Reading archive 2021-02-16

VERIFY: What are George Washington's ties to slavery?: The first president had a complicated history. The Verify team went to historical experts to break down his views and actions.

Valentine’s Day Giving The Texas Electric Grid The Cold Shoulder

What went wrong with the Texas power grid? - "Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants. 

"'The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,' said Hirs. 'It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances. 

"'For more than a decade, generators have not been able to charge what it costs them to produce electricity,' said Hirs. “'If you don’t make a return on your money, how can you keep it up? It’s like not taking care of your car. If you don’t change the oil and tires, you can’t expect your car to be ready to evacuate, let alone get you to work.'"

The Real Reason for Texas' Rolling Blackouts - "It’s true that Texas has the most installed wind capacity of any state in the country–wind can supply up to 60% of power in the state. But the grid is designed to allow for natural ebbs and flows in power sources, synchronizing when people need more or less power with when wind energy may be lower, like in the winter. ERCOT only plans for around 25% of electricity to be from wind in the winter; natural gas, on the other hand, makes up around half of the state’s electricity generation. 

"'It’s not like we were relying on wind, but we were relying on natural gas, and it failed terribly in that respect,' Rhodes said. 'Yes, we have wind turbines that are iced up, yes, we have wind turbines that are not performing. We don’t typically rely on wind during [the winter], so we built the grid to rely on those other resources, and they didn’t show up, either. We didn’t plan for this.'

"While it may take some time to do a full postmortem on what exactly happened to make conditions so dire this week, this isn’t the first time the Texas grid has frozen up both literally and metaphorically. In 2014, regulators found that wind energy was actually more reliable than both coal and natural gas during an early January cold snap. And in 2011—when Texas’s wind power capacity was one-third what it is now—state regulators ordered ERCOT to make winterizing updates. Since winterization is not mandatory, though, it’s not clear what the utility actually did to upgrade the grid."

There’s an invisible climate threat seeping from grocery store freezers. Biden wants to change that.: New undercover survey suggests leaks of powerful planet-warming gases pervade many supermarkets

Frozen Wind Farms Are Just a Small Piece of Texas’s Power Woes

Trump is the culture war. The culture war is the base. Now what? - "But in the Republican Party of 2021, that’s unacceptable. Republicans aren’t elected to 'do the right thing' or whatever; the expectation among much of the base is that they are there to elevate cultural fights against Democrats. This was the engine for Trump’s rise in the 2016 presidential nominating contest, his willingness to overtly prioritize the rhetoric and battles of conservative media over conservative policy proposals."

Ron Johnson and the emerging hoax-ification of the Capitol riot

On social media, vaccine misinformation mixes with extreme faith: Even with renewed efforts by tech companies, religious-themed misinformation is among the hardest to police

Pizzagate’s violent legacy: The gunman who terrorized a D.C. pizzeria is out of prison. The QAnon conspiracy theories he helped unleash are out of control.