A foretaste of collapse

I have noticed that if you talk about economic collapse (in other words, a realist) you are automatically put on the "Right". 

If you are a liberal you see things in rosy-coloured spectacles and blame the situation on "the other side" 

The Temporary Collapse Of Texas Is Foreshadowing The Total Collapse Of The United States

Michael Snyder

Economic Collapse Blog,

18 February, 2021

We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to the United States as a whole.  America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling.  Our power grids were never intended to support so many people, our water systems are a complete joke, and it has become utterly apparent that we would be completely lost if a major long-term national emergency ever struck.  Texas has immense wealth and vast energy resources, but now it is being called a “failed state”.  If it can’t even handle a few days of cold weather, what is the rest of America going to look like when things really start to get chaotic in this country?

At this point, it has become clear that the power grid in Texas is in far worse shape than anyone ever imagined.  When extremely cold weather hit the state, demand for energy surged dramatically.  At the same time, about half of the wind turbines that Texas relies upon froze, and the rest of the system simply could not handle the massive increase in demand.

Millions of Texans were without power for days, and hundreds of thousands are still without power as I write this article.

And now we are learning that Texas was literally just moments away from “a catastrophic failure” that could have resulted in blackouts “for months”…

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

I can’t even imagine how nightmarish things would have eventually gotten in Texas if there had actually been blackouts for months.

According to one expert, the state really was right on the verge of a “worst case scenario”…

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

For years, I have been telling my readers that they have got to have a back up plan for power, because during a major emergency the grid can fail.

And when it fails, it can literally cost some people their lives.  I was deeply saddened when I learned that one man in Texas actually froze to death sitting in his own recliner…

As Texas suffered through days of power outages, a man reportedly froze to death in his recliner with his wife clinging to life beside him.

The man was found dead in his Abilene home on Wednesday after being without power for several days in the record cold.

Most Americans don’t realize that much of the rest of the world actually has much better power infrastructure than we do.  Just check out these numbers…

In Japan, the average home sees only 4 minutes of power outages per year. In the American Midwest, the figure is 92 minutes per year. In the Northeast, it’s 214 minutes; all those figures cover only regular outages and not those caused by extreme weather or fires.

As our population has grown and our infrastructure has aged, performance has just gotten worse and worse.  In fact, things ran much more smoothly all the way back in the mid-1980s…

According to an analysis by Climate Central, major outages (affecting more than 50,000 homes or businesses) grew ten times more common from the mid-1980s to 2012. From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled. In a 2017 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported that there were 3,571 total outages in 2015, lasting 49 minutes on average. The U.S. Energy Administration reports that in 2016, the average utility customer had 1.3 power interruptions, and their total blackout time averaged four hours.

America is literally crumbling all around us, and it getting worse with each passing year.

Our water systems are another example.

In Texas, the cold weather literally caused thousands of pipes to burst.  The damage caused by all of these ruined pipes is going to be in the billions of dollars.

Right now, we are being told that a total of 797 water systems in the state are currently reporting problems with “frozen or broken pipes”…

Some 13.5 million people are facing water disruptions with 797 water systems throughout the state reporting issues such as frozen or broken pipes, according to Toby Baker, executive director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. About 725 systems are under a boil water advisory, Baker said during a press conference Thursday.

Overall, approximately 7 million residents of the state live in areas that have been ordered to boil water, and it could take months for service to fully return to normal.

Without water, none of us can survive for long, and it is absolutely imperative that you have a back up plan in case your local system goes down.

In Houston, people that are without water in their homes have been forced to line up to fill buckets at a public spigot…

Meanwhile, in scenes reminiscent of a third world country, Houston residents resorted to filling up buckets of water from a spigot in a local neighborhood.

One Houston resident, whose power has just gone back on Thursday after three days but still has no water, told DailyMail.com: ‘It is crazy that we just watched NASA land on Mars but here in Houston most of us still don’t have drinking water.’

You can watch video of this happening right here.  Of course if your local water system completely fails, there won’t even be a public spigot available for you to get water.

Shortages of food and other essential supplies are also being reported in Texas.

For Philip Shelley and his young wife, the situation became quite desperate fairly rapidly…

Philip Shelley, a resident of Fort Worth, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter, Ava, were struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and due April 4.

