Getting Ready For The Super Bowl -- January 31, 2019

Super Bowl: Continuing with the best of The Big Lebowski quotes:

7. Jackie Treehorn Presents. The Dude. Maude Lebowsi. In Gutterballs.
6. Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.
5. Dude, let's go bowling.

Natural gas fill-rate/withdrawal: link here -- so far, except for spot shortages, it looks like the natural gas situation "held":

Cold. I talked about this the other day.

When I was growing up in Williston, ND, we did not have much money. But I never once heard my parents complain about the cost of electricity (to heat the house in the winter). We never experienced a black-out or loss of power in the winter due to too much demand. We never once worried whether we would have electricity. We were never, never, ever advised to turn our thermostats down to conserve energy. Williston, ND, up in the northwest corner of the state seldom got above zero degrees during the month of February. It was certainly as cold as anything the US is experiencing this week.

That was back in the 1950's -- less than a decade after WWII. And now, 60+ years later with all that technology and a glut of natural gas in the US we are unable to meet power demands for a cold spell that will last less than 72 hours. 

And yet, these two headlines (among many). From CBSLocal, Minneapolis, probably not excelling today:

From Bloomberg:

The three largest automakers in the U.S. suspended operations, or dialed them back, at several plants on the coldest day of the year after a fire at a natural gas facility in Southeast Michigan drastically reduced how much heating fuel the utility could supply.

CMS Energy Corp.’s Consumers Energy utility sends gas to about 4.1 million people in 45 counties in the region, including much of the auto manufacturing sector, according to its website.

The fire occurred in a facility that accounts for about 64 percent of the utility’s gas supply, and company officials were urging all customers -- residential, industrial and commercial -- to cut back on their use of the fuel.

When I was growing up in North Dakota, energy was available, dependable, dispatchable, and affordable.

We now have an energy source that is no longer dependable, dispatchable or affordable. So what happened?

Hillary: we'll put a lot of coal miners out of work.  

And the sad thing: neither the politicians who legislated this nor the utilities who promoted this will be held accountable.

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For The Archives

The Three-Day Winter Of 2019

Had it not been for global warming, it might have lasted four days.

From SFGate:

Temperatures dove more than 30 degrees below zero Thursday morning in the Midwest in this polar vortex outbreak's last gasp, driving wind chills to dangerous levels and clobbering long-standing records.

After a bitter-cold morning with temperatures that sank all the way to minus-48 in northwest Minnesota, with wind chills down to minus-65, the air ostensibly "warmed" Wednesday afternoon, to readings such as minus-18 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and minus-22 in Rockford, Illinois.

But it didn't take long into the late afternoon for the mercury to plummet again to readings well below minus-20, minus-30 and in some locations in north-central Minnesota, minus-40 by Thursday morning.

The cold snap is smashing all-time records in northern Illinois. Moline hit a new low late Wednesday night - the lowest temperature the city has ever recorded. The weather station at the Moline Quad-City Airport sent a reading of minus-29 degrees at 11:19 p.m., which was enough to break the record, and then continued to drop even further through the early-morning hours Thursday. As of 7 a.m., the lowest temperature Moline had reached was minus-33 degrees, a full five degrees lower than the old record of minus-28 set in 1996.

All I know is that it was much colder when I was growing up in Williston, ND, and I had to walk to school uphill both ways and in six-foot snow drifts.

And, as I replied to John Kemp, climate forecasting is even better. We know that the earth will be 2.7 degrees warmer one hundred years from now. Even bartenders-turned-congresswomen know that.