“A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical onto a wind turbin” | Hacker News Reader

“A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical onto a wind turbin”

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9 pointsfireeyed8 comments

Posted by Luke Legate: Texas Public Affairs at G. Fox Consulting. Energy. Pipelines. Small Biz

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/16/natural-gas-n...

> The numbers show that natural gas plants were the biggest cause of the power shortfall, not wind.

> The state’s grid operator said Feb. 15 that about 34 gigawatts of power were offline. But of that, about 4 gigawatts was due to problems with wind turbines. The rest came mainly from the state’s primary sources, natural gas and coal.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/matt-canavans-faked-wind-meme-is...

> Importantly, Legate’s biography on Twitter says “Texas Public Affairs at G. Fox Consulting. Energy. Pipelines. Small Biz #grassroots.” G Fox Consulting’s clients include industry lobby groups ‘American Natural Gas Alliance’ and the ‘Texas Oil and Gas Association’. Legate himself has been on speaking tours to promote fossil fuels. “Increasingly, more and more, it is more of a challenge representing the benefits of the oil and gas business because there are some people who do not want the oil and gas business. There are a lot of activists and groups and candidates for office all across the country who want to stop all fossil fuels,” he said in 2019.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/viral-image-claiming-to-show-a-h...

> Viral Image Claiming to Show a Helicopter De-Icing Texas Wind Turbines Is From Winter 2014 in Sweden

This whole meme is used by the "clean coal" and "clean natural gas" climate change deniers to say "and this is why we don't need this renewable junk."

Why don't European countries have these sort of problems? Are wind turbines in Texas different or maintained improperly?

A helpful, if brief, Forbes explainer:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2021/02/16/why-w...

The answer, in short, is that turbines in colder places are typically equipped with de-icing and other tools, such as built-in heating. In Texas, where the weather is almost never this cold, they usually are not.

The market in Europe is privatized and cross border, even when there are some problems there is usually plenty to buy excess from other sources. Although the cold weather did make the prices skyrocket.

Also the price of kwH in so much more in EU, maybe you need higher prices to fix the problems both in California and Texas.

Did anyone bother to go down the thread? The image has been debunked as an image from a wind turbine being de-iced in Sweden in 2014.

This is a very very very dumb "take".

So do you snark the same if an electric power line is down and you drive a gas truck to fix it?

If a hydroelectric dam needs maintenance and you use an ICE boat to do it, is that "ironic"?

I guess it is amusing in a way, but a pet peeve of mine is humor that simplifies things into "This is ironic if we play dumb and assume a thing is all about X." when... clearly that's not the case.

There's way too much of that when it comes to politics, public policy... people.

But par for the course on Twitter...

Hmm, yes it's pretty great that we can use these huge-ass energy generating machines to power houses and malls, instead of burning a crapton of non-renewable dead dinosaur juice, so that we can reserve this precious dinosaur juice for cases where we really need it, such as antifreezers, food packaging, or (for now) helicopter fuels.

...what?

* Yes I know it's not really "dinosaur" juice.

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