“(Ava) is down to half a can of formula,” Shelley said. “Stores are out if not extremely low on food. Most of our food in the refrigerator is spoiled. Freezer food is close to thawed but we have no way to heat it up.”

So what would they have done if the blackouts had lasted for months?

All over the state, extremely long lines have been forming at local supermarkets.  In some cases, people have started waiting way before the stores actually open…

Joe Giovannoli, 29, arrived at a Central Market supermarket in Austin at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, an hour-and-a-half before it opened. Minutes later, more than 200 people had lined up behind him in the biting 26-degree weather.

Giovannoli’s wife is three months pregnant and the power in their one-bedroom Austin apartment blinked out Tuesday night. After a water pipe broke, firefighters also turned off the building’s water, he said. Giovannoli said he realized he still had it better than many others across Texas, but worried how long things will take to get back to normal.

This is happening in communities across Texas, and you can see video of one of these “bread lines” right here.

Of course those that had gotten prepared in advance did not have to wait in such long lines because they already had food.

Sadly, even though Joe Giovannoli had gotten to the supermarket so early, he later received really bad news…

A few minutes before the store opened its doors, a manager stepped outside and warned those waiting in line that supplies inside were low: No produce, no baked goods, not much canned food.

“We haven’t had a delivery in four days,” he said.

Remember, this is just a temporary crisis in Texas that is only going to last for a few days.

So what would happen if a severe long-term national emergency disrupted food, water and power systems for months on end?

All it took to cause a short-term “collapse scenario” in the state of Texas was some cold weather.

Eventually, much worse things will happen to our nation, and it has become clear that we are not ready.

So get prepared while you still can, because time is running out.

900 bucks to charge a Tesla

 Texas Freeze Raises Electricity to $900 to Charge a Tesla

21st Century Wire,

18 February, 2021

As a result of the record-breaking freeze in Texas, massive demands have sent retail energy and electricity prices skyrocketing.

One power supplier, Griddy, went so far as to tell 29,000 of their customers – now fully exposed to the real-time swings in wholesale power markets – to switch to another provider because spot electricity prices pushed as high as $9,000 a megawatt-hour.

In recent years, Texas officials were lured into adopting supposed ‘green’ energy policies and production, and promoted the sale of electric cars, including Telsa motors, whose billionaire owner Elon Musk has recently begun relocating a large part of the company’s operation to the Lone Star state. But at the current price per megawatt-hour, charging your Tesla is liable to set you back about $900.

Charles Kennedy from Oil Price reports…

IMAGE: A frozen Texas wind turbine is being doused with petrochemicals in order to remove the ice of the blades. Billionaire owner of ‘green’ manufacturer Telsa motors, Elon Musk, never anticipated his electric car revolution could be hampered by failing ‘sustainable’ green energy grids in Texas.

The electricity shortage in Texas amid the cold snap has sent spot electricity prices soaring so much that the surge in power prices equals a cost of $900 for charging a Tesla.

The typical full charge of a Tesla costs around $18 using a Level 1 or Level 2 charger at home, according to estimates from The Drive. This estimate is based on an average price of $0.14 per kWh of power.

However, the extreme winter weather this week has sent Texas spot electricity prices soaring, as the wind turbines froze in the ice storms and reduced the wind power generating capacity in the Lone Star State by half.

Spot electricity prices at the West hub have soared above the grid’s $9,000 per megawatt-hour cap, compared to a ‘normal’ price of $25 per megawatt-hour, FOX Business notes.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called early on Monday for rotating outages across the state as extreme winter weather forced wind power generating units offline, while electricity demand set a new winter peak record.

At the same time, freezing cold and ice storms cut offline almost half of the wind power capacity in Texas.

“We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units,” ERCOT said.

SEE ALSO: Green Power Fails: Will Texas Be Able to Reboot Its Power Grid?

In Texas, wind power generation overtook coal-fired generation in 2020 for the first time ever, with wind power now accounting for 25 percent of the Texas electricity generation. Natural gas-fired power generation is the leading source of electricity in Texas, with more than 45 percent share.

While oil-and-gas rich Texas is the leading U.S. state for wind power installations, the frozen turbines in the Arctic weather have strained the grid so much that rolling outages in Texas continue for a second consecutive day.

