Nashville Bits and Pieces

[jmtunafish 4325]

23 minutes ago, KJHburg said:

Hmm,  no that would be Seattle which is sitting next to Mt Rainer than could blow anyday. 

to quote this article 

Mount Rainier Volcano – Basic Planet

"The Most Dangerous Volcano in the mainland US"

Hmm, yes, there's a volcano just a few miles from Austin and a stone's throw from the Austin airport.  An extinct volcano.  But a volcano nonetheless.

https://texashillcountry.com/pilot-knob-largest-extinct-volcano-remaining-in-central-texas/

[donNdonelson2 6230]

8 minutes ago, jmtunafish said:

Hmm, yes, there's a volcano just a few miles from Austin and a stone's throw from the Austin airport.  An extinct volcano.  But a volcano nonetheless.

https://texashillcountry.com/pilot-knob-largest-extinct-volcano-remaining-in-central-texas/

Life in Nashville has potential for disaster as well. You never know when Mount Juliet might erupt! 

[markhollin 97581]

Update on skyline changes coming our way. These numbers are from projects that are either currently under construction or proposed:

10-19 stories: 52

20-29 stories: 29

30-39 stories: 21

40-49 stories: 2

50+ stories: 1

Mind-boggling! 

[bigeasy 1771]

Wow! For that number what is the probability of the "proposed" projects happening? What would be a realistic number of X will be finished by End of 2022

[nashville born 169]

I've read enough strings to know the reasons why.  Yet I can't help feeling disappointed as I look at that list and consider of 103 proposals, just three (not even 3%)  are over 40 stories.    I'm sorry.  I know it's an awesome  picture of development in Music City.  Just a little in my feelings.  

Having said that, come on Tony.  Win one for the Gipper!!!

[Luvemtall 158]

1 hour ago, nashville born said:

I've read enough strings to know the reasons why.  Yet I can't help feeling disappointed as I look at that list and consider of 103 proposals, just three (not even 3%)  are over 40 stories.    I'm sorry.  I know it's an awesome  picture of development in Music City.  Just a little in my feelings.  

Having said that, come on Tony.  Win one for the Gipper!!!

Absolutely! Although it’s great to have all the fabulous projects that we do, we need some tall boys to make a statement! Even one or two prominent towers like Tony G’s Signature Tower proposal will make the skyline stand out. 

[markhollin 97581]

The Farmer's Dog, a fresh dog food delivery service, is planning on expansion of its Nashville office with 332 new employees by 2024. They just opened their Music City office as their secondary HQ outside of NYC just a few years ago, and already has 116 here.  No word on the location of their office, since most of the employees are working remotely right now due to Covid-19.  

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2021/02/24/the-farmers-dog-nashville-expansion.html?cx_testId=40&cx_testVariant=cx_34&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

 

 

[nashvylle 6958]

10 minutes ago, markhollin said:

The Farmer's Dog, a fresh dog food delivery service, is planning on expansion of its Nashville office with 332 new employees by 2024. They just opened their Music City office as their secondary HQ outside of NYC just a few years ago, and already has 116 here.  No word on the location of their office, since most oof the employees are working remotely right now due to Covid-19.  

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2021/02/24/the-farmers-dog-nashville-expansion.html?cx_testId=40&cx_testVariant=cx_34&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

 

 

Wow this is 1/3 of the size of Alliance Bernstein... great news. 

[dragonfly 193]

On 2/20/2021 at 3:23 PM, BnaBreaker said:

Texas only gets a quarter of it's power overall through renewables (wind & solar) so it seems kind of odd to blame the issue on that.   It seems to me that the primary reason that Texas exclusively experienced such severe issues is because, as Ron pointed out, it is the only state that has it's own power grid and doesn't share with surrounding states.  

This leaves out one big elephant in the room. Not only has $billions and billions been spent on wind and solar in Texas, with a good proportion coming from taxes to cover subsidies and tax credits, but $billions and $billions have been spent on transmission lines to carry that "renewable" energy across hundreds and hundreds of miles from the the Panhandle and West Texas to the big metros PAID FOR by all rate payers in Texas as a surcharge on our electric bills.  I've been paying it, and got to depend on my own generator last week for the privilege. Not only were solar panels covered in snow, there was no unobscured solar flux on Monday the 15th when it was most needed AND aggregate wind velocity across those turbines was significantly lower than average on all the days power was most needed.  Including the turbines disabled by ice. The point being that those many $billions could have been spent on normal power sources with ability to respond quickly to demand. AND not to mention the accelerated depreciation schedule put in place during the Obama years with the required accelerated decommissioning in Texas of several functional coal fired plants in the last 10 years. So that we could be privileged to feel so good about ourselves  with our newish fanciful interruptible power sources. To save the planet or something.

