Author: Steven Guccione

Texas Energy Blame Game

Steven Guccione

The state government in Texas is trying to blame renewables for their failures in the Big Freeze. I won’t even say it was gas that was the problem. Just failure to winterize the system, which was heavily gas based. Not widely discussed, but lack of gas from Texas also left millions in Mexico without power. Hard to blame that on renewables.

A good read on the subject that quotes a former ERCOT member:

“They would have to be complete idiots if they think what they’re doing is solving the problem,” he said. He doesn’t actually think elected officials are idiots, he added, but he does think they are acting out of political convenience.

Texas Politicians Aim to Penalize Wind and Solar in Response to Outages. Are Renewables Now Strong Enough to Defend Themselves?

Texas vs Austin

Steven Guccione

Austin has always been a liberal oasis in the vast conservative state of Texas. I have always liked it here, but the state government’s ongoing vendetta (if that is the word) against the city has always bothered me. It seems to be getting worse. Too many things to cover here (like why was half of Austin blacked out for days during the Big Freeze, even as Austin Energy had enough capacity to power the city). Seems other people have noticed. From the local media.

The history of the City of Austin vs. the State of Texas

ERCOT urges energy conservation through tonight

Steven Guccione

Really? From Twitter. Sounds like a bunch of generators shut down and now rates are going to go up, at least temporarily. In April. ENRON, anyone?

Alert: Due to a combination of high gen outages typical in April & higher-than-forecasted demand caused by a stalled cold front over TX, ERCOT may enter emergency conditions. We do not expect customer outages. Declaring an emergency would allow us to access additional resources.

ERCOT urges energy conservation through tonight

Electric Mower Blade Covers

Steven Guccione

I glued the PVC pipes for the blade unit and even painted it all black. I needed some way to cover the blades, mostly to prevent accidents. Not likely these little blades will be throwing rocks around. I found some plant saucers on Amazon that looked like they could do the job. The problem is how best to attach them. I bought some aluminum strips and decided to bolt them together. Some cutting, drilling and bolting and I made a nice little cover for the blades. Bought some u-bolts to attach the cover to the PVC pipe, which is going to require just a little more drilling.

I went back and re-installed the big handle to raise and lower the blades and re-purposed some of the mechanism used to lift the original deck. Instead of four offset lift points, I now have just two parallel to each other. The last job is to figure out how to connect the whole blade unit to these lift points. It needs to be offset to give some overlap in the blade paths so that there aren’t uncut stripes in the grass. Also hope the whole arrangement is flexible to handle a bit of collision but not so flexible that the blades move around in normal use. Almost there.