“The wind-dependent Texas grid is experiencing rolling blackouts, prices the equivalent of $900 per Tesla charge, and an expected supply shortage of 10 GW–the amount of electricity needed to power 5 million homes,” Alex Epstein, Founder of Center for Industrial Progress, tweeted today.

Here is my video from yesterday

A winter storm in Texas, global warming and the Great Reset

A Humanitarian Crisis in Texas

Is Texas Facing A 

Humanitarian Crisis? 

Zero Hedge,

18 February, 2020

Up to 15 million Texans remain without heat and electricity as temperatures across the state are well below freezing. Another round of winter weather is battering parts of the state Wednesday morning, as many Texans have been without electricity since Sunday are desperately scrambling to find shelters. Weather-related deaths have already been reported as one of the nation's wealthiest states can barely supply electricity to its residents. And some of those residents have written to us to share their painful realities...

...my house is now resembling a refugee camp. yeah these are all my friends but crazy cause they all have young kids...

hence i'm escaping the chaos...

what's insane is that big swathes of population in surrounding areas are without power and *water supply*

... bottled water flying off shelves & stores bout to run out.

... so much for Green New Deal shit... all our turbines and solar don't work now in freeze, LOL

i live in an area behind a major hospital so i'm thinking that's why my grid has been up and running this whole time. 

The unprecedented polar vortex split, dumping Arctic air down to the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in frozen wellheads that impeded the flow of natgas to power stations, triggering electric shortages as demand overwhelmed the grid. Considering ERCOT, which manages 90% of the state's electric load, has a high percentage of electrical generation produced via natgas, power has yet to be restored to millions of folks. Still on Wednesday, the power grid operator warned 40% of generation capacity remains offline. 

The cascading effect of blackouts and controlled power outages has resulted in some critical infrastructure such as cellular networks and water treatment plants going offline. 

As we attempt to show below, the speed at which one of the nation's wealthiest states transforms into a third-world country is simply stunning.

Jared Tennant, a drone pilot in central Texas, captured stunning images of how downtown Austin has been lit up during the power grid collapse while surrounding and more impoverished communities on the outskirts of town have had their power cut. 

Tennant "showed images of downtown Austin Tuesday night. Municipal buildings, empty office buildings, and even empty parking garages fully lit throughout the night," said PJ Media. 

Office buildings in downtown Austin were lit up during the blackouts.

Austin's convention center had power while neighborhoods across I-35 were dark.

Downtown offices were lit while tens of thousands of thousands of people in the surrounding community froze. 

One reader wrote that central Texas looks like a "refugee situation of sorts," offering some anecdotal accounts of what he's seeing on the ground which is nothing short of a disaster in the making. 

• Central Texas looking like a refugee situation of sorts... suburbs with power have homes with 10 to 15 or 20 people piled into living rooms with sleeping bags.

• Increasingly whole zip codes are being hit with not just power outage, but water system going down too either thru frozen or electrically damaged processing facilities or key pipes bursting.

• Anyone without power/water (now going on 2 to 3 days) is begging any friends or family in area still with power to take them in.

• Often multiple families are camped out in living rooms of those who still have power.

• Families are dropping off young children in residences & with neighbors that still have heat.

• Basically whole neighborhoods on other side of highway with no power are "moving in" to neighbors' homes on other side where power still exists.

• I'm getting phone calls from friends and elderly people in the community asking desperately for firewood. People are now running out of firewood and the couple grocery stores actually open for a few hours a day are constantly out.

• People are braving the iced-over roads to go looking for anyone with firewood.

• Any home that still has water is filling up jugs & bathtubs in expectation of water supply cut at any moment.

• The water situation is getting alarming.. especially many elderly now trapped in homes with no heat OR WATER.

• Local stores (the 2 or 3 that actually open) are limiting customers to 2 gallons of water each--it's flying off the shelves

• Individuals with 4-wheel drive and/or jeeps have been seen picking up stranded strangers on side of road... often people are having to hike miles to an open corner store to raid the shelves for any canned food/or still available items.

• As vehicles get stuck and/or become inoperable due to extreme freeze... people have been seen hiking out of suburban neighborhoods to reach "civilization" (or any area still with power and water)

• People are also now living in their work offices and/or teachers bringing their family to school classroom to live if school/office still has power/water.

• In many cases schools or some churches are not yet officially "warming centers"--yet people are basically squatting--entering any public place/room they can find that's warm.