Edited Friday at 05:45 AM by dragonfly

[PaulChinetti 6087]

8 hours ago, dragonfly said:

This leaves out one big elephant in the room. Not only has $billions and billions been spent on wind and solar in Texas, with a good proportion coming from taxes to cover subsidies and tax credits, but $billions and $billions have been spent on transmission lines to carry that "renewable" energy across hundreds and hundreds of miles from the the Panhandle and West Texas to the big metros PAID FOR by all rate payers in Texas as a surcharge on our electric bills.  I've been paying it, and got to depend on my own generator last week for the privilege. Not only were solar panels covered in snow, there was no unobscured solar flux on Monday the 15th when it was most needed AND aggregate wind velocity across those turbines was significantly lower than average on all the days power was most needed.  Including the turbines disabled by ice. The point being that those many $billions could have been spent on normal power sources with ability to respond quickly to demand. AND not to mention the accelerated depreciation schedule put in place during the Obama years with the required accelerated decommissioning in Texas of several functional coal fired plants in the last 10 years. So that we could be privileged to feel so good about ourselves  with our newish fanciful interruptible power sources. To save the planet or something.

I’ll bite, it’s Friday.  

I've read numbers that Texas gets around 7% of its power from renewables. Regardless of that most of the power plants that failed where coal and natural gas.

This was all 100% avoidable and that is 100% a fact  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/us/texas-electricity-ercot-blackouts.html

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/energy-executive-texas-power-plants-turned-off-crisis-76115042
 

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/02/20/texas-blackout-of-2021-was-primarily-a-human-failure/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-20/texas-blackout-how-the-electrical-grid-failed

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-power-grid-operator-ercot-sued-over-blackouts

 

[Bos2Nash 3012]

3 hours ago, PaulChinetti said:

I’ll bite, it’s Friday.  

Kicking the weekend off in style. Love it! haha

Also agree 100% that Texas brought this situation on themselves.

[nashvylle 6958]

it's a simple as: you have to winterize your power sources, regardless of the source. Texas didn't. 

[Bos2Nash 3012]

4 minutes ago, nashvylle said:

it's a simple as: you have to winterize your power sources, regardless of the source. Texas didn't. 

But "Climate Change isn't real", right? I thought that is a logical reason to not be proactive on things.

[gnash_nelson 31]

it's a simple as: you have to winterize your power sources, regardless of the source. Texas didn't. 

Winterizing costs the generating companies money and reduces profits. They figure this only happens about every 10 or so years so why bother. A little short term pain for some real long term gains.

In this particular situation the renewable energy generators almost delivered all the power they said they would. It was coal and gas plants that failed.

You could have had enough back up gas fired plants as you could dream up. When the we’ll head freezes and the pressure in the pipelines drops - no gas for generation.

Texas brought this on themselves by having their own grid and refusing to winterize their equipment.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[nashvylle 6958]

2 minutes ago, Bos2Nash said:

But "Climate Change isn't real", right? I thought that is a logical reason to not be proactive on things.

I believe in climate change, but I see some saying "investments in renewable energy would have prevented this" and others saying "went spent billions on renewable energy and it still happened".

Point being.... you have to winterize your equipment. 

[satalac 1541]

As much as I've had some personal issues with TVA, I'm glad we have them providing our power. It's a good mix.

Plus, they aren't really as profit hungry as the Texas model so they put the money back into the infrastructure. 

[smeagolsfree 19485]

The point is you can’t have greedy bastards running your utilities!

[titanhog 15649]

Thing is, bad winter storms come along and knock out services and some people don’t have electricity for literally weeks.  I have friends in Oregon who have been out of electricity for 2 weeks already and they’re not sure exactly when they’ll be up and running again.  I remember around 93-95, there was a horrible ice storm here in Nashville and I had friends without electricity for nearly a month up near Joelton.

Even though Texas botched this…sometimes historic storms just totally nail us.  Hopefully we learn from them and are better prepared the next time.

[dragonfly 193]

21 hours ago, Bos2Nash said:

Kicking the weekend off in style. Love it! haha

Also agree 100% that Texas brought this situation on themselves.

Of course "we" did. "We" went along with the dream. The dream of a future with no heat engines. That's why we're down to 20% coal fired from 33%  in 2014, you know, the ballyhooed "green economy" and all that. At the cost of lives. quote:  Texas produces more electricity than any other state, generating almost twice as much as Florida, the second-highest electricity-producing state.¹⁰¹ Natural gas-fired power plants supplied more than half of the state's electricity net generation in 2019.¹⁰² About 5,000 megawatts of Texas coal-fired generating capacity have been retired since 2016.¹⁰³ As a result, coal-fired power plants supplied less than one-fifth of state generation in 2019, down from about one-third as recently as 2014.¹⁰⁴ Wind-powered generation in Texas has rapidly increased during the past two decades.¹⁰⁵ In 2019, wind energy provided more than one-sixth of Texas' generation.¹⁰⁶ 

link: Texas - State Energy Profile Analysis - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

[dragonfly 193]

On 2/26/2021 at 7:47 AM, PaulChinetti said:

I’ll bite, it’s Friday.  

