro. However, it is solar and wind that are the federal and state approved energy alternatives, while all waterways are to be left alone as natural features. We are not even supposed to clear out the debris from Tropical Storm Irene 6 years ago that laid such waste to our roads and towns: it’s “natural” and humans must not have an impact on nature. So we’ll see how many dead 100 foot tree logs float up and jam into bridges with the next major flood, causing how many more hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary destruction.
This is just government by bureaucratic mindset, the bane of problem solving. There’s nothing rational about our approach to energy, and more people in fewer houses won’t fix that.
“So let me get this straight, we are experiencing the problems in Texas because we didn’t pursue “green” energy solutions aggressively enough?!?”
Unfortunately this is just in the nature of bad ideas (or of sticking to a narrative no matter what). It’s what we humans do.
In the book “When Money Dies” there was this amazing set of events where the Weimar hyper inflation was really starting to get out of hand. All the economists of the time interpreted the problem as being a shortage of money.
It was so twisted I can hardly remember it, but it was something like, “Look at all these poor people working 80 hours a week and at the end, they don’t have enough money to buy food. They need more money”.
There was actually a moment where the central bank proudly announced that they were going to fix the money shortage by printing some crazy amount of currency on a one time basis to stop inflation in its tracks. I’m not making this up.
When it made the problem worse they decided they hadn’t printed enough money to stop inflation and performed the same “rescue” several times with escalating amounts of new currency.
It’s scary as shit, but once you recognize the process it really helps you shake off your reluctance to act. If you were a Texan right now, you might be thinking, “I was gonna get a backup heat source but now I don’t have to worry because these events will teach everyone a lesson and the grid will be fixed.”
No one will learn anything and nothing will get better. Get resilient.
Unfortunately, I think we’re both right.
Of course, centralized planning is a significant part of the problem.
But so is too many people expecting too much.
I’m sure those anti-dam and anti-debris removal policies are in place because trout (and salmon if they ever return in significant numbers) hold a special place in our hearts. There are probably other aquatic lifeforms I’m not thinking of (eels and any other migratory fish that swim far upstream to lay eggs). Perhaps this is given too much weight, but it’s a real impact. With that said, of course it’s stupid to leave an unpowered dam there blocking fish.
Farmland is important, but in Vermont much of it is dedicated to growing corn with toxic methods to feed to dairy cattle. It’s probably a better idea to grow other crops or graze the cattle to get what dairy we can and figure out out to live with less dairy in our lives. With that said, solar panels on high quality farmland are a bad idea anywhere.
I agree heat pumps are more efficient MOST of the time, but when it gets this cold the auxiliary heating strips come on and efficiency plunges. How do I know this? I have one in the Northern part of TN. I knew when I bought the house that I was a bit far too North for a winter with a heat pump. I have power, but haven’t run it for two weeks. Wood stove 24x7. Keeping the thermostat at 68, I had a 86 KWh day on Feb 3rd which got into the mid 40’s. I turned it off and went full wood stove at this point. After that I had a 27 KWh day Feb16th, which didn’t go over 16. I also have my electric water heater on a WiFi enabled switch and keep it off unless we are going to shower etc. We did laundry and stuff on Feb 10th and ran it for four hours that day and had a 38 KWh day, which got into the high 30’s for a short period of time.
I have an app on my phone for my Electric provider and water heater switch. It’s a Wemo relay switch wired in to 240 VAC.
It’s cool to be able to see what uses high amount of power. BTW on the laundry day the electric dryer was going too, which caused an interesting spike during the day.
I’m all for alternate energy, been into since the 70’s because of my dad’s influence, but have never had the properties that allowed it, either because of a HOA or in my case now, I live in a log home in the woods and there is too much shade.
I think your critique of so-called renewables goes in the right direction. Full analysis of the energy cost of wind and solar electricity reveals a net energy too low to power the industrial economy needed to build or maintain such energy sources as a significant replacement to current fossil fuel consumption. Unfortunately, Germany and Spain are discovering this after heavy investment in those sources.
Moreover, many analysts of the problems that the end of cheap fossil fuel will pose have agreed that the electrical grid, already dilapidated by poor maintenance in the US, is the most vulnerable component of industrial civilization, and will be the first to fail in the energy descent. Blackouts are already common in the less developed world, a harbinger of what will occur in the US.