• For most part there's almost zero snow plow/de-icing equipment particularly in mid- to small-sized towns and rural areas... last night's layer of ice storm means many people now trapped in their powerless/waterless homes even if they want to leave for a warming center

• There's no recourse, no answers... Oncor will not answer calls or give answers for days running. Civic services not responding... also local police departments are angrily demanding answers from the large energy companies

• Growing number of carbon monoxide poisonings in area and the state...people are lighting charcoal grills indoors, also running vehicles in garages

Another Texas resident exclaimed: 

So I honestly don't really know if there's anyway to mitigate this at all, or if there is any point trying to kick and scream and raise awareness about this since it seems like such an unstoppable avalanche, but with all of the pipes bursting as well as water treatment plants now going offline – next week when this shit thaws out, all of that sewage is going to coat the entire fucking state.

Which is gross, but the worst part of it is that fucking Covid can transmit through sewage, not all that well and it probably needs to be aerosolized, but with apartment buildings and the fact it will be EVERYWHERE and everything else… Texas is about to become a science experiment in herd immunity.

When those pipes start to thaw I bet they'll be gushing and spurting too - how long is it gonna take to seal everything off, there's just no way. 

I hope I'm wrong, but I think Texas might be on its way to becoming a Third World country.

... and there's more. 

Houston Chronicle's Brett Coomer reports dozens of people lined up to fill their propane tanks - many of whom have been without power for days. 

More Texans are standing in freezing weather waiting for propane fillups. 

People are running out of food. Huge lines were seen at a grocery store in Houston's suburb on Wednesday. 

More people are starving in Texas; a drone captures a massive line at another grocery store.

Lines at gas stations. 

"The line to get into HEB an hour before they open. I expect it to wrap around the building within the hour. Why? No power and most stores are closed. Why? Texas insulated and privatized the grid and failed to winterize it. Time to expropriate. It starts here!," one Twitter user said. 

Users are reporting grocery stores are now placing limits on food to avoid shortages.

"This is the line outside to get to the lines inside the only grocery store our roads are safe to get to in Canyon Lake Texas. We have been out of power and water since last Sunday it is now Wednesday. Friends brought us firewood. It's 26 degrees outside," another Twitter user said. 

... and while people rush to stores for propane and food, others are facing some grim realities at home with busted pipes. 

Dallas resident records ice frozen fan. 

More busted pipes - some homes in Texas are not winterized. 

The Hilton hotel in downtown Forth Worth is flooded after pipes broke. 

The Hilton- downtown Fort Worth. pic.twitter.com/bCt8nmleOG

— Clay10® 🔎🏡 (@djordxc) February 17, 2021

Water gushing from an apartment deck. 

A Camden Property in the Victory Park/Uptown Dallas area. People aren’t just “crying” about snowfall. Pipes are literally bursting in residential buildings around the metroplex, causing property damage to hundreds of residents! pic.twitter.com/FUOptPZGnW

— Clay10® 🔎🏡 (@djordxc) February 16, 2021

"Burst pipe has been running for 9 hours at an apartment in Austin," said one user.

This certainly doesn't look good. 

Homes across Texas have been devastated by bursting pipes all day. 

... and it gets worse - Houston Public Works' pipes are beginning to break. 

Is anything in Texas winterized? 

The George Allen Dallas County Civil Court in Dallas experienced a major leak due to a frozen water pipe. 

"My entire tiktok fyp is flooded with videos like this of peoples' homes in Texas. The electric company is dead ass wrong for turning off power knowing pipes would bust in the cold," said one user. 

How about Bitcoin or silver or gold coins? 

Internet search trends for "pipe burst" are exploding across Texas - imagine how many insurance claims will be filed in the coming days...  

40% Of US Crude Production Offline

 Texas Frozen Chaos Becomes Global Oil Market Nightmare With 40% Of US Crude Production Offline

Zero Hedge,

18 February, 2021

One week ago, when virtually nobody was following the sudden surge in certain obscure mid-continent nat gas prices...

... we warned that the ripple effects of the freezing vortex-induced calamity, which led to near record-low temperatures across the plains states, would ripple far and wide sparking logistical and commodity shockwaves not only in Texas and the continental US, but also around the world. Sure enough, just a few days later, Texas has been hit by a humanitarian crisis the likes of which it has never before seen with millions of people without electricity and increasingly without running water.

