LogFAQs > #950807936

Entity13 posted...

Seriously, and I will repeat this take for a while:

A reasonable human being would have looked at the storm and the needs of other people, and either canceled the first flight altogether, or use whatever connections necessary to send one lucky family somewhere warm for the weekend while said reasonable person helped take care of everyone affected by the storm.

However, if reasonable people were in charge of Texas, it would have better precautions to keep its infrastructure running, rather than cutting corners on proper materials (lubrication, turbine heating, or cold-appropriate metals) just because "lol Texas so hot" and avarice combined. The people of Texas deserve better than this nonsense, and Cruz's flight highlights this utterly.

The annoying thing, right now, is that I'm trying to look up exactly what the failure points are in a wind turbine with the cold weather with it, and I can think of a few things, but, not that much.

The metal shrinking could cause issues with the wings, but, that's a design issue that should be standard across all wind turbines, not just cold ones and not-cold ones.
The grease and oil could gunk up, not fully freeze, but, slow things down. Oil freezes at a much lower temperature than water, and you can get some super simple stuff to inject in the oil to prepare them for temps lowering. Mass-buying and applying new lubricant is kinda stupid.

Ice buildup is the biggest issue, you can cause serious damage if you apply weight to a windfoil at the wrong position. The mathematics is actually unknown how much ice is acceptable, vs how much isn't, fluid dynamics is horrifically complicated and the failure condition of a windmill snapping off a wing, or an airplane snapping off a wing, is more or less unacceptable to just shrug and move on. It's actually a big issue because planes wings are sprayed off with chemicals that are awful for the environment any time they get ice.

Installing a heating system in a wind turbine in texas is... kinda stupid. Not going to lie. When this happens, they just need to be de-iced, and it takes a bit. If the other systems on the grid are robust enough, it should be able to handle the additional strain. But, it looks like the propane has gone down from the temperature, and, a nuclear power plant had to go offline for saftey reasons as well.

When you'e skirting the edge of what's acceptable, and something bad happens, yeah, this is what you expect to happen. I'm not sure what they thought would happen, maybe they were out of office when it was going to hit, or something?