I've read numbers that Texas gets around 7% of its power from renewables. 

 

Read again. My previous post. Wind is 16% of Texas installed capacity at 28,000 MW, the capacity of 15 very large, normal, non-fanciful power plants. Solar capacity is at 3110 MW putting the total capacity at about 19% combined wind and solar. A total waste that could have been spent on reliable sources to help us out during the disaster. 

And I haven't seen any of you guys acknowledging that you have a clue how much has been spent on dedicated transmission lines for the fanciful "green" power in Texas, paid for out of the pockets of rate payers as surcharges. Again, I see it on my bill every month. A total waste. Enough to build several normal power plants, quote: "Investments in infrastructure are paid for by electricity customers and taxpayers, and our state spent more than $7 billion to build out the CREZ Transmission Lines for wind and solar generation."    Link: Texas energy commissioner says grid spending placed green politics over reliability (worldoil.com)

This is money that T. Boone Pickens tried to raise  in equity markets 12 years ago, and failed. For a very good reason, the markets know a boondoggle when it comes along. So this money has to be forced out of us by the so-called "unregulated" system in Texas, that cause for the disaster, the cause you've been hearing about on NPR, absence of regulation.

Edited Saturday at 03:38 PM by dragonfly

[ruraljuror 1110]

1 hour ago, dragonfly said:

Read again. My previous post. Wind is 16% of Texas installed capacity at 28,000 MW, the capacity of 15 very large, normal, non-fanciful power plants. Solar capacity is at 3110 MW putting the total capacity at about 19% combined wind and solar. A total waste that could have been spent on reliable sources to help us out during the disaster. 

And I haven't seen any of you guys acknowledging that you have a clue how much has been spent on dedicated transmission lines for the fanciful "green" power in Texas, paid for out of the pockets of rate payers as surcharges. Again, I see it on my bill every month. A total waste. Enough to build several normal power plants, quote: "Investments in infrastructure are paid for by electricity customers and taxpayers, and our state spent more than $7 billion to build out the CREZ Transmission Lines for wind and solar generation."    Link: Texas energy commissioner says grid spending placed green politics over reliability (worldoil.com)

This is money that T. Boone Pickens tried to raise  in equity markets 12 years ago, and failed. For a very good reason, the markets know a boondoggle when it comes along. So this money has to be forced out of us by the so-called "unregulated" system in Texas, that cause for the disaster, the cause you've been hearing about on NPR, absence of regulation.

Your raw numbers may be correct here in terms of annual averages, Dragonfly, but it seems you're neglecting to account for seasonality, which is obviously a big factor when it comes to renewable energy. During the winter season, Paul's number appears to be accurate that renewables like solar and wind are only expected to carry about 7% of the load from what I've read.

And I'm sure your'e right that there has been a lot of taxpayer investment and subsidization of specialized transmission lines and other renewable energy infrastructure, but if you want to make that argument then you're going to have to compare the renewable infrastructure investments and subsidies against the investments and subsidies that have gone into non-renewable energy production. I'm not going to dive into that research here for you, but I'd be curious to see what you come up with - given that it's Texas, however, my strong suspicion is that it's not going to be supportive of the point you're trying to make. 

As I see it, the situation here is pretty cut and dried. Texas chooses to have very little oversight/regulation over energy providers. Instead of requiring energy production infrastructure to be winterized to some kind of minimum operational standard, they instead chose to rely on market forces to encourage that winterization. The idea is that any energy providers that could remain operational during an "extreme" weather event like last week would make so much money from spiking prices while their competitors sat on the sidelines that enough of them would take that carrot and independently choose to prepare themselves both in terms of winterization and the ability to ramp up production capacity and meet demand when needed.

As last week made clear, however, those market incentives were obviously insufficient and did not have their intended result - in fact many of the companies that were actually able to continue distributing energy won't even see the fully realized benefits of those spiking prices because more than a few of their customers will likely end up filing for bankruptcy as a result of being unable to pay a 5 to 6 figure power bill that they weren't prepared for. Perhaps the market smartly/accurately factored in those kinds of collections issue to the equation, which could have been in part responsible for what led to the current mess, but that just serves to reinforce the premise that market forces alone and a laissez fair approach to regulation is probably not ideal for something as essential as the power supply.

 

 

 

Edited Saturday at 05:23 PM by ruraljuror

[nashvylle 6958]

1 hour ago, dragonfly said:

Read again. My previous post. Wind is 16% of Texas installed capacity at 28,000 MW, the capacity of 15 very large, normal, non-fanciful power plants. Solar capacity is at 3110 MW putting the total capacity at about 19% combined wind and solar. A total waste that could have been spent on reliable sources to help us out during the disaster. 