And even though Texas is doing everything in its power to contain the fallout that, it appears that the crisis is now spreading, because as a result of the persistent freeze and rampant "force majeueres" across the industry, more than 4 million barrels a day of output - almost 40% of the nation’s crude production - is now offline, Bloomberg reports citing traders and executives.

This is because not only has Texas - one of the world’s biggest oil refining centers - seen output drastically cut back but the waterways that help U.S. oil flow to the rest of the world have been disrupted for much of the week. The country’s largest refiner, Motiva in Port Arthur,  has closed and at least 3 million barrels a day of processing got taken offline.

“The market is underestimating the amount of oil production lost in Texas due to the bad weather,” said Ben Luckock, co-head of oil trading at commodity giant Trafigura Group.

As a result of the collapse in output, late on Thursday night Brent briefly surged above $65 a barrel, a level not seen since last January. Spreads indicating supply tightness also soared.

While historically weather-related disruption would have been mostly a U.S. issue, it is now "unmistakably global":

Crude markets in Europe are rallying as traders replace lost U.S. exports. OPEC and its allies must decide how much longer they keep millions of barrels of their supply off the market.

Adding to the misery is that what was expected to be a brief production setback is becoming longer by the day. As Bloomberg notes, estimates for how long the outages may last have gotten progressively longer in recent days as analysts try to figure out the timespan involved in thawing out infrastructure, especially in those areas where freezing weather isn’t the norm (read the following from Bloomberg for some more details: "How Do You Restart an Oil Well That’s Frozen Solid?").

While initially traders and analysts expected the hit to US production to last between two and three days, it's now looking unlikely that things will start to recover much before the weekend, and a full resumption could take weeks. That means that ever more barrels are being removed from the global market, just as demand returns slowly back to normal around the world.

Some estimates, such as Citigroup's, expect a production loss of 16 million barrels through early March, but some trader estimates are now almost double that as vast swaths of production in the Permian - ground zero of U.S. shale output - have been shut in. The result is a surge in the value of crude barrels in other parts of the world. North Sea traders have been frantically bidding for the region’s cargoes this week as replacements are sought for U.S. crude exports. As Europe’s supplies have gotten more expensive, Asian buyers have been snapping up Middle Eastern shipments at higher premiums.

And while headline crude futures are at their highest level in over a year, they’re yet to rip higher because the loss of refining capacity is equally acute. It's why traders are rushing to send millions of barrels of diesel across the Atlantic to the U.S., a potential boon for Europe’s downtrodden refining industry.

“The Gulf Coast is a gasoline machine and sends products across the U.S. as well as international markets,” said Kitt Haines, an analyst at consultant Energy Aspects. “For a brief period at least, this could help European refining.”

The result is going to mean a mixed picture for U.S. inventories in the coming weeks. While gasoline production has been hit by the spate of refinery outages, there are also far fewer drivers on the roads than normal. Stockpiles of heating fuels like propane and diesel -- for which demand was already soaring before this week’s weather -- are set to fall sharply.

Needless to say, the chaos has left Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ allies closely watching the forecast for Texas’s weather. As we discussed yesterday, while the group has yet to decide on its output plans for April, the WSJ reported that Saudi Arabia is now contemplating restoring 1mm barrels in output in the coming months after it unexpectedly cut an extra million barrels a day of supply in February and March.

“The market is turning into a wild animal for OPEC+ to control,” said Gary Ross, a veteran oil consultant turned hedge fund manager  at Black Gold Investors LLC. He said Wednesday that he saw 5 million barrels a day of U.S. supply offline. “The weather is having an unbelievable impact on global supply and demand,” he said.

There is some good news: a thaw - literally - is coming, with temperatures in Midland -- the capital of shale production -- expected to hit 45 Fahrenheit on Friday before rising to 56 Fahrenheit on Saturday, allowing crude production to restart. On Monday, Midland hit -2 Fahrenheit, its lowest temperature in more than 30 years.

Of course, the great unknown remains how long output - and the rest of the region’s oil infrastructure - will take to recover in full.

“Evidence from the last great Permian freeze off is that it can come back very quickly,” said Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research at Standard Chartered Plc. “But refineries are more likely to be prone to prolonged damage.”