As you say, direct mechanical use of small, local hydropower is the most permanent and economical solution. And waterways and sail transport will return. Animal integration in agriculture for animal power, soil regeneration and some food and fiber is one of the most durable and resilient of agroecosystem designs. It is ironic that the current dictatorship of urbanized ecofascist thinking prevents ecologically healthy management of the natural resource base.
Some brief notes on the impact of relying on wind under these weather conditions:
https://twitter.com/dancrenshawtx/status/1361810434282704898?s=21
https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1361691271199264770
where TX energy comes from:
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/august/ercot.php
bottom line: blackouts would have been avoided if we had more nuclear, nat gas, or coal. Wind is not reliable.
**** EDIT 6PM CT 2/18/21 ****
Further reading shows the impact on nat gas, coal, and nuclear was substantial. Right now, I can’t say whether wind and solar was more sensitive to the cold or not. The overriding factor, it appears at this time, was failure on the part of ERCOT to properly “winterize” the infrastructure, leading to frozen well heads, wind turbines, control systems, etc. across the grid. (Whether it would have been appropriate to winterize everywhere, given the rarity of storms like this vs cost, is a separate discussion.)
I have other data from which I’m convinced wind and solar are significantly less reliable in general compared to nat gas, coal, and nuclear. This was a case of confirmation bias on my part to jump to the conclusion that this was the root cause. The relative reliability of different forms of electricity generation and transmission is a large topic, and at the moment I don’t think it is fundamentally relevant to the root cause and corrective action analysis that’s needed.
**** EDIT 840PM CT 2/20/21 ****
Wind generates about 23% of electricity in TX, but is notoriously variable. When wind production drops, additional natural gas is turned on to meet demand; it acts as a swing producer. Together wind and nat gas make up about 49% of TX generation. As temperature dropped and wind turbines shut down, wind generation dropped considerably. Natural gas production shot up, reaching a peak of 165% above the normal level, before well head and other natural gas generation started coming off line.
So it is absolutely true that wind generation’s lack of reliability was the root problem. Additional causes, like possible failure to properly winterize generation plants (wind, solar, nat gas, coal, nuclear), are secondary.
Articles at ZeroHedge and SRSRoccoReport lay this out in detail.
I think it’s a combination. No one can deny that continuing with fossil fuels as a source of energy is lunacy. And to grow the population on top of that is lunacy x 2. We need to get onto renewables. It just isn’t being done very well.
I’ll put forth our little 2 acre home as an example of what to do, LOL. Well not quite, but it’s clear how this could be addressed.
Anyone who lives in a house can have a fireplace or wood stove with some wood stored away for such an emergency. Then you can keep your house warm in grid down scenario.
Keep a cistern of 100 gallons of water somewhere.
For electricity, well, you can go without for a few days in an emergency. Or if you have a hybrid or electric vehicle, set that up to feed your house and at least run your fridge.
We are set up pretty well, I just need to install the manual pump on the well so we can continue to get water in a power outage.
IMO hydro is the worst renewable energy. In BC we have been feeling the impacts of this for a long time. In recent decades there was a fanatical push to install run-of-river dams in all of the most remote rivers here. It’s sad, you can now look on Google Earth and find the most pristine remote river you can think of, and now it has a road bulldozed in with a little dam built on it. It’s a disgrace, it was a totally corrupt fiasco, and the economics of it didn’t even make sense. Hydro consumers will be paying big time for this for many years. And all the previous big dams have destroyed salmon rivers. The big one under construction now is Site C which is a complete boondoggle. They green lighted it without even a viability study being done. It will cost multiple billions of dollars. Thanks for that, Christy Clark, you corrupt b!tch. It will flood thousands of hectares of prime farmland and native sites. It is being built to provide electricity for Alberta oil activities, and it isn’t even financially viable. It will again cause all of our rates to skyrocket in coming years. A total disaster by every account. And in BC we just sell our supposedly “clean” hydro power to California, then import cheaper electricity from Alberta produced by coal powered plants, for our own use, then brag about how clean our energy is.
And solar power paves over productive land. Much better to just put it on roofs.
And wind turbines kill birds and destroy landscapes.
There are no good alternative energy options.
Ultimately the problem is overpopulation because it forces people into condos and apartments where they can’t do most of the resiliency and sustainability actions I mention above.
But, the economists in charge are insane and believe that more population will solve the problems. The only solution is population reduction. Here in Canada I just filled out a government survey asking for input on how we can foster economic growth once Covid is “over” (like that will ever happen). The option of NOT growing the economy wasn’t even on the table. They have plans to triple our population to 100 million. They are insane.