And I haven't seen any of you guys acknowledging that you have a clue how much has been spent on dedicated transmission lines for the fanciful "green" power in Texas, paid for out of the pockets of rate payers as surcharges. Again, I see it on my bill every month. A total waste. Enough to build several normal power plants, quote: "Investments in infrastructure are paid for by electricity customers and taxpayers, and our state spent more than $7 billion to build out the CREZ Transmission Lines for wind and solar generation."    Link: Texas energy commissioner says grid spending placed green politics over reliability (worldoil.com)

This is money that T. Boone Pickens tried to raise  in equity markets 12 years ago, and failed. For a very good reason, the markets know a boondoggle when it comes along. So this money has to be forced out of us by the so-called "unregulated" system in Texas, that cause for the disaster, the cause you've been hearing about on NPR, absence of regulation.

Let’s assume zero investment was made in texas for wind and solar. That does not mean that money would have been spent on winterization of “non-renewable” sources. I assume no company would have spent the costly investment and texas still would have been in the same situation. 
 

so blaming it on renewable or non-renewable is pointless to me if either is going to breakdown in extremely cold conditions. 

[titanhog 15649]

In the end…we need ALL of the energy sources we have at our disposal.  The more the better.  None of them are perfect…but together, they provide a healthier energy situation in America.   Thankfully, even the large corporate oil companies are putting money into renewables…and as long as we continue to use everything we have at our disposal in a manner that meets “clean” standards…good.  I’m also hopeful we’ll continue to do research on safe nuclear power for the future, as well.  

[ruraljuror 1110]

1 hour ago, titanhog said:

In the end…we need ALL of the energy sources we have at our disposal.  The more the better.  None of them are perfect…but together, they provide a healthier energy situation in America.   Thankfully, even the large corporate oil companies are putting money into renewables…and as long as we continue to use everything we have at our disposal in a manner that meets “clean” standards…good.  I’m also hopeful we’ll continue to do research on safe nuclear power for the future, as well.  

The issue here isn't really about the source of the energy, it's about the regulations (or lack thereof) that protect and maintain those power plants. The wind turbines and solar cells were just as poorly winterized as the non-renewable power plants, and the only reason we're even talking about power generation sources in the first place is because some of the Texas leadership brought up the green new deal as a red herring to distract from their own contributions to the mess their state is in.

For what it's worth, I agree with you about nuclear potential - but that just raises the stakes when it comes to the need for stronger and better run regulatory processes, especially with regard to extreme weather events. You also made a good point earlier in the thread that there's always going to be some degree of inherent risk that historic storms just nail us, which is true, but Texas is compounding that risk by running a grid independently from the rest of the states since geographic diversification of power facilities is one way to mitigate that risk. 

As with most things, there is a cost benefit tradeoff here, and there are certainly both costs and benefits associated with the way that Texas has managed it's power infrastructure. We will see if last week's blizzard inspires enough Texans to see about reevaluating and maybe revamping the cost benefit equation they're currently operating under, but change is hard and slow, and survivorship bias can be a major demotivating factor once the snow melts (or once the waters recede, as we have seen with our own flood wall). 

[titanhog 15649]

11 hours ago, ruraljuror said:

The issue here isn't really about the source of the energy, it's about the regulations (or lack thereof) that protect and maintain those power plants. The wind turbines and solar cells were just as poorly winterized as the non-renewable power plants, and the only reason we're even talking about power generation sources in the first place is because some of the Texas leadership brought up the green new deal as a red herring to distract from their own contributions to the mess their state is in.

For what it's worth, I agree with you about nuclear potential - but that just raises the stakes when it comes to the need for stronger and better run regulatory processes, especially with regard to extreme weather events. You also made a good point earlier in the thread that there's always going to be some degree of inherent risk that historic storms just nail us, which is true, but Texas is compounding that risk by running a grid independently from the rest of the states since geographic diversification of power facilities is one way to mitigate that risk. 

As with most things, there is a cost benefit tradeoff here, and there are certainly both costs and benefits associated with the way that Texas has managed it's power infrastructure. We will see if last week's blizzard inspires enough Texans to see about reevaluating and maybe revamping the cost benefit equation they're currently operating under, but change is hard and slow, and survivorship bias can be a major demotivating factor once the snow melts (or once the waters recede, as we have seen with our own flood wall). 

I agree.  There needs to be better preparation…and the entire US grid needs a long, hard discussion not only about issues like this, but about issues concerning hacking and the possibility of terrorist attacks.  I have a close friend who worked in corporate of Allegheny Power and he always told me how surprising it is to see just how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is.  I don’t know what all is going on behind the scenes in protecting this infrastructure…but I’m willing to bet there’s still